What does worship 'in Spirit and Truth' mean?

This semester at Moore Theological College in Sydney I have the privilege of sitting in on David Peterson's class on Worship. Dr Peterson is one of our best thinkers on the theology of worship. (I'm not alone in this opinion - Bob Kauflin lists his book "Engaging with God" above the Bible on his list of books to read on worshipmatters blog.)

Today we looked at worship in the New Testament, particularly in the gospel of Matthew and John. There were many highlights, but one thing which struck me was his exposition of the story of the Samaritan Woman and Jesus at the well.

John 4:19       “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet.  20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,  but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”
John 4:21       “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming  when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.  22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know;  we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews.  23 Yet a time is coming and has now come  when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit  and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit,  and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”
John 4:25       The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ)  “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”
John 4:26       Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.” 

People have all sorts of theories on what worship 'in Spirit and Truth' means. But in the context of John's gospel, the Spirit here probably refers to the Holy Spirit (hence the capital letter S in the 2011 NIV). And 'true' in John's gospel is normally used about things which are the ultimate fulfilment of something, as opposed to the provisional shadow of its Old Testament counterpart.

The Samaritan woman is asking Jesus to comment on the dispute between Judaism and the Samaritans over where the right location for worship is (Jerusalem as the Old Testament says, or on Mt Gerizim as the Samaritans decided in about 400BC). Jesus confirms the priority of the Scriptural teaching ('salvation is from the Jews'), but then blows apart the categories. Right worship in the Old Covenant involved a temple, priests, sacrifice... but all these things served only to point towards the True Worship of the New Covenant. Jesus is our priest, and his body is our temple. (This is why Christian Zionism is badly mistaken to look to an earthly Jerusalem for the fulfilment of Christian eschatological hopes ... we look instead to true worship by Jew and Gentile together: through Jesus, anticipating the heavenly Jerusalem).

True worship, and Spiritual worship, is the worship which Jesus alone makes possible. He is the truth (John 14:6). And the Spirit makes this worship possible by showing us who Jesus is, and enabling us to recognise and respond to him as he really is. That it what it means to worship in Spirit, and in truth.

As Dr Peterson observed during class, all the issues that consume our attention when thinking about worship (Having the right liturgy, the right music, the right location and all that stuff) looks so weird and irrelevant next to John's definition of proper worship - worship of Jesus, in Spirit and Truth.

Music brings us closer to God?

There is a fascinating piece in the July edition of Eternity Magazine (an Australian church paper). The question is: 'Can music bring us closer to God'. Two songwriters who I respect immensely, Rob Smith and Ben Fielding answer differently.

On the side of "No and Yes" is the typically measured and balanced Rob Smith, a lecturer at Sydney Missionary and Bible College.  He points out that only Jesus can bring us closer to God: 'if as a resul tof the Holy Spirit's work in us we have come to put our faith in Christ, then we have already come to God and cannot come any closer in this age'. He draws our attention to Rom 5:1-2, 1Pet 3:18, Heb 12:22-24, Eph 2:13 and Eph 3:11-12. The once for all sacrifice made by Jesus when he sacrificed his own body for us is not to be repeated. On the other hand, once we have experienced this incredible grace, we are freed to continually 'draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water (Heb 10:21-22). To the extent that our singing involves the word of Christ dwelling in us richly (Col 3:16), we find a means of being filled by the Spirit with the fullness of God. He uses the analogy of a married couple having dinner together - it doesn't make them married, but does bring them closer.

Ben Fielding is a songwriter and worship pastor at Hillsong Church in Sydney. In the past I have had the benefit of Ben's generosity in sharing his insights on songwriting with a group of church music directors, and I was hugely impressed by his concern for good teaching through music. He takes a different angle to Rob. While Rob starts with the atonement and works backwards, Ben starts with creation and works forward through redemption to show how God uses creation, and music in particular, to draw people to himself in repentance and faith: 'God does use music to draw people unto Himself, to tell His story and beckon repentance.' He is talking, first, about music in general not just church music. It's a rich place to begin a theology of music. Yet he is working towards the same point as Rob - the two meet in the middle, at the Cross of Jesus:

Though music can be a wonderful, spiritual and powerful expression of God-given creativity, its importance must be held in the perspective of Jesus. It is Jesus who overcomes sin and makes a way to the Father. Nothing takes the place of Jesus - not the apostles, not the prophets, and not music. However, they are not in competition. Through Jesus we can boldly enter God's presence with worship and singing.

Music, then, can be a means by which the 'character of our faithful God' is declared. 'We should concern ourselves with presenting biblical truth that necessarily points towards Jesus.' The emotional expreiene of music should not, according to Fielding, be confused with the presence of God. It is the work of the Spirit that brings about repentance and change. 'Music enables us to turn to the Lord in agreement with one another as we sing the same words and melodies, powerfully depicting the unity that is taking place.' Music is used 'by God to draw us closer' - closer, he means, in the sense of drawing our gaze to the cross of Christ.

What a fascinating study in two able songwriters from different traditions arriving at the Cross together. 

The best worship music I’ve ever heard

This last weekend we had the privilege of being asked to take part in Revelation Conference, in Adelaide. The conference is run by Mark Peterson, who works with the Trinity network of churches.

It was wonderful to catch up with our old friends Nathan Tasker and Nicky Chiswell, to hear talks by Peter Adam, and take part in all sorts of workshops. Every part of the conference was inspiring and helpful.

But the highlight, for me at least, was the final night. The wonderful house band walked off stage, the house lights were raised up slightly, and Mark Peterson walked alone in front of the crowd with an acoustic guitar. We were told before the session that everybody had to bring an acoustic instrument. And they did. Behind me was a piano accordion. In front of me a djembe being played by a ten year old. Nicky Chiswell had the triangle. An army of acoustic guitars stood by. There were obscure Arabic drums, soprano saxophones, and a bunch who, like me, had only their voices to contribute.

Mark began the session in his thoughtful and measured style with a single, simple question - ‘are you glad … that you have been saved?’. We thought about it for a bit. And then he put our first song up on the overhead. There were words, chord symbols and four part harmony parts. We sang through a series of hymns and popular choruses. For ‘Holy, Holy Holy’ Mark asked the percussionists to lay out and we all picked a harmony based on the SATB score on screen. For ‘Lord I Lift Your Name on High’ the percussionists led us most of the way.

It was the most extraordinary singing experience -- perhaps the most moving church experience -- I’ve ever had. God was kind to us and it did not descend into chaos, but a beautifully balanced harmony of diverse instruments and skill and styles of playing. Depending on where you were standing you could hear different sounds, but everywhere people were singing loud. The acoustic instruments perfectly complemented the human voices, and it seemed as though the instrumental sounds were coming up from within the voices.

Afterward, Nicky Chiswell said to me (perhaps with a hint of tears) ‘we’ve been trying too hard!’ All these amazing musicians on stage, workshops full of talk of genres and arrangements and careful planning - and yet when we took a step back and let everyone contribute the result was amazing. A taste of heaven’s music, perhaps?

But when the band went back stage, to my surprise they didn’t drown out the voices – rather, everyone sang with just the same focus and joy and passion. The moment of acoustic singing and playing had passed, but the worship continued with just as much integrity. 

What I love about Darlene Zschech's theology

I’ve never met her, but I have a huge amount of respect for Darlene Zschech. Until 2007 she was a pastor at Hillsong church here in Sydney. She still tours and leads a growing church in Newcastle. Leaving aside the obvious debt we all owe her for bringing worship music to where it has come worldwide, her discipleship and church leadership off stage has benefited some of my dearest friends.

At the same time, I believe it’s often fruitful to compare and contrast our respective theological positions on worship. Our respective traditions may have much to learn from each other. Realising that I don’t have all the answers either, in this brief blog post I also want to provide some friendly critique of her theology of worship as presented in Extravagant Worship.

There is much I love in her theology of worship.

1. Zschech is dead right in pointing out that worship is bigger than merely music. Worship is bigger than music. “Although music is a wonderful expression of worship, it is not in itself the essence of it. The core of worship is when one’s heart and soul, and all that is within, adores and connects with the Spirit of God.”¹
2. She is right to make Christian education a central goal in our music ministry: ‘make the Word memorable and settle the message into our hearts.’²
3. She presents a balanced view of the place of emotional response in music ministry: music is ‘not about stirring ourselves into an emotional frenzy’, but ‘corporate worship’ should help turn the congregation’s ‘eyes to the Lord.’³

Yet, I do want to suggest some possible tensions in her theology of worship which make me reluctant to adopt it wholesale without thinking it over some more. The biggest tension I detect is over the issue of ‘excellence’.

Zschech rightly puts great emphasis on excellence, something which I have often written about and agree on. Yet I’m more cautious about the reasons she gives for seeking excellence: ‘We are to serve God with excellence because we know an excellent God.’⁴ Like the high medievalists, Zschech wants to ‘enter the throne room of God’.⁵

Largely I think this theology is reactive against more mainline traditions (such as Anglicanism), which have been (I’ll freely admit) too afraid of excellence. She thinks this fear has ‘kept almost an entire generation out of the house of God’.⁶

And to her credit, this emphasis on excellence is qualified: we give our finest ‘at whatever stage your finest is.’⁷ We bring our gifts in a context of grace, and Zschech is too experienced a pastor to seek to establish a ‘performance-based Christianity’ on or off the stage.⁸

However I do take issue with some of the arguments she uses to bolster this argument of excellence. “Extravagant worship grabs God’s attention ... Throughout the stories in the Bible, whenever someone demonstrated extravagant worship, God reacted with extravagant blessing. It’s cause and effect. Extravagant worship brings extravagant results.’⁹

My nervousness about this is that I am very unexcellent! I’m not talking about the quality of music, even. The fact is that the excellence of our offerings, as God measures it, is entirely dependent on the heart. As Hebrews 10 points out, God has never been pleased by sacrifices or burnt offerings. Zschech obviously knows this, and so concludes that ‘the only thing God wants from you is your heart.’¹⁰

I don’t think I’m being too nitpicking to say that there is a tension here. Is God impressed by musical excellence, or does he just want us to serve with the right attitude?

What is missing, I think, is a bridge between the Old Testament passages and the New Testament hope. In the Old Testament even our most righteous works are considered as dirty rags (Isaiah 64:6). In the New Testament, we are given the incredible invitation to continually ‘through Jesus … offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that confess his name’ (Hebrews 13:15). What is missing from Zschech’s worship theology, therefore, is the very important concept of a priest: not one who wears robes, but Jesus our great high priest. With Jesus standing as our representative before God, the excellence of our worship is guaranteed.

As much as it pains me to say it, therefore, the excellence (in a musical sense) of our worship, and the strength of our good intentions, becomes much less relevant to how acceptable our worship is. Don’t get me wrong, I want excellent music as much as the next music snob. But I’m not sure that we want to tie that excellence to its suitability for worshipping God.

1 Darlene Zschech, Extravagant Worship (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2002)., 27.

2 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 196.

3 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 169.

4 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 127.

5 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 155.

6 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 128.

7 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 127.

8 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 148.

9 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 34-35.

10 Zschech, Extravagant Worship, 46.

Why the methodists had all the good music

Have you ever noticed how many of the great hymns in the English language were written by non-conformists like Isaac Watts and the Wesleys? These were people who stood apart (sometimes at great personal cost) from the mainline Anglican church of their day. This was a time where uniformity in worship was highly valued above everything. Edward VI and Elizbeth I had both laid down guidelines for worship, insiting on a ‘plain and modest song’. Nothing to flash. Thomas Sternhold supplied a boring but competent translation of the Psalter into English, and this was the basis of worship inside the mainline official Anglian church.¹

Not so for the non-conformists. John Wesley wrote to a friend criticising this style of worship, insisting that Christians should:

“sing praise to God ... with the spirit, and with the understanding also: not in the miserable, scandalous doggerel of Hopkins and Sternhold [i.e. the English Psalter], but in psalms and hymns which are both sense and poetry.”²

He thought the style should be whatever would ‘best raise the soul to God’, and that meant he was not confined to using simple boring arrangements of the Psalms.³

But the reason why Wesley ended up with such a stress on emotion was not accidental. I think it flowed from his theology. The reason why he wanted music to help people in ‘praising [God] lustily and with a good courage’ was so that their hearts could be changed.⁴ I suspect that John Wesley’s Arminianism – his overemphasis on human responsibility while forgetting that only God can soften or harden hearts – set him on this trajectory.

My hunch is, too, that this set much of methodism (and later Pentecostalism) onto this path of emotional music. If you believe that people turning to Jesus is a wholly human decision, not a miracle, then you’re going to do all you can to make sure they make the right decision.

The challenge, then, for those of us who believe that a decision to turn to Christ is both a human choice and a miracle that only God can bring about is to still write incredible songs which move the heart. A belief in divine sovereignty in conversion doesn’t stop us from engaging in apologetics, clear preaching, or trying to live the gospel in an attractive way. So it shouldn’t stop us from having poignant music either.

1 Evans, Music in the Modern Church, 31.

2 John Wesley, ‘To A Friend, On Public Worship’, in The Works of the Rev John Wesley: Tracts and Letters on Various Subjects (1st ed.; New York: J & J Harper, 1827), 233.

3 John Wesley, ‘To A Friend, On Public Worship’, in The Works of the Rev John Wesley: Tracts and Letters on Various Subjects (1st ed.; New York: J & J Harper, 1827), 233.

4 John Wesley, ‘To A Friend, On Public Worship’, in The Works of the Rev John Wesley: Tracts and Letters on Various Subjects (1st ed.; New York: J & J Harper, 1827), 233.

Please manipulate my emotions

There is a great deal of suspicion of emotional manipulation. Sometimes I think that suspicion is justified. A friend told me a story about a church where the keyboard was hooked up to an electric shock machine, and just at the right moment the keyboard player would hit the button and people in the front row would be brought to their knees by the ‘electrifying’ power of the sermon.

But sometimes I wonder whether we are oversensitive to the power of music on our emotions, as if being moved emotionally by a song is less ‘worthy’ of us than to be moved intellectually by a sermon.

Consider the tension felt by the great father of the faith, Augustine. His conversion story was marked by an emotional musical encounter:

“I wept at your [God’s] hymns and canticles, deeply moved by the voices of your sweetly singing church. Those voices flowed into my ears, and the truth was poured out in my heart, whence a feeling of piety surged up and my tears ran down. And these things were good for me.”¹

Yet at the same time, the Platonism which Augustine’s culture had subscribed to made him suspicious of such animal attraction merely based on music:

“the gratification of my flesh – to which I ought not to surrender my mind to be enervated – frequently leads my astray ... when it happens to me that the song moves me more than the thing which is sung, I confess that I have sinned blamefully and then prefer not to hear the singer.²

For similar reasons, another thinker, Athanasius, decided that it would be better not to sing at all. For him it was important that the Psalms were recited not ‘from a desire for pleasing sound’, but as a more spiritual ‘manifestation of harmony among the thoughts of the soul’.³ Augustine, to his credit, didn’t go that far. But he did look down on the role of music, saying it merely enabled a ‘weaker soul’ to ‘be elevated to an attitude of devotion’.⁴

But I don’t think it is an admission of weakness in our soul to recognise that we are embodied: our thoughts and actions are influenced by what we eat, whether we have slept enough recently, and whether our brain chemicals are balanced. To recognise that music can have a non-rational effect on our souls is simply to recognise that we are human. Rather than be afraid of any emotional effect, we should seek out music which draws us closer to God and honours Jesus. Provided there is no deception, and the emotional power of the music is anchored in the truth, and we aren’t trying to substitute for the Spirit’s work in changing hearts, I can’t see the danger. If ‘manipulation’ means simply helping me to feel the weight of Jesus’ glory then please, go ahead: some days I could do with a bit of musical manipulation.

1 Augustine, Confessiones IX, vi, 14 in James McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 154.

2 Augustine, Confessiones X, xxxiii, 49-50 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 154.

3 Athanasius, Epistula ad Marcellinum 29, PG XXVII, 40-1 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 53.

4 Augustine, Confessiones X, xxxiii, 49-50 in McKinnon, Music in Early Christian Literature, 154.

Worship: Like running a cold bath

Okay, work with me here on this analogy. I recently got my bath fixed which is great news for everybody. I'm reminded that there's an art to running a bath - not too hot, not too cold. The temptation when you realise that the bath is going to be too cold is to slam on the hot water, but of course that just makes the opposite problem. Getting the optimal temperature requires small adjustments, not over-reactions.

By analogy, it seems that improving worship music is an exercise in balance. Usually when something goes wrong in church, it's not that people have set out trying to be destructive. It's usually that we were trying to improve in another area, and just got things out of balance. Perhaps we wanted to bring in new songs to keep our repertoire from being stale, but brought in too many too quickly and now people can't sing along. Perhaps we wanted to raise the quality of our music to the Glory of God. But instead we put too heavy a load on our already busy musicians. It's all about balance. 

But so often when we realise something is wrong, we express it in terms of absolute criticisms, not relative criticisms.

Karl Barth, one of my favourite German theologians, writes about this in relation to the subjective/objective question in worship. He describes how people responded to the overly subjective wishy washy hymns which started dominating in some protestant circles in the 17th century. They criticised 'I-hymns' as being overly subjective, and insisted on 'we-hymns' or 'he-hymns'. They made absolute their criticism. But as Barth writes 'it is obvious from the presence of the I-Psalms in the Bible...[that this] can only be a relative and not an absolute criticism. It cannot try to eliminate or suppress altogether either the I-hymns or the I-piety' (Church Dogmatics, IV.63.I p755). You can't eliminate 'I' from our worship, because the wonder of the gospel is that what God did he did for me.

I think there are many areas of contemporary thinking about church life that need us to be more relative and less absolute - in many areas it's a question of balance, not blanket statements.

So the challenge (for me) is to try to approach disagreements about how to do church music as if we're running a bath. If I think that a church service is getting too cold, before turning off the tap completely I need to ask whether the way I intend on going is going to get too hot if we're not careful. This helps too when taking criticism - normally when someone raises a criticism they are not just being nasty - there is so longing or desire behind their complaint. If they hate contemporary music, then what is it about hymns that they love - perhaps I can learn to share their love as well, and we can run a more balanced bath?