This is something of an insider post. I am writing for people who worship at Grace, though others are definitely welcome to eavesdrop. I wanted to let you all in on a little bit of the thinking and planning that goes on behind the scenes when Jess, Michael, and I plan a worship service. I hope this will help you in your worship at Grace.

Believe it or not, there is a method to our madness. Essentially, we try to make each worship service about one thing. Each week, this “one thing” will be slightly different. We vary the central theme from week to week based on the sermon text and the church calendar. But each week, everything—from the Call to Worship, to the Prayers of the People, to the songs we sing—works to support the one theme of the service.

We try to do this in a way that’s not wooden or pedantic, so there is a fair amount of space for us to be flexible and not overly rigid. Also Jess faces certain limitations when he selects music for the week. Specifically, he needs to factor in what musicians are available and the congregation's familiarity with the songs he chooses. We can’t just roll out 5 or 6 new songs every week. We have to work with where people are to some extent.

However, these limitations notwithstanding, we intentionally write and select texts, prayers, confessions, and songs that are all moving in the same direction. We think there are a several benefits to this approach.

First, though it requires more work, it is a good challenge for us as a staff. Having a single unified theme every week helps sharpen our focus as we construct the liturgies. We do not want to lead people through a series of disconnected worship elements. So, we must work as a team to create a liturgy that hangs together. This is a great weekly discipline for us as it keeps us all on the same page.

Second, our worship practice (hopefully) simplifies things for the congregation. Since we’re not asking people to go in multiple directions each week, worshipers get the benefit of a singular focus. This also allows folks to go deeper each week with one idea, rather than going shallow with several different ideas.

Third, I think worshiping this way can be more transformative. We can come at the same aspect of the Christian story from multiple angles during a worship service. As distracted and finite beings, we hardly ever grasp something the first time. We all need to experience the same thing multiple times before it really grips us. Each week, we try to have people sing, hear, and pray a single reality in over a dozen different ways. We think that the elements of a worship service should all build off one another.

Finally, our practice helps puts the sermon in its rightful place. In many churches, the sermon dominates the entire worship landscape. This is unhelpful and doesn’t adequately form us as disciples. Sermon-centered worship tends to elevate the intellect over our regular practices and habits. It also tends to create consumerist churches that over-emphasize the gifts of one person. This is not a good way of shaping people as disciples.

Though it is true that the sermon is a very important part of worship, it is by no means the only thing. With an entire worship service aimed in the same direction, the sermon doesn’t have to do all the work. As a preacher, this means I can let the Opening Hymn, the Confession of Sin, and the Prayers of the People share the load.  In this way, the sermon takes its appropriate place as one key ingredient in an integrated whole.

Here is a recent liturgy from Pentecost Sunday. Work your way through it. Look for the common thread that runs from beginning to end.  If you’re interested, here is the sermon for this liturgy.

Yesterday, The Welcome Wagon released their second record: Precious Remedies Against Satan’s Devices. Instead of reviewing the record (which I don’t think I’m qualified to do), I thought I would write up a bit of a rambling endorsement.

I not only think this album is good. But I also think it is good for you.

Let the rambling commence.

In his famous book Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes about pretending. He says there is a bad kind of pretending and a good kind of pretending. The bad kind of pretending is happens when, for example, someone pretends they are going to help you. Instead of helping you, they take advantage of you. Everyone knows this is wrong.

But, Lewis says there is also a good kind of pretending. This happens when the pretending actually leads us towards becoming the thing we are pretending to be. For example, let’s say you’re in a bad mood and encounter a friend. Instead of taking out your anger on your friend, the best thing to do is to act friendly towards your friend even though you’re not feeling particularly warm and affectionate at that moment. Then, Lewis writes, “…in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.”

So what does this have to do with a talented Indie Rock band from Brooklyn?

The Welcome Wagon intentionally structured this record to reflect the content and flow of a historical Christian worship liturgy. On the album, they include songs that confess sins, wrestle with God in the darkness, claim God’s forgiveness, celebrate community with one another, celebrate community with God, and send people out into the world with God’s blessing. Precious Remedies is a very thoughtful and musically compelling interpretation of a traditional Christian worship service. For this, I think the record is brilliant.

Working your way through a worship liturgy involves the good kind of pretending. When we worship, it requires us to act in ways that we may or may not feel like at the moment. We may not feel like confessing our sins. But we give ourselves to confessing them anyway. We may not feel forgiven by God at the moment. But we give ourselves to the absolution and drink in God’s grace anyway.

The Christian’s hope and experience is God meets us in the midst of our pretending and shapes us to be the people we are pretending to be. We become people that are quick to own up to our faults. We become people who are defined more and more by God’s grace. We become people who become better and better at welcoming others into our lives. We become the liturgy.

Precious Remedies is a great gift in that it gives us an opportunity to “put on” the Christian qualities that we learn by worshiping ever week.  As the title indicates, the record works like medicine for the soul.

But there’s one more thing that is gripping about this album. It is devoid of pretense. It is relentlessly sincere and earnest. I think that is it’s greatest strength.

From the opening lines of the brutally honest call to confession I’m Not Fine, to the naked yet strongly confident I Know that My Redeemer Lives, to the jangly and unashamedly upbeat benediction of God Be With You Til We Meet Again, there is no self-protective posing allowed here. Instead, The Welcome Wagon is inviting us to be vulnerable, honest, and genuine. They are inviting us to join them unlearning all the layers of pretentious behavior that for many of us has become second nature.

Kind of sounds like what worship should be like, don’t you think?

We follow an ancient liturgical pattern in our worship, drawing from the wisdom of Christians who have gone before us. Every Sunday we renew our commitment to God, offer him our prayers and gifts, confess our sins, receive forgiveness, hear from God’s word, and celebrate the Lord’s Supper together.

In other words, not much changes from week to week. Sure, we sing different songs, pray slightly different prayers and hear from different parts of God’s word, but the weekly pattern is the same.

In a culture obsessed with the novel and unique, we should ask a very important question: What is the wisdom in this?

God generally doesn’t work through seismic spiritual events in our lives. True, most of us can look back to significant turning points in our lives that were profound and maybe even “out of body”. But the vast majority of the growth God brings is the result of slow, plodding work.

Think about the Bible’s dominant metaphor for spiritual growth—it is the growth of fruit. When you grow fruit, you don’t just plant some seeds and expect immediate results. No, you plant seeds and then you do a lot of the same things—watering, fertilizing, pruning—over, and over, and over again. Then you will have fruit. French winemakers are said to not really take a grapevine seriously until it is at least 20 years old. I think we need that kind of perspective when we think about growing as disciples.

By worshiping liturgically, we are doing the same things over, and over, and over again. We do this with the belief that, over time, God will bless these practices with fruit in our lives. Sure, there will be some seismic moments of profound change. But, for most of us most of the time, change will happen in a much more deliberate fashion.

And how does this spiritual growth manifest itself? It manifests itself when we actually “become the liturgy”. It happens when our liturgical actions—like  responding to God’s word, confessing our sins, praising God for his goodness, pouring out our sorrows at his feet—become second nature to us.

Think about our liturgy and the actions we practice. Every week, we confess our sins. We confess our sins on Sunday morning because we want confessing our sins to become second nature on Thursday afternoon. We sing our praises to God on Sunday morning so we can learn how to instinctively praise him on Friday nights. We pour out our hearts in prayer to God on Sunday morning so that we can turn toward him in prayer when our lives fall apart on Wednesday.

Is it the sexiest way to worship? Not by a long shot. However, worshiping in this way helps us be shaped and formed by a God who grows his people slowly and steadily.

Here is a helpful clip that explains some of this thinking.

Important Caveat: How you celebrate Christmas, or even whether you celebrate it, is a matter of Christian freedom. You can celebrate Christmas on one day, two days, twelve days, or zero days. For this reason, I am not trying to bind anyone's conscience with this post. Instead, I want to shed some light on the historic Christian observation of Christmas. I also want to point out a few ways this can positively impact congregational practices and our individual lives. So, take this post for what it's worth. It's not a law to be followed. Rather, it is something to get you thinking about how you celebrate Christmas.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about how Grace didn't sing Christmas songs during Advent. Instead, we were following the ancient practice of Advent First, Christmas Second. During Advent, the 4-week period leading up to Christmas, we weren't singing songs of celebration like "Joy to the World." Instead, we were singing songs of longing and expectation like "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" and "Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus."

By doing this, we were learning (through our congregational worship) the difficult practice of waiting on God. To use an Old Testament metaphor, we weren't leapfrogging into the Promised Land. Rather, we were intentionally placing ourselves in the desert so we could practice the skills of directing our unfulfilled longings and desires to the Lord.

Truth be told, we haven't mastered the skill of waiting on God yet. The virtue of developing patience in the desert isn't something one masters in four weeks. So next year, we will "worship through longing" again during Advent.

But, as you all know, Christmas was two days ago. So now what?

The answer is pretty straightforward. The long wait of Advent is over, and the Christmas celebration has begun. And here's the beautiful thing: you don't have to limit Christmas to one or two days. The traditional Christmas celebration lasts for 12 days—from December 25th through January 5th. This historic practice is what gave rise to the popular song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas."

The Twelve Days are when we get to fully celebrate the birth of Jesus. It's a time of singing carols, reading the gospel stories of Jesus' birth, being with friends and family, working less (if possible), eating great food, and thanking God that in Jesus, "the Word has become flesh and came to dwell with us". (John 1).

I want you to notice the contrast between the common cultural approach to Christmas and the church calendar's approach to Christmas. Our common cultural approach to Christmas feels like a mad dash to get everything ready followed by a very intense 48-hour period where we try to squeeze in all of our celebrating. It can be, well, a bit counter-productive.  No wonder we put Bourbon in our egg nog. :)

But this is a place where the church's historical practices can really help us. Instead of being like a frantic sprint followed by a collapse, the traditional observance of Christmas is more of a leisurely stroll. You don't have to get in all of your celebrating over the space of two days. You can spread out the feast over nearly two weeks. This not only takes some of the pressure off, it also teaches us something about true celebration. Our culture knows a lot about fleeting moments of euphoria. But observing an entire season of celebration teaches us something about developing lives of sustained joy. I really believe this is something that both we and our culture desperately need.

Some Practical Outworkings

How does observing Christmas in this way change things? I will briefly answer that question from two perspectives: 1) congregational and 2) personal.

From a congregational standpoint, this means that worship on January 1st is going to be a lot like it was on December 25th. We will continue to rejoice that God has sent Jesus to the world. It gives us another week to sing great Christmas songs and also takes a little pressure off expectations that Christmas worship be mind blowing and warp the fabric of space-time. Believe me, pastors, worship leaders and musicians really appreciate this. Normal we can do. Out of body experiences are harder to deliver on cue.

But, in all seriousness, most of us instinctively know that Christmas ends too soon. Observing the church calendar during Christmas season keeps the feast going one more week--and this is a good thing for the worshiping life of a congregation. Just as we need Advent worship to teach us how to live in the "Not Yet", we need Christmas worship to teach us how to live in the "Already."

From a personal standpoint, our family has embraced this tradition full-on. I'll give you some of the highlights:

1) We try to do something devotionally on most days. I'm not a family devotional super-hero, so I need all the help I can get. The structure of the 12 Days helps me a lot. We often use the "Twelve Days of Christmas" song as a teaching tool and branch off from there. For example, last night we read the stories of Jesus' youth from Matthew and sang the new song Jess & Annie wrote.

2) We spread out presents out over the 12 Days. This really helps with some of the over-materialization of Christmas (it also means I get to sleep at a reasonable hour on Christmas Eve). The kids still get presents and we love that, but the gifts take place within a larger context. Also, some days the "present" is a family activity like going to a movie or going sledding. On one of the 12 Days, we do some kind of family service project. We do things like bake cookies for homeless people and bring them to a local shelter. In other words, there is something to look forward to every day.

3) We spend a lot of time with friends and family. It's a great time for playing games, discovering new iPad apps and watching completely meaningless college football bowl games. Spreading out our celebration also enables us to "open up" our family on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. Because we know we're going to be spending a lot of time together for 12 days, there's not as much pressure to be "alone as a family" every single day.

4) Observing the Christmas season really "institutionalizes slacking" in a way that is helpful. Face it, not a lot gets done during this time of year anyway. Calling the whole period a holiday really just simplifies things. I know not everyone can take time off from work (I am working more than I would like today). But it is a great relief to call it a holiday and lower our expectations for what we can get accomplished.

Conclusion

To sum things up, I think there is a great deal we can learn from the way that Christians have observed Christmas in the past. Adopting some of these older approaches can help us navigate through this time of year in a more intentional and helpful way. But please don't be bound by any of the particulars. If I can boil down this post down to its essence I would say thi: Christmas is bigger than one day; it's a season. Embrace it.

Joy to the World, the Lord has come!

This Sunday someone asked me, "Why aren't we singing Christmas carols in church right now?" That's a great question. We are three Sundays into Advent and have yet to sing a single Christmas carol. And this is on purpose.

At Grace, we are worshiping according to the ancient pattern of Advent first, Christmas second. Notice that Advent and Christmas are not the same thing. They are two distinct seasons. Advent is the four-week period immediately preceding Christmas Day. Christmas begins on Christmas Day and lasts until January 6 (Epiphany).

Advent is all about waiting and yearning. It's a time to recognize areas of our lives where we are not presently experiencing fulness. So, during Advent, we sing songs of longing like "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" and "Come, Thou Long Expected Jesus". These are all sung from the context of our present lack. Advent is a time where we sit, at times uncomfortably, in the midst of our unfulfilled longings and unmet expectations. In our worship, we are trying to learn the very important skill of learning to wait on God. Jess even wrote a new antiphon for this Advent, "In the desert, Lord, let our cry come to you." Crying out to the Lord in the desert is what Advent is all about.

Of course, this can seem very strange and out of step. It seems like "Christmas Season" starts earlier and earlier every year. It even feels that some retailers start playing "Santa Baby" the day after Halloween. I think that's because, by and large, our culture doesn't know how to wait. We don't have a real category for how to deal with unfulfilled desires or broken dreams. We all want and expect comprehensive fullness right now.

But the reality is, God doesn't promise us that kind of life in the present age. Even as people who are connected to Jesus and the power of his resurrection, we are still looking forward to a day when God will wipe away our tears. This means we should expect some tears now. So we all desperately need to learn how to live faithful lives in the midst of our present longings and groanings. That's one of the reasons why celebrating Advent is a good idea. It helps us build and exercise this much-needed muscle.

We have to keep in mind, however, that to be a Christian means that unfulfilled desires don't get the last word. Advent leads to Christmas. For this reason, we also need to learn how to celebrate. So, the Christmas Carols are coming. We'll be singing "Joy to the World" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing", and many others. But we'll all have to wait just a little bit longer.