WHEN THE ORGAN GOES SILENT
I’m not sure when I first noticed that the organ had fallen silent. The synods of the Christian Reformed Church met for many years in the Calvin University Fine Arts Center Auditorium. (Lately, the synod has moved to the Calvin chapel building.) The auditorium features the impressive Zondervan Memorial Organ, built in 1966 by the Schlicker company. I was at Calvin at the time it was built. I remember the pride that Calvin took in the installation of the instrument. It was made for worship—to play the hymns and other music that had long characterized Reformed worship. But now, at synod, the general assembly of the Christian Reformed Church, the organ was seldom used any more.
Synods worship often. That, too, is recent; older synods punctuated their agenda with prayers, but now synods worship for something like 45 minutes in the morning, before the first session of the day; they often worship again before the afternoon and evening sessions (the 2024 synod suspended these midday worship times mid-week, “in the interest of time”). The worship services are led by worship teams: they typically feature guitars, piano, drums, perhaps a few other instruments, and singers. No organ.
And this is true not just of synods. It is true of almost all official (and, perhaps, unofficial) Christian Reformed gatherings. When CRC people used to gather, they worshiped with unaccompanied piano or organ; now they worship with a praise band. They used to sing songs from the denomination hymnal; now they sing from the contemporary Christian music playbook. They used to follow a printed text; now they project the words on screens. They used to move only their mouths; now some worshipers raise their hands, though not so many as in nondenominational churches, and when they do, not very high. Things have changed.
WHEN WORSHIP CHANGES. . .
I mention this not because I want to revisit the worship wars of the late 20th century. I do not. I have worshiped in many ways, including, often and gladly, with a band and contemporary Christian music. I mention it because it represents not just a change in worship—the kind of songs that are sung or the instruments that are used—but a change in spirituality—how the faith itself is experienced and lived out. And this change is worth noting, not least because the change did not arise from within Reformed theology but Pentecostalism. With the change in instruments and songs comes a change in theology, not so much on synodical level as on the level of the local church..
In the post previous to this one I traced a shift in evangelical Christianity in the direction of charismatic (Pentecostal) theology. Charismatic theology emphasizes the experience of the Spirit. It claims a continuation of the “spiritual gifts” associated with the New Testament church: tongues, healings, other kinds of miracles. At best, it recovers the emphasis on the Spirit found in the New Testament (in this regard, read, for example, Galatians 3:1-5) and largely lost in later theology; at worst, it becomes a kind of spiritual technology, a form of magic, claiming powers to heal cancers and bring fortunes and decide elections. In contrast to an older evangelicalism, it’s brash and noisy—all of which fits the present moment.
In my last post I argued that this theology has lent itself to the trumpification of America. In this theology, especially under the influence of the late C. Peter Wagner and his disciples, three characteristic beliefs stand out, each contributing to MAGA politics: (1) spiritual warfare, a prayer practice which demonizes enemies; (2) apostolic leadership, the claim that leaders are raised up by God and responsible primarily only to God; and (3) “seven mountain domininism,” the notion that Christians by right of their being Christian ought to rule all aspects—the seven mountains—of the culture.
Trump offers a secular version of these same ideas. He regularly demonizes those he regards as enemies: immigrants, other countries, Democrats, and sometimes members of his own party. As a leader he regards himself as appointed, if not by God, then by history, giving him the right to do what he wants to do in the way he wants to do it. And he believes that his people—those loyal to him—should control everything. Put these together with religion, and you have white Christian nationalism, about which much has been written.
At the end of that piece, I promised two additional comments. One was a critique of the theology underlying these claims. I’ll get to that in the next post. But I also promised to connect these theological ideas and directions to what might be regarded as more conservative evangelical churches, churches like the CRC. It’s that story I will tell in this post. And that story begins with worship. And with the silence of the organ at synod.
THE NEW WORSHIP. . .
In the last half of the 20th century, worship in many white evangelical churches changed. (It should be noted that almost nothing I say in this or in the previous post applies to African American churches; what I’m talking about is largely a white phenomenon.) It didn’t happen all at once nor was it always smooth. Change rarely is. The last part of the 20th century was the time of worship wars in many churches. But over what was, in retrospect, a short period of time, worship in many white evangelical churches changed from an older hymn tradition to contemporary worship songs, from pianos and organs to guitars and drums, from choirs to professional worship leaders.
As much as anything, the flow, and with it, the direction of the service changed. Services—at least the services I knew in my conservative denomination (CRC)—had alternated between what was spoken—prayers and scripture readings—and hymns. Rarely did a congregation sing two hymns in a row. And even then the hymns were heavy on words. Services were addressed mostly to the head, not to the heart and even less to the hands and feet.
But that has changed. Services are now even in Reformed congregations like the ones I grew up in are built typically around two major liturgical blocks with everything else fitting around them. The first block is a lengthy song set, sometimes carefully put together, with the intent of moving worshipers toward God. The classic pattern, if I can speak of anything “classic” in this regard, is to begin with exuberant songs of praise, and slowly arcs the set toward songs that are more contemplative: from “praise” to “worship,” for reasons I’ll come to below. The emphasis is not on the head so much as the heart. And even the hands and feet; hands are raised, feet move to the beat. Hearts are stirred.
The second liturgical block is the message, also often lengthy, usually in the style of word-by-word, verse-by-verse exposition. The emphasis is on instruction for today: how to succeed in marriage, at parenting, in business, at managing money, at life in general, all derived in one way or another from the Bible.
It’s important as we look at this shift in worship style that we not immediately jump to judgment. You may have strong opinions about the way worship should go, but whether you or I prefer one form of worship to another is not the point here. What’s important is that changes in worship mark changes in spirituality. Congregations worship differently because they believe differently. Or, more often, they believe differently because they worship differently.
IT’S NOT WHAT I THINK; IT’S WHAT I FEEL. . .
Consider again how worship has changed. The shift in worship style from the older hymns, organ, choir, and three-point sermons to worship today with contemporary Christian music, bands, worship leaders, and expository preaching has to do with what it means to be a Christian. At the heart of the older style of worship was theology—who God is and therefore who we are—and the nuances of theological differences among various Christian groups. The Bible was read and expounded in these churches for how it spoke to the theological differences—sometimes small differences—between groups of Christians. This is what distinguishes us from the Catholics, the preacher might say, or what distinguishes us from Arminian theology. In this way, preaching had to do with identity: this is who we are apart from others. It was a marking of boundaries.
One can easily understand why that sort of preaching would be attractive to ethnic churches like the CRC in which I grew up. It reminded the congregants who we were, kept us together, worked to support separate institutions like the Christian schools that popped up wherever CRC people went. It kept us Reformed.
The CRC has lately doubled down on this way of being church. It has put front and center a narrow set of theological affirmations and condemnations. Affirm these things, the last three synods have declared, or you can not belong to our group. It will be interesting to see how this works out for the future. It runs contrary not only to much of what has been happening in evangelical churches but to what has been happening in our culture.
What has happened broadly in white evangelical Christianity is a move from the head—theological concerns—to the heart, to the experience of God. This can be seen as a response to modern critiques of traditional Christian claims, critiques about the historicity of the Bible, for example, or about the development of human life. What these sorts of critiques cannot touch is experience. Experience does not require global claims about God; it only requires that I, in my own heart and in my own way, have met God. (On this, see T.M. Luhrmann’s 2012 book, When God Talks Back.) Experience is a way of getting around knotty theological problems.
But it’s not just this. In Reformation churches almost from the beginning there has been a deep hunger for the experience of God in part because there has been so much emphasis on the head. The Bebbington Quadrilaterial, a widely circulated list of characteristics of evangelicalism, includes as one of those characteristics an emphasis on conversion. Evangelical churches lean into the rhetoric of conversion: “When did you get saved? evangelicals ask. And not just individual conversion; they pray for and long for revival—mass conversion. What they are longing for is religious experience.
This longing in America goes back at least to the Great Awakening, which began, not accidently, among the heirs of the Puritans in a church pastored by an intellectual, Jonathan Edwards. The head was looking for the heart. In these buttoned down churches, people longed for anything experiential. That longing remains. I remember it from my growing up. How would I know that I was a Christian, if I had not experienced the presence of Jesus in my heart? As the Easter hymn has it in response to questions about resurrection: “You ask me how I know he lives? He lives within my heart.”
MEETING THE MARKET. . .
The latent hunger among white evangelicals was met in the late 20th century by new ways to worship found among charismatic churches. These churches had introduced what they called “Praise & Worship.” “Praise” is the invoking of God. God shows up, this theology of worship claims, where there are people praising God. And then, with God present, people worship, hands raised, feet moving. The worship is expressive, active, emotional—all that worship in many evangelical churches had not been.
I’ll not spend time on just how this happened. For the story of how charismatic worship came to dominate white evangelical Christianity in America, check out A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship: Understanding the Ideas That Reshaped the Protestant Church by Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong (Baker Academic, 2021). In many respects, it’s the characteristic American story of how a market opened up, and entrepreneurs, in this case charismatic pastors, rushed to fill it, so that now the contemporary music scene is dominated by a few music publishers attached to megachurches, including Bethel, Hillsong, and Elevation, all with roots in the prosperity gospel and charismatic worship.
FINDING OUR WAY FROM SUNDAY TO MONDAY. . .
We could trace many reasons why worship changed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries among white evangelicals. Surely, technology has a role here. Suddenly it was possible to get away from hymn books. Sound systems made a difference. But it is worth asking how these changes in worship were prompted by and themselves prompted changes in theology and spirituality. How did singing songs that originated in a charismatic context change how worshipers in Reformed churches experienced and thought about God?
The answer to that question is complicated, of course, and I am not in a position to answer it in any comprehensive sense. But I do wonder about whether the move from head to heart does not bring with it some separation between Sunday and Monday. If worship is about experience—which indeed it should be in part—then might not that experience put the focus on the worshiper, so that one is inclined to ask not about God or Jesus or how to live out the Christian life in our world but about my experience, about whether the worship stirred me. And if the question is about whether it stirred me, then worship is about me. It’s ultimately me—my tastes, my like and dislikes—that the worship serves.
I am reminded of a story of a 19th century Methodist revival told by Frederick Douglass. Douglass at the time was enslaved by one Thomas Auld. During the time that Douglass was counted among his slaves, Auld experienced an emotional conversion to Christianity at a Methodist camp meeting. One day in 1833, Douglass along with other enslaved persons, was permitted to attend one of the camp meetings. He was stunned to see Auld in the “mourners pen,” a place where (only if you were white and free) you could go to mourn your sins. Douglass got close enough to the pen to hear his master groaning, presumably with contrition for his sins, and to see “a stray tear halting on his cheek.” But these emotions had no effect on Auld’s treatment of his slaves. Apparently, for Auld enslaving people, cruelly whipping them, and living off their labor did not count as sin. Douglass says, “If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself: Electronic Edition, p. 54).
HOW IT CONNECTS. . .
What’s going on here? The problem, in part, is the problem with religion in general. Religions tend to serve those who belong. The focus is on the experience of the worshiper. What am I getting from this experience? is the question on the minds of those who attend. Is it what I came to church for? Or is there another church that does it—whatever “it” may be—better than this church? If so, perhaps I should go there.
The version of Christian worship that came out of the mid-century charismatic movement, centered in the Latter Rain movement (on this see Ruth and Lim), amped up (I mean that quite literally) the worship experience. In large churches today, the experience includes sound and light carefully produced to carry the worshiper along emotionally. It’s a sort of religious entertainment.
But there is something more, and this is where the charismatic theology I reviewed in the previous post and worship come together. It has to do with power. What’s characteristic of the post-Peter Wagner, politicized, charismatic theology is that, as I said above, it lends itself to the trumpification of America. It offers a spirituality of power or, perhaps better, a technology of spiritual power. Pray in this way, says this theology, and good things will happen: demons will fall, diseases will be healed, dominions will be conquered, and, not incidentally, churches will full. It’s spirituality in the pursuit of human goals: power, control, and money. As such, it appeals to those who wish to seize control of the culture for their own purposes.
This may seem a far stretch from singing a few Bethel songs and worshiping in a pale imitation of the charismatic style, but underlying the spirituality of charismatic worship is the same idea found in charismatic politics, the idea that the power of God needs to be and can be summoned to act on behalf of the believer. It’s worship designed to bring God down. It’s worship to summon God on the worshiper’s behalf.
Calvin Stapert, in his 2006 book, A New Song for an Old World: Musical Thought in the Early Church(Eerdmans), called it “epicletic.” The epiclesis in the traditional Christian liturgy is the point at which the priest invokes the presence of the Spirit, asking that the bread and wine “be for your people the Body and Blood of your Son, the holy food and drink of new
and unending life in him” (Book of Common Prayer). In the theology from which charismatic worship comes, praise invites God, in the language of the day, “to show up.”
As I said in the previous post, saying this there and now with considerable caution, not wishing to put down anyone’s faith, there is something of an older animistic idea in this practice. God has to be attracted, invoked, brought down. It puts one in mind of the story in 1 Kings 18 when the prophets of Baal do their song and dance in a failed effort to get their god to show up. It’s religion, and religion can be for good or ill, but it does not have much of Jesus or the Jesus faith in it.
LET’S TALK. . .
And this represents a shift in Christian spirituality of major significance. The faith has shifted in many white evangelical churches from the doctrinal emphases stemming from the Protestant Reformation to a faith that is almost entirely devoid of any doctrinal thinking at all, a faith based on experience. It’s no longer the Jesus of the pages of the New Testament or the Christ of the Nicene Creed but the Jesus in my heart. And with that shift, a crucial link between the Jesus of history and the church has been severed. Christianity of this sort may and often does float free of the past—not just of Jesus but of church tradition. And not only that. If my faith is my experience of God, then faith becomes an affirmation of what and who I am. It rarely confronts me with the need to change the way I think or what I do.
Which is precisely what is happening. White evangelical Christianity is less and less faith in Jesus—the Jesus of Nazareth—and more and more a political brand. Churches are no longer identified by older theological distinctions (this in itself may not be bad) but by political affiliation. Churches are either MAGA or not-MAGA.
What we need in the face of these developments is a theological and biblical conversation. The recent moves of the CRC to double down on old formulations of the faith and to take an anticultural stance will not help. It’s not a conversation; it’s the imposition of thought control. But a conversation, a conversation open to the history of the faith, to the Bible, and to what is happening in the world is long overdue. We need a new Reformation. Maybe we even need a new name. Can we continue to call ourselves Christian? when “Christian” has come to mean MAGA.
I wonder. But a change of name for the followers of Jesus is perhaps not the point. The point is to notice, to notice what is happening in the church, how when worship changes, the church changes. To notice what it means when the organ goes silent.
Clay