Having read and appreciated Greg's last couple of posts, I thought I'd relate a recent service I attended:
The Architecture the Chapel was classic protestant: Seats downstairs on a slight curve, with a balcony on three sides.It is designed to make it clear that the church is the people of God gathering around the word of God.It is designed so that the congregation might all gather near the front of the chapel and be able to hear the word of the Lord, see one another's faces and hear one another's voices.
The irony of a recent service I attended was that everything was done to try to undermine everything the building was designed for.
And it was deliberate.
Presumably the more "intimate" atmosphere that was created was designed to make the sense of "worship" more authentic. Sadly I fear that what was achieved was merely that it was more Roman Catholic.
Let me explain:
The congregation was in darkness - the only faces that could be seen were those of the "worship leaders", on the stage, lit not by the thousands of candles, but by spotlights from the lighting rig that blocked much of the view to the stage: the spotlights colored to clothe the worship leaders in their priestly robes of purple - while the congregation was clothed in black.
From the lighting rig hung also such large speakers so greatly amplified that only the voices of the performers might be heard. We looked to them to see and hear where the worship was truly taking place, and we partook through participation only by seeing and hearing (and feeling the reverberations of) their priestly act.
There was a rood screen suspended 8 feet above their heads, the rood (cross) itself projected upon it.
There was even smoke rising into the air - not from the swinging of incense but from smoke machines...
The moment when the climax of the worship is reached is marked not by the ringing of a sacring bell
and the repetition of the "magic" words, "hoc est corpus meum" (this is my body), but by the moment when the shortest phrase of the song is repeated "haec sunt verba ad nauseum" (these are the words, until sickness results) and the drummer is slashing the cymbals without ceasing.
A few minutes later and the lights had been turned on, the smoke began to disperse, and the preacher approached the pulpit. We had been told that we would have a time of worship before we listened to the word being preached, and everything about the service had made it pretty clear that now that the music had faded and the preacher had begun, the part of the service where we worship was most certainly over. It was actually an excellent sermon expounding Genesis 3, with a powerful presentation of the gospel in which Christ bore the curse that had justly been pronounced on fallen mankind. But I couldn't help fearing that for some who were there it might have seemed something of an afterthought, or at least an anticlimax.
A Romish view of worship is not something that was surgically removed from protestants at the reformation. It is the kind of worship that we naturally tend to when our senses lead, and our minds (possibly) follow. It is the kind of worship we tend to as embodied spirits. When we have the preoccupation with musical excellence to the extent that it becomes affectually more important to us than the words we are in real danger of losing all that was gained in the Reformation.
