Worship Weblog

Bemidji Book Group – First Meeting

Posted by cicw

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

Book Groups

We invited 34 book groups across the U.S. and Canada to meet and discuss The Church of All Ages and its implications for their worship, and to share their notes here.
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Our group had its first meeting Saturday, Sept. 12, over breakfast and living room discussion. Eight persons attended, ranging in age from 19 to 76. Along with the leader this represents 9 different churches, ranging from mainline (Roman Catholic, ELCA) to evangelical (Baptist, Bible, and Community churches.)

Discussion began with the singing of “How Great is Our God” accompanied by a non music reader on the piano. So the first topic was to compare the use of contemporary music with traditional hymns. One member said that “Amazing Grace” had to be sung in her congregation at least every third Sunday. Their denomination has just updated their approved Hymn Book, but no one wants to use any new songs.

The upside of this is that the old hymns are more “sacred” to people, and often represent deeper meaningful worship. They also connect us to the “communion of the saints” who are now in heaven. But the downside is that for many, worship is simply an exercise in nostalgia, a comfortable time that doesn’t challenge anyone.

Discussion went on to the Biblical mandate for intergenerational worship. The two principles the group saw to be most crucial were the Unity of the Church, the Formation of Character, and The Continuing Community. One of the Pastors had read a study of evangelical churches that had highly developed programs that separated teens from adult congregations had a much higher rate of drop-outs in the post teen period. The assumption was that deprived of worship together with adults as teens, they grew accustomed to something that couldn’t be maintained.

The most exciting part of the discussion had to do with faith development. The discussion began with a concern that growth in faith can (in spite of what they perceived from Fowler) actually could regress. This part of the discussion could have been contentious, but was resolved by noting that the stages described not so much the content of faith, as the capacity for faith. Another way to describe this difference is that Fowler is talking about the qualities of faith, and not so much the quantity of faith. It seems to be primarily the ability to perceive and describe things that are not physical.

The evangelicals in the group were used to describing faith in terms of trust in the Savior, not a thing that arises from fallen man, but a product of the new birth. To them, this description of growth in faith was a new concept, one that would not replace their thinking, but give another dimension to it.

Most of the group (perhaps all) were not content to leave people in the lower, untested stages. Especially critical was the dynamic of having the person own his own faith. One commented that there were people in his strongly evangelical church who still perceived their faith in terms of group-think. He thought he needed to be a wave-maker, to shake people into self-actualization.
But the group decided rather, that we needed to realize that our worship needed to recognize that as well as multi-generations, we needed to plan worship for all the stages, and that people in all these stages are equally valuable. The speculation continued that perhaps some people do not progress in these stages because their worship focus is not addressed in their slowly progressing development. This was an interesting thing to speculate about, but not something many were sure about.

Tags: bgbemidji, Book Groups 2009, intergenerational