Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #279: A History of Christian Worship Part Eight - Post-Reformation

Welcome back to the Voices in My Head podcast. As always, I am your host, Rick Lee James, and I will be back with you in just a moment after these words from our sponsor to start part 8 of the history of Christian worship.

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Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer-songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Well, welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host Rick Lee James, and I'm so glad that you could be here for this episode. We are going to be diving into Part 8 of the History of Christian Worship. I can't believe we are already up to Part 8. It seems like I just started this journey with you, but indeed, 8 weeks later, here we are. We are going to be wrapping it up here in just a few weeks. Right now it is a 10-part series, and that is all that I plan to do. But there is so much, and I almost wonder if we may have some follow-up episodes. I am getting good feedback from people, and maybe we need to do sort of a reaction episode. Just to allow listeners to give their thoughts on this. But I've really been enjoying it. I hope you have too. So hopefully we're not going to have any computer glitches like we did in times before. We're going to go through this and just trust that it's all going to be good tonight in session 8, titled Post-Reformation. So session 8 of 10 of the History of Christian Worship. I hope you are ready to go. —because ready or not, we're going to be going. Well, one result of the Reformation was that the sacramental system of the church had been broken. Protestants still saw value in baptism and the Lord's Supper, but didn't so much view them as means of grace. Sacraments were now seen mainly by Protestants as symbols of God's promises, believing that the Holy Spirit used other means to accomplish its purposes. The new Protestant view was that people primarily came to faith by reading and hearing the Word. The Protestant view of conversion became less about the communal and more about the personal, believing that the presence of Christ was experienced more in direct individual relationships rather than in corporate times of worship. Modernism, with its emphasis on humanism Individuality, science, and philosophy found its way into the church through the Reformation. With the coming of the New World, Europe, the church, and worship itself were undergoing change at a dizzying pace. Even though free churches had strongly been persecuted in Europe by Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican churches, by the 18th and 19th centuries, a strange thing happened. Free church worship ideas began to dominate Protestant worship. Though Zwingli and Calvin had established the Sunday service as a liturgical preaching service with a pattern for prayer and scripture reading, they started becoming free preaching services. The sermon became the central feature of worship with long extemporaneous prayers before and after. Congregational participation in worship was primarily limited to singing psalms in Reformed churches or German hymns in Lutheran churches. The sacraments were rarely celebrated, and when they were, it was awkward because the sacramental services were the only times of worship that followed a prescribed order. The usual order had become a loose pattern of prayer, scripture, prayer, sermon, and prayer. So adding a fixed liturgical text for times of baptism and Eucharist became forced and awkward. The Eucharist became an optional appendage to the service rather than the climax of worship. As the sermon became the focus of Protestant worship, its lengthy function was mostly to inform people on matters of correct morality and doctrine. This emphasis on the sermon as education went hand in hand with the New Enlightenment and its focus on individualism. With the focus of worship now being on the individual, the church—the community—found itself well aligned with the rise of capitalism and democracy. In spite of the original intentions of their founders, many Protestant liturgical churches in Europe became free worship churches. This fact—that the fact that this happened had less to do with the influence of the Anabaptists Puritans, and Independents of the 16th century, most of whom had migrated to America to escape persecution, and more to do with new philosophical and cultural movements that were taking place in Europe. The 17th and 18th centuries gave birth to the Enlightenment, an intellectual movement that celebrated the powers of human reason. The Enlightenment was marked by great discoveries in science and philosophy, striving to apply reason to every aspect aspect of life, including religion. Newton introduced theories of a world operating under predictable and understandable patterns. Locke philosophized that reason was not only the ultimate test of morality and truth, but that it was also the most important aspect of religion. Rationalism was quite attractive to the church, largely due to the religious wars and brutalities of the past century. There was also dissatisfaction with the narrow Biblicism of many Protestants on the one hand, and frustration with the reactive, rigid anti-intellectualism of Roman Catholicism on the other. Rationalists were tired of the bloodshed brought about by religion and were seeking a faith guided by clear and balanced reason. The Deists caused a sur— in Europe. That is, Deists, D-E-I-S-T-S. The Deists caused a stir in Europe, seeking to reduce religion to a few simple, rational, superstition-free principles. The Deists argued that everything valuable in Christianity is available to us by using reason. Their argument was anything that can be proved or reasoned is simply superstition and therefore completely untrue. I'm sorry, I said that wrong. Their argument was that anything that can't be proved or reasoned is simply superstition and therefore completely untrue. That's a very important point. I almost said that completely wrong. I apologize. But their argument was that anything that can't be proved or reasoned is simply superstition and therefore completely untrue. For deists, miracles are superfluous and maybe even insulting to the natural perfect order set in place by the Creator. Many rationalists, inspired by Locke's vision of a harmonious, mechanical, and divinely ordered universe, looked upon creation itself as a testimony to the validity of faith in God. However, not everyone liked Deism, and many saw it as nothing but cold-hearted atheism. Its popularity was almost exclusively limited to the upper class in England and in a few other European countries. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin—those were two notable intellectual Deists in the English colonies of North America. Another product of the Enlightenment, Utilitarianism swept through the Presbyterian Church in the 18th century. I'm sorry, I can't read tonight. Not utilitarianism, Unitarianism. I apologize. Unitarianism, like deism, called for freedom, for a new freedom of thought and exclusive adherence to reason alone. It was then further developed in England and America until the early 19th century. Having a major impact upon New England. Because of Unitarians' belief that Jesus was not divine, its opposition to the doctrine of the Trinity, and belief in universal salvation of all souls, Unitarianism was viewed as heresy and was specifically forbidden not only by the church but by Parliament as well. In spite of this, Rationalism left its mark. The rationalistic belief that the individual conscience was the supreme test of religious truth rather than the church's tradition or corporate experience has shaped Protestant Christianity to this day. The sermon in didactic form was the only act of worship that had value to rationalists because they saw it as a means of educating people on universal truths and moralities. Now, as a result of bitter theological controversies in Germany, Lutheranism morphed into fixed, dogmatic, creedal interpretations of the faith, demanding strict intellectual conformity to those interpretations by its members. Lutherans, in their attempt to battle heresies, emphasized adherence to pure doctrine as the basis for Christian life rather than a relationship between the believer and God. This stood in opposition to Luther's own teachings that salvation was a gift of God's grace through Jesus, available by faith alone. As so often happens, when the church begins engaging in battles of culture, it loses something essential of itself. I need to repeat that because I feel like it's so important even to today. As so often happens, when the church begins engaging in battles of the culture, it loses something essential of itself. The task of Lutheran laity was now to understand and accept dogmatic statements, moving Lutheranism toward a rather dry Protestant scholasticism. Pietism, in contrast to the scholastic tendencies of what Lutheranism had become, asserted the primacy of emotion in Christian experience. Pietism stressed a strict ascetic attitude toward the world. Restoring the role of the laity in shaping the life of the church, Pietism was a reaction against the age of rationalism. Doctrinal definitions and confessions of faith were often denounced in favor of personal morality, and spirituality. In 1675, Pietist pastor Philip Jacob Spencer gathered a group of like-minded people into his home for Bible reading, prayer, and discussion of Sunday sermons with the goal of deepening individuals' spiritual lives. Pastor Spencer, in his Pia Desideria, proposed the formation of smaller groups within the larger congregation to gather together for edification and encouragement. These little churches within the church stressed the ministry of all believers in favor of the experiential knowledge of religion, thus avoiding doctrinal controversy. While the Pietists restored a desperately needed dimension to the life of faith, They also had the effect of placing personal prayer and Bible study over and above public worship. Sunday worship was viewed by Pietists as more of a psychological experience than the fellowship of believers. And in spite of Spencer's protests, many of them withdrew completely from church worship and the sacraments. It was Pietism that stressed a conscious personal experiential conversion experience as the only normative method of entering into the kingdom of God. Let me emphasize that again. I think many of us in Protestantism think it's always been this way, but it's only been in the last couple hundred years that this is the case. It was Pietism that stressed a conscious personal experiential conversion experience. As the only normative method of entering into the kingdom of God. This belief often led them to a kind of anti-intellectualism, condemning those who failed to duplicate Pietism's patterns of conversion. If certain emotional states were not achieved, then a person's faith was suspect. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? One group of Separatists, the Moravians, became known for their zeal as missionaries and for their hymns. The roots of the Moravians were found in German Pietism. They gave us an important liturgical contribution known as the Love Feast, a joyous meal within the context of corporate worship. The Love Feast emphasized Pietistic ideals of fellowship, warm feelings, and hymn singing. Now this brings us to the Methodists and the Evangelical Anglicans. On the eve of England's Industrial Revolution, illiteracy, drunkenness, legal system inequalities, squalor, and economic oppression were the great evils plaguing society. This was a century when devout individuals and communal efforts would seek to arouse piety among the people. In 1792, William Law wrote a response to the spreading influence of Deism called A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. Between 1690 and 1720, Isaac Watts challenged Thomas Cranmer's notion that no Christian could improve on the Psalms of David by writing a number of lasting hymns, including When I Survey the Wondrous Cross Joy to the World, and O God Our Help in ages past. Small groups of Christians known as religious societies began gathering together for mutual edification, communion, study, and social work. In the 1700s, with the emergence of George Whitefield and John and Charles Wesley, a revival began to stir throughout England and Scotland that would affect the religious life of all English people. The Wesley brothers, John and Charles, had religious roots in both the Free Church and the Anglican Church traditions, with both parents and grandparents in the ministry. Their father, Samuel, was a country parish pastor. Their mother, Susanna, was an extraordinary and extraordinarily able theologian. Both of their parents were devoted to the Anglican Church. While studying at Oxford, both brothers, along with a devout group of Oxford students, founded a club for religious reading and frequent communion. Very soon after its formation, John became the leader of this "Holy Club." The club sought to practice William Law's ideals of a consecrated life, as they combined social service to prisoners with high church Anglicanism. Soon, the club was joined by a new student named George Whitefield, and together with the Wesleys, they became the founders of what their fellow students mockingly called the Methodists. The Methodists, possibly because of their reputation for strict spiritual discipline, didn't have much of any influence upon Oxford. The club disbanded in 1735, and Charles and John sailed to the new colony of Georgia to be missionaries to the colonists and the Native Americans. This mission trip did not go well, and eventually both brothers returned home to England feeling ineffective and disappointed. However, not all was lost on the trip to the colonies. While in the New World, John came into contact with the Moravians, What most impressed Wesley about the Moravians was something that they had which he didn't: a deep assurance of their own salvation. In 1738, just days apart from each other, the Wesley brothers both experienced a Moravian-like instantaneous conversion. John felt his heart strangely warmed while attending a religious society meeting on London's Aldersgate Street. Street. Though John eventually parted ways with the Moravians for theological reasons, he was forever in their debt for helping him determine a dramatic spiritual change in his life. God had done something new and powerful in the lives of both John and Charles as they began preaching a joyful evangelistic message of a personal experience of God's love. Their enthusiasm was condemned by their fellow clergy in the established church, so they had to do most of their preaching in small societies in and around London. George Whitefield led John to begin open-air preaching, delivering sermons to people who felt excluded from established religion. The Wesleys and Whitefield toured England together, bringing a fresh message of God's love to all who would listen. John's high organizational skills helped to ensure that this revival they were a part of was not simply a short-lived bout of religious emotionalism. He formed societies as a lay movement within Anglicanism where he cultivated traveling lay preachers. The societies proved auxiliary— sorry, the societies provided auxiliary small group worship experiences discipline and settings for conversations and social action within the context of the Anglican Church. As Teresa Berger has pointed out, for the Wesleys, conversion was viewed as an eschatological event, when heaven is found on earth in the experience of God's love. The Wesley societies joined together their love for the sacraments, the Book of Common Prayer, and their conviction that conversion was a necessity. As the movement spread overseas, the American Methodists asked John for directives in worship. So Wesley made a few simple revisions to the Book of Common Prayer and sent it to them, saying that he knew of no liturgy which breathes more of a solid scriptural rational piety. American Methodists mostly ignored it and adopted a free church worship style instead. When it came to the much-debated topic of frequency of communion, the Wesley brothers were much more closely tied to the early church than to their Church of England contemporaries. Anglicans rarely celebrated communion in their parishes, but John Wesley communed at least twice a week. And urged Methodists to receive the Eucharist frequently. When it came to the doctrine of communion, the Wesleys were mostly Calvinist in their belief in the real presence and High Church in their view of the centrality of the sacraments—bread and wine—for Christian life. Wesley was unique in the scope of church history in that he saw the Lord's Supper as an evangelistic tool. Unlike the Moravians, who believed that if a person was unsure of their faith, that they should abstain from the sacrament, Wesley asserted that communion is a justifying as well as sanctifying ordinance. Wesley believed so strongly in communion as a means of grace for salvation that he believed individuals could be converted to true faith in the very act of participating in the Lord's Supper. —a view that the Church of the Nazarene, which I belong to, also adheres to. John's view on baptism was both unique and problematic, as so many things are. As an Anglican, John believed in the regeneration of infants at baptism, but because of his own faith experience, he also believed in the necessity of later adult conversion experiences. Which he seems to have understood as a kind of renewal or awakening. Thus, the theological problem: if baptism needs something more later in life to take effect, then how effective is it? This is an issue that we still wrestle with today. Although Wesley desired for Methodism to be a renewal movement within the Church of England, by the time of his death, it was emerging as a new church. This being the case, neither John nor Charles ever left the Church of England, and both passed away as Anglican priests. While many members of the Methodists did leave the Church of England, many stayed within, bringing a new warmth and liveliness to many of their congregations. The Wesleys cast a broad and lasting shadow upon many denominations. Even Pope Francis has praised John Wesley for leading people to knowledge of Jesus Christ. Well, how about the Great Awakenings in America? While the 18th-century English religious revival was taking place, another kind of revival known as the Great Awakening was happening in the States in the 1720s. Long-held conventional patterns of outreach were proving to be poorly suited for the particular needs of the American frontier. In the midst of the spreading of rationalism, the Great Awakening spread news of a new kind of message emphasizing the need for transformation and regeneration as the normative method for entering into the faith. Pastors like Jonathan Edwards noted surprising manifestations of the work of God in his congregation in Massachusetts. George Whitefield traveled throughout the colonies on a series of preaching tours bringing about transformation in many places. By the time that the Methodist movement reached America in the 1760s, This experiential form of worship found a highly receptive audience. Methodists and Baptists in particular profited from the passion generated by the Great Awakening. As the First Awakening came to an end and the American Revolution began, the Methodists, the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and other free church movements were on the edge of what would be a remarkable century of growth. Energized by continuing awakenings and revivals. At the end of the 19th century, less than 10% of the population of America were members of churches. But as the American churches became obsessed with winning converts, this was about to change. When the 18th century ended, the Second Great Awakening began in New England, spreading from there to the Mid-Atlantic states, the South, and to the frontier areas like Kentucky. The most emotional manifestations of the revival happened in the Kentucky wilderness. In August of 1801, in Cane Ridge, Kentucky, one of the most famous frontier camp meetings took place. A crowd of 10,000 to 25,000 people gathered for a week-long revival that went on to be described as the greatest output the outpouring of the Spirit since Pentecost. That's a huge thing to say. A Cane Ridge Presbyterian minister, Barton Stone, reported that after hearing the gospel, hundreds of people experienced various kinds of bodily agitations, also described as jerks, or the dancing exercise, or the barking exercise even. Though the movement had its critics, for the frontiersmen who attended the Cane Ridge Revival,— it was a sign that true revival had begun again. Preaching and singing were of the utmost importance in the revivals of the Second Great Awakening. The message was simple: "Repent and be saved." The goal of the revivals was conversion of lost souls rather than the nurture and discipleship of those who were already believers. The worship of the Great Awakening was worship focused on the first baby steps of faith, not the long term. The father of modern revivalism, Charles Finney, was a product of the Great Awakening. Finney was a lawyer by trade until he experienced a soul-shaking conversion in 1821. Finney refused theological training and immediately began a series of evangelistic meetings in upstate New York. He was a down-to-earth, direct, confrontational preacher. From Finney, we received such innovations as the anxious bench, the place for the almost saved to be seated so they could focus more closely on the preaching. Finney also encouraged women to testify in public worship services, disregarding critics who would quote 1 Corinthians 14:34 at him. Finney also introduced expanded meetings that lasted longer than the established Sunday worship settings, usually for a week or more. Before he entered into a town to hold revival, he would send organized teams of supporters into cities to do advanced work and to publicize extensively. The greatest liturgical contribution made by American Protestantism is the revival. In a vast unchurched population, revivals were a highly effective, tailor-made way of spreading religion to a young nation. Revivals brought a simple, straightforward version of the gospel to people who would probably never have darkened the doors of established conservative churches. The songs of revivals were lively, engaging, and most importantly of all, they were singable. Black churches, for the most part, were born out of the revivalist movements with prophetic sermons and hope-giving spirituals that gave Black people hope in a time of great oppression. However, revivalism did have its share of weaknesses, which became evident in the 19th century form of Protestantism. Revival songs filled with heartfelt, simple lyrics often led to a subjective form of religion, only taking the believer so deep. The "new measures" that Finney employed were very effective in the weeks of a revival meeting but in the long term came to be associated with artificially induced, emotionally exploitative, simple-minded, and short-lived faith. Revival services just weren't designed to handle long-term discipleship work. The greatest liturgical contribution made by American Protestantism is the revival. Because the focus was simply on getting saved, The range of Scripture that was shared in sermons was sadly insufficient. American preachers tended to use the same biblical texts over and over again. As prayer became simply a tool for the evangelist to use to reach his objective, the "pastoral prayer time" often just turned into a sermon with eyes closed, rather than a true genuine attempt to lead the congregation to the Lord in corporate prayer. Worship went from being a gathering that was centered on God to being a gathering centered on the performance of the preacher and the choir. Services were carefully calculated to move, titillate, excite, calm, motivate, and entertain congregants rather than to help worshipers place their focus upon God. Some would argue that we are still still in that place in our worship today. Some would argue that. Well, this has been part 8 of our study of the history of Christian worship and how worship has changed over the years. There is a lot of food for thought this week, a lot of ways I think we can all see that we are still being affected by the changes of the post-Reformation I hope you have been enjoying this time. I hope that this has given you a lot to think about. This is where worship changed, and it is still influencing the way that Protestants worship today, for sure. There is a lot to think about, so maybe just ingest it a little bit. Think about it in your own context, where you go to church. What can we do better? What can we change? What are things that we are doing well that we need to continue? Doing? How could we go back and do things that we've forgotten about in our worship? How can we move forward and find new ways of expressing our faith and our love of God and our ways of making disciples? Well, I hope you'll join me again next week for Session 9. I can't believe there's only 2 sessions left in this study of Christian worship. Thank you for all the kind comments that you're leaving me online and the messages you've been leaving me through places like Facebook and Twitter. Please continue to do so. I love hearing from you. And don't forget to rate this show on iTunes. The more positive votes that we get— the more positive star ratings, I should say— the more influence that we have and the more people can see us online. Well, that's it for this week. Thank you so much for listening to Voices in My Head. I am your host, Rick Lee James. God bless you. Talk to you soon.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page at facebook.com/rickleejames, and keep up to date on what I'm writing on my author page on Amazon. There's also the Voices in My Head Facebook community found at facebook.com/voicespodcast. And if you want to follow my alter ego on Twitter, follow my popular Mr. Rogers quote account found @MrRogersSay. Also, make sure to follow my appearance schedule on my website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website at rickleejames.com/bookings.

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The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction. May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen you in your inner being for every good work, and may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.