Faithful Citizenship H arold D ean T r u lear
Worship Wars Oh, Master, from the mountainside / Make haste to heal these hearts of pain. / Among these restless throngs abide / And tread the city’s streets again. I have not heard these words sung in church lately, and it’s likely you haven’t either.They are from the hymn “Where Cross the Crowded Ways of Life,” penned by Frank Mason North in 1903 and sung lustily by women and men of the social gospel era, desirous to see the clear connection between worship and social justice. The era of the Civil Rights movement saw similar strains ring out before, during, and after acts of protest, as Christians committed to God’s justice sang “We Shall Overcome” and “I Woke Up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom.”Today the music of our worship contains little if any reference to justice—or any dimension of civic and community life for that matter. Many of us sought to bring together faith and public life in new and invigorating ways in the recently concluded campaign and election.We just couldn’t sing it. In the ongoing battles waged as part of “worship wars,” combatants struggle along front lines such as “contemporary” and “traditional,” not recognizing that social justice—God’s justice—is often part of the collateral damage.The battles seem to be over what type of relevance sustains personal integrity in the postmodern era. One side claims that contemporary worship meets the needs of hurting people, while the other argues that traditional worship roots us in historic Christian faith. Neither side rehearses the relationship between the gospel and social transformation; rather they focus on forms that heal and strengthen the individual, while ignoring the claims of Christ on our community, social, and civic life.
The contemporary crowd cries “relevance” without developing a critique of the culture it seeks to engage. Members of this crowd seem content to capitulate to a worldview captivated by a pseudopsychological hermeneutic that considers the solutions to all our ills to be contained in a therapeutic model. Their sermons consist of practical instruction for daily living rooted in a problem-solving framework that emphasizes what works in our lives.The God of this crowd is a “loving God” who doles out love and acceptance to a hurting world. But this God has no time for the poor and marginalized—he is too busy playing psychotherapist to a disoriented middle class seeking meaning in a culture of anomie. The traditional tribe combs the shores of Christian history and diametrically declares that relevance is irrelevant to a God who stands above culture.The weak theology of contemporary worship betrays a shallowness of Christian life and witness that can only be retrieved by rehearsing the great doctrinal themes of the church in preaching, music, and prayer. However, the traditionalists miss the fact that the golden age of Christendom that produced their forms of worship also bred slavery, colonialism, and oppression of the poor in manners that strain its credibility. The God of this worship presents himself concerned with doctrine only so much as it establishes an individual relationship with Jesus and not for any form of Christian service. In spite of heightened interest in things “spiritual” and things “political,” the twain never meet on Sunday.Why is that? One reason might reside in the self-centeredness of our culture that seeks space for validation over sacrifice for vindication. Space for validation requires that we feel good about ourselves, whether by latching on to doctrinal tradition or connecting to the latest fads. In a press toward personal fulfillment, we reduce worship to a commodity to be chosen, to “what works for me.” The menu outside the PRISM 2008
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church tells us if it’s traditional or contemporary, so we can make our personal selection. Tragically, it renders our faith politically irrelevant, except where policies touch the issues that affect our sense of well-being and wholeness. We have just witnessed a presidential campaign in which both sides appealed to such selfinterest. Even when the poor were mentioned, they found visibility as objects for the largesse of the middle classes: Doesn’t helping some poor single mother on the South Side of Chicago feel good? Doesn’t rearranging the energy of our institutions to include the poor (as long as the middle class gets theirs) feel generous? Doesn’t affirming family values as the panacea of the impoverished validate me as an upstanding orthodox Christian? All of the above issues came before us this election. We went to the polls and voted in ways dominated by self-interest and validation, not by a sense of God’s justice. Our worship experiences—the sacred space in which we affirm our identity as believers and declare in praise whom we believe God to be—still ring empty when the God of the poor is sought. We have a new “trickle down” theory, only this time it’s not just from big business to the larger society. Now we make Middle America happy, and it will trickle down to the poor.Whether it’s “Jesus loves me this I know,” or “What God has for me it is for me,” the common thread is me. That’s a far cry from Frank Mason North’s focus, as recorded in other verses of his hymn: From tender childhood’s helplessness, / From woman’s grief, man’s burdened toil, / From famished souls, from sorrow’s stress, / Your heart has never known recoil. / The cup of water given for You, / Still holds the freshness of Your grace; / Yet long these multitudes to view / The sweet compassion of Your face. n Rev. Trulear teaches applied theology at Howard University School of Divinity.