More Relevant, or Less?

 9.West sent me this, about the Archbishop of Canterbury letting loose with all manner of liturgical reform. The basis for this is to provide more "relevant" services in order to increase Church attendance.

They seem to forget, however, that what is relevant, is that people work out their salvation.  Mere showing up at Church doesn't accomplish that.  I attended a high school band concert a few weeks ago, that was held in one of the local non-denom church buildings.  Does my simply being there help me grow closer to God?  I doubt it somehow.  Now, I realize (hope) that nobody thinks that merely showing up at a building accomplishes anything.  You have to ask, though, what they are trying to accomplish.  In some ways, this is reminiscent of the bait and switch mentality you see with many missionary groups.  Some friends of ours are over in Germany where they provide English classes at their Church (Claudia and I can't figure out why, as English is taught in the schools).  The idea is to get folks comfortable in the building.  Then you can present the standard Evangelical 30 second Gospel, have them recite the sinner's prayer, and put another notch in your Bible.

What the Archbishop's group is forgetting is the switch part.  They get them in the building, but they don't seem to actually present the Gospel.  If anything, the notion that services need to be comfortable and appealing seems to contradict the whole "take up your cross" notion.  Further, you have to admit that the praying for CEO's of Walmart, etc. smack of a bit of self-righteousness, which is hardly demonstrative of the sort of humility that is essential in one's salvation.

This group is also forgetting that our worship is supposed to be the earthly reflection (dim as it may be) of heavenly worship.  Thus, an Eastern Orthodox Divine Liturgy, or a more classical Roman Catholic Mass will bring to mind scenes from the book of Revelation.  Engaging in heavenly style worship facilitates our growing closer to God by making us more heavenly minded, or, perhaps more accurately, by helping us ascend into heaven, at least briefly.

What they are accomplishing here is to make Church less relevant, at least regarding the stuff that matters.

 Visual Basic is Evil

 At some level, this is simply axiomatic.  After all, it is a Microsoft product.  But seriously folks...

I had been developing an application to manage the book cart I help run at church, and I've been developing it in Visual Basic .Net.  A relatively easy process.  Recently, a portion of a project I've been working on at the office looks like it should have a custom program as a solution (a small program, mind you).  I was going to rollout VB for it, but it seems that the new standard in the group is C#.

In order to learn C# quickly, I figured the best approach would be to port the book cart application over to C#.  There are programs you can buy to do this, but since there were a relatively small number of forms to recreate, I simply rebuilt them and have been redoing the code to make it C#.  Since it has been a couple of years since I touched Java (which is quite similar to C#), I mistakenly assumed most of the code could just be copied, with the addition of some semicolons and braces.  Oops.

What I had forgotten is how sloppy VB allows you to be.  Data hiding?  No, everything is pretty much open for other objects in the system to manipulate.  If I don't want object b to be able to directly manipulate the controls or properties of object a, I have to take steps to prevent it.  Casting of variables?  VB seems to handle anything you throw at it.  Rarely does it not get what you're trying to do, even if you don't.

So, why is this evil.  Realistically for small individual apps like I'm dealing with, its fairly irrelevant.  There will not be other coders working on this, and the complexity won't be such that I need be concerned with breaking something via direct manipulation.  However, I really had to stop and think about what I was doing when dealing with C#.  I had become so very sloppy in my programming habits, simply because VB lets you.  I suspect VB was developed for rapid development of small programs by less than well trained programmers, something it is very good for.  Unfortunately, if you want to become a well trained programmer, I think VB probably harms you more than it helps.

 A Little Liturgical History

 9.West and I have conversations occasionally about the historicity of hymns and prayers etc.  How far back do certain texts date.  With Orthodox hymns and prayers, I often don't know specifics, although generally most are pretty old.  For instance, our Liturgy dates largely back to St. John Chrysostom, who modified an earlier liturgy.  However, some things have been added over time, and hymns - especially for Saints - are developed over time.

Last week I was listening to a series of Podcasts on Church/State relations and learned a small piece of liturgical history that I thought was interesting.

There are three antiphons in the Divine Liturgy.  Traditionally they involve a series of Psalm verses interspersed with a refrain.  For the most part, except in monasteries, the psalm verses are no longer sung, but the refrains have been retained.  The refrain for the first antiphon is  "By the intercessions of the Theotokos, Savior, save us", the second antiphonal refrain is "Save us, O Son of God, (who rose from the dead)*, to You we sing: Alleluia.  The third antiphon consists of the Apolytikia - the hymns appointed for the day and leads directly to the small entrance where the Gospels are processed into the altar.

After the second antiphonal hymn, there is another brief hymn, which was apparently added a bit later.  This hymn is, "Only begotten Son and Word of God, although immortal You humbled Yourself for our salvation, taking flesh from the holy Theotokos and ever virgin Mary and, without change, becoming man.  Christ, our God, You were crucified but conquered death by death.  You are one of the Holy Trinity, glorified with the Father and the Holy Spirit - save us."

 It is Not Good

 When reading about the creation of the universe in Genesis, its interesting to note that, as God finishes each stage of creation, we are told "God saw that it was good."  That is the repeated theme of the entire first chapter.  So, when do things stop being good? Well, that doesn't happen until most of the way through the second chapter.  The first thing that isn't good, is for man to be alone.

I'm not saying anything original here, just borrowing from various Orthodox teachers, but this is the first point in Scripture where we are given a hint that salvation may not be an individual thing.  The reason I bring this up is a blog post brought to my attention by 9.West.  The blogger in question got a lot of coverage for these posts in various venues.  One thing that struck me was much of what he doesn't like about modern evangelicalism is summed up in the following points:

"2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures."

This reflects, I think, the radically individualistic nature of Evangelicalism.  Although Lutherans will be quick to point out that Luther very much believed that the Christian belonged in a worshipping community under the guidance of a pastor, what Luther did was establish that the individual could, in fact, work out what Scripture said all on his own.  After all, that is precisely what Luther did.  This individualism grew over Luther's lifetime such that even he decried the presence of so many factions.  Over the centuries this individualism has resulted in modern Evangelicalism.  Every individual has the right and capacity to figure out Christianity on their own.

In order, then, to draw the average Christian, a church must market itself.  It must present Christianity as a commodity where their particular brand is more attractive than another.  Music that is hard to tell apart from modern punk/rock/whatever, slick multimedia, promises of health and wealth, even the charismatic promise of an individual spiritual experience, all are necessary to draw people in.  Doctrine must necessarily fall by the wayside as it tends to challenge folks and demand that they change.  Sometimes that is appealing to folks, but this is a culture where pre-packaged peanut butter sandwiches can actually sell.  The work free option is always preferred.

Ancient Christianity, on the other hand, realizes that becoming a Christian is about coming into communion, both with God, and with their fellow Christians.  While the person is highly thought of, the individual has no place.  It is not good for man to be alone.  Protestant make up your own spirituality has no place.  The modern Evangelical Church and the collapse of mainline Protestantism is simply the fruit of a fundamentally flawed theology in which the individual has been made supreme.

 CATECHETICAL HOMILY

 For Holy and Great Lent