Leviticus 6 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Commentaries (Henry, Gill)Psalms 5&6 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Proverbs 21 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Colossians 4 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Leviticus 5 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Commentaries (Henry, Gill)Psalms 3&4 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Proverbs 20 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Colossians 3 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Numbers 9 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Commentaries (Henry, Gill)Psalm 45 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Song of Solomon 7 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Hebrews 7 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Numbers 8 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Commentaries (Henry, Gill)Psalm 44 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Song of Solomon 6 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Hebrews 6 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Leviticus 4 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Commentaries (Henry, Gill)Psalms 1&2 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Proverbs 19 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
Colossians 2 (NASB, ESV, KJV, HCSB)
I am long overdue for wrapping up this series, and I apologize for the longer than expected delays if you are following this. But in this blog I will offer one more critique for egalitarians, and prayerfully, I will finish up in one more blog with some meaningful suggestions that I can offer to any woman who finds herself struggling between her natural egalitarian tendencies and submitting to the authority of Scripture on the matter.
Now, if you have read Christian’s for Biblical Equality’s statement, you will immediately recognize the emotionally-heavy language this is used throughout the document. You will read about “devices designed to make women feel inferior for being female” and “becoming the perennial loser” and even freedom from what they believe is “unbiblical ‘traditionalism’”. And to think about these things like any normal person, I don’t believe that any woman wants to see herself as being inferior just because of her sex or always feel like she has to give up everything about her life just to fit the mold of what history and tradition say a woman should be. Basically, no woman wants to feel oppressed, and you surely don’t want to feel oppressed by the Bible and its teachings. So the question comes down to this: How do you deal with the thing that is seemingly oppressing you and forcing you to do and become someone you are not?
Short Story
Growing up, I was the middle child sandwiched between two brothers. We lived in the country, and outside of school, we spent most of our days playing outside. I enjoyed most of the adventures my brothers and I went on, and we had a lot of fun. But I HATED being a girl! I couldn’t stand it. I hated wearing dresses, and I especially abhorred the tights my mom made me wear during those hot Virginia summers. I didn’t like ribbons in my hair because I thought they looked stupid. I hated getting my hair done at all, and training bras were the bane of my existence. If you couldn’t figure it out, I just wanted to be a boy like my brothers.
In my opinion, their lives were far better than mine! Haircuts took 10-15 minutes, and all they had to remember was run a brush over their heads in the morning. They got to wear pants or “dress shorts” to church (I despised them for those dress shorts). They never got in trouble for playing or showing up a little dirty. They could play contact sports (my mom wouldn’t let me try out for the football team). And overall, they seemed to have far more freedom in their life than I did as a girl. I hated the difference, and I wanted to be a boy. I even told my mom that one day….I’m guessing she didn’t take that well. But it was how I felt, and I continued to feel that way as I grew up. Even with having crushes on guys, I just hated having to be “feminine”. And I wasn’t sure what it would mean for my future (i.e. would I actually get married, would I want to get married, would I have to change and be more “ladylike” in the future, etc.), but I knew I just didn’t like it at all.
Addressing the Conflict
The internal conflict with my feelings was always there because I was raised in the church. I read the Bible. I saw Christian women, and even as a child, I had a general sense of what was expected of me as a female. I just didn’t like it, and eventually, I realized I had a major problem. Let me bring in this excellent quote from Dr. Al Mohler:
Most Americans believe that their major problem is something that has happened to them, and that their solution is to be found within. In other words, they believe that they have an alien problem that is to be resolved with an inner solution. What the gospel says, however, is that we have an inner problem that demands an alien solution – a righteousness that is not our own.
I soon realized that my problem wasn’t being female and getting the short end of the stick. My problem was that I didn’t like God. I felt like His way of designing and ordering things was really unfair. I didn’t understand why He had to make male and female different and then say that they are of equal value in His sight. I felt like men got all the perks, and I didn’t understand why He would make women deal with periods, childbirth, and not being in charge at all. It just didn’t seem fair to me. But as I would read my Bible, I kept coming across passages like Job 38-41, Isaiah 40:13-17, Isaiah 55:6-9, and my favorite, Jeremiah 17:5-10 (verses 9-10 are below):
The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?
I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.
Eventually, I realized that my problem was my own sinful heart. I needed to change. And the more I thought about these things, the more I realized that I had always had problems with things I read in the Bible throughout my life. There were lots of things that I didn’t think were always fair, but I knew that they were right to do because God had commanded them. And my reasoning finally came down to the question of what made being a woman and embracing my God-designed role any different than any other command I had ever learned and obeyed from Scripture. I reasoned that there was no difference. Even if my feelings were stronger, there was no difference, and I still needed to obey.
Coming Around Full Circle
So let’s come back around to the question presented at the beginning: How do you deal with the thing that is seemingly oppressing you and forcing you to do and become someone you are not?
First, you must identify the thing that is opposing you. As Christians, one of the main opposing forces we must fight against is sin (aside from Satan and the world). We also know that sin has penetrated to the very heart of our beings, and it affects every single area of our lives, including the way we think about things. Yet, our Christian duty is to strive and fight against sin all the days of our life. This leads me to my critique of the egalitarian position.
In explaining their position, egalitarians never addressed the root problem of sin. They didn’t address the fact that sin has affected each of us, nor did they consider how sin has affected their own attitudes, predispositions, feelings, and willingness to obey the Word of God on the matter of the roles of men and women in marriage. Egalitarians rightly determine that the whole Bible is “the liberating Word”, but they have failed to rightly identify what the Word is actually liberating them from. As Christians, we cannot get around the fact that sin exists, and we are totally depraved because of it. The difference between us and the rest of the world is that we have been set free from the slavery of sin to become slaves of righteousness (Consider Romans 6 – I would read the whole chapter).
In answering the question, the final thing you must consider is whether or not you should succumb to the thing that is trying to oppose and change you. When it comes to sin, we are obviously exhorted to stand firm against it and not yield to it many times in Scripture. But when it comes to the matter of the roles of men and women in the marriage relationship, the assignment of the roles and the responsibilities attached to the roles were predetermined by God. The Bible is clear on the matter. You only continue to fight against it if you are not willing to accept it. But as Christians, we are called to accept the teaching of the Bible as truth from God for our lives today.
But then you may ask: Why should I allow the Bible to change me when God accepts me for who I am?
And in response, I can only say that you are sadly mistaken. We have a Savior, Jesus Christ, because God no longer accepts us for who we are. He is too holy to accept us poor, miserable, sinful creatures. And Christ came, lived, died, and rose so that we could partake in His perfect righteousness and be able to stand before God while not facing the eternal wrath and judgment that we are due. So yes, the Bible is extremely liberating for the believer, but the thing it liberates us from (that is, the dominion of sin) is not something we naturally want to be freed from (consider Romans 6-7). And yes, the Bible will force you to change, to become someone you are not. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we are being conformed to the image of Christ, as Romans 8:29 tells us. And in the language of Ephesians 4 and Colossians 3, we are constantly exhorted to “put off” our sins and old manner of living and thinking and “put on” the deeds of righteousness, pursuing holiness and godliness in this life. Oh yes, as Christians, we are forced to change all the time, and we do well not to resist the work of the Spirit of God in the matter.
Ultimately, we will all face moments when we have a problem with something we read in Scripture. I mean, the Word of God is offensive. It tells us the truth of our condition…a truth we out rightly reject and often delude ourselves in denying. But it is still the truth. And as Al Mohler pointed out, we can act like the rest of the world and believe that the things outside us, including the Word of God, are the real problems. And we can even make up in our own hearts and minds the proper solutions for remedying these things and ‘liberate’ ourselves from these problems. But ultimately, we have internal problems that can only be remedied by God alone. With these thoughts in mind, I challenge my egalitarian brothers and sisters to consider the weighty problem of sin in their own beliefs and perspectives on the roles of men and women in marriage and in their willingness to accept the plain teachings of Scripture.
In the previous blog, I addressed the first major issue regarding American college education – a growing lack of mental discipline from students. Although most social commentators focus on the negative impacts of video media upon college students, I believe that the root cause of these issues stem from the fact that we have re-defined education. We have moved from a view of education as a means of discipleship to education as a means of job training. Thus, it can be said that we have undervalued the need to discipline and train the human mind. Coupled with this change in education, I want to address the second major issue: the promotion of the autonomous self.
The self is our interior world, made up of our own thoughts, private intuitions, desires, yearnings, capacities, particularities, and all other elements that makes us distinct from other persons. In essence, it is the sum package of ourselves that makes us unique from all other people. I believe that the promotion of the autonomous self has had a profoundly negative impact on higher education, and I believe the development of the autonomous self is the consequence of three noetic effects of the Fall: faulty perspectives, intellectual pride, and vain imaginations.
As mentioned previously, we are all subject to these issues in varying degrees because of the Fall. We all have various intellectual prejudices that cause us to misunderstand and misinterpret the world around us (as well as the people around us). These intellectual prejudices also cause us to misunderstand ourselves as well. This suggests that prejudice is somewhat axiomatic. However, there is a difference between recognizing our inherent prejudices ourselves and claiming that reality is defined and shaped by the observer. This is a perspective that is being promoted throughout our society, particularly in education. What cultural forces have contributed to this and what impacts do these have on the quality of college education?
The Emergence of the Self
In his book The Courage to be Protestant, David Wells address how the self-esteem movement has dramatically changed the fabric of American culture. In commenting about the 1960s, Wells notes
In a nutshell, what happened was that our individualism, which had always been a potent factor in American life, turned inward in this decade. It withdrew from the outside world and during the 1960s, a new worldview emerged. To a great majority of Americans, it now became clear that the self had become the source of all values. The pursuit of the self was what life was all about.
In other words, the old world individualism has morphed into a new type of individualism. The older individualism in which you should think for yourself, decide for yourself, provide for yourself, and work to serve others in personal and civic ways has turned inwards. Now, individualism is about “finding yourself”, discovering your inner potential for your own benefit, developing positive self-esteem, and developing new ethical rules that serve the discovery of the self.
In this new style of individualism, self-esteem is elevated even above actual performance. This is a trend that is tracked by numerous academics in which virtually all students view themselves as “above average” in all ways. In this regard, we are producing a generation of students who are “cured” of their inferiority complexes, but whose academic performance lag behind that of many other nations. In therapeutic terms, we have all become adept at being our own healers and our own counselors, dispensing wisdom and comfort to ourselves. In other words, we are not challenging ourselves; we are soothing ourselves.
In our version of individualism, we have the emergence of the autonomous self. Instead of esteeming objectively-defined virtues, we have prioritized good subjective values. Instead of developing objectively-defined inner character, we have prioritized self-marketing, image, and personality. We have replaced an understanding of human nature (which is based on a presupposition of a common shared identity) with the new concept of self. We have drifted from what we all have in common to what is unique to each individual.
The promotion of the self has been the message delivered to many of us for the past several decades. When a child grows up, he or she is taught to embrace their distinctiveness and uniqueness. We are taught to develop our own values and that each person needs to be respected for their values. Moreover, each person is entitled to express who he or she is and each person should define the meaning of his or her life. The prevailing theory is that a poor development of the self explains all sorts of bad behavior and also explains failing academic work. We can now examine some of the impacts that this philosophy has had on higher education.
The Impact on Higher Education
There are numerous consequences of the promotion of self upon college education. The first obvious consequence is a growing sense of entitlement and overconfidence. College faculty members tend to believe that this sense of entitlement is fostered into college students because of grade inflation throughout high school education, but there is plenty of evidence of grade inflation within colleges and universities. This means that the quality and respectability of an undergraduate degree is rapidly declining – to the extent that some degrees are not worth the paper that they are printed on. If the statistics in the above link are correct, this means that all college students are literally above average (with an average GPA of 3.1). Because of these trends, there is a genuine sense that if a student fails a course, then it is the fault of the professor rather than the student.
The promotion of self in higher education has also led to an increase in the hiring of student affairs professionals while freezing or delaying the hiring of full-time faculty members. Furthermore, to meet this ongoing need, more colleges and universities are beginning to develop graduate degrees for Student Affairs, and these programs are even being expanded to the undergraduate level. Therefore, we are witnessing an increase of programs aimed at training people to guide, aid, and facilitate the “personal identity” development of students. And what all of these theories have in common is the promotion of the autonomous self. For evidence of this, please see the following cheat sheet of student development theories.
The expansion of student affairs professionals in higher education also indicates a shift in the financial priorities for colleges and universities. It has been documented that the financial endowments of many academic institutions have flatlined or decreased over the past few decades. Thus, the funding for these new programs/departments have come from four likely sources: (1) students (through increases in student fees and/or tuition); (2) private donors and/or grants; (3) at the expense of academic affairs programs; or 4) through cutting the budgets of current student affairs departments to create new departments/programs. In my view, the creation and/or expansion of student affairs has led to the growth of adjunct, non-tenured faculty within most universities as a cost-cutting measure. This is one of the key indicators that colleges have begun to prioritize the development of the self over the development of the mind.
Our Response
From a Christian worldview, we should see this, not as just a fad in modern American culture, but a rejection of the Christian view of man. The truth is that Western societies want to think only in terms of the self, and they want to use this psychological world as an alternative to the older religious world. This myth of the autonomous self is so well-established, preserved in place by so great a public desire to keep it there, that it borders on heresy to question it. Nevertheless, we should question it and confront it.
The question that we should be asking is whether or not we have the ability or the right to autonomously define themselves. The answer is emphatically no! We do not have the right to dictate who we are because we are creatures, not the Creator. We are not self-created beings who choose to define our own reality; our identity has already been prescribed as creatures made in the image of God. Our lives are not a grand experiment in order to discover our unique identity; we are a part of God’s work of creation and providence, which means that our purpose and function has been determined by God. This is our Father’s world, and reality is set and defined by Him. Consider the commentary by David Wells
To speak of virtue, then, is to speak of the moral structure of the world God has made. Rebellious though we are, we have not broken down this structure, nor dislodged God from maintaining it. It stands there, over against us, whether we recognize it or not. We bump up against it in the course of life and we encounter its reflection in our moral makeup. And from all sides a message is conveyed to our consciousness: “Beware! This is a moral world that you inhabit!”
God’s work of creation does not consists only of the physical structure of the world, but it also includes the moral structure of the world. This also implies that we do not have the ability or the right to define the reality that we live in. Therefore, education should not be a means to liberate our minds from prejudices so that we can discover our true selves in our own inner world. Education should be a means to confront our intellectual prejudices so that we can understand the world that God Himself has made.
In the previous blog, I mentioned that there are several noetic effects of the Fall that have a direct impact on the quality of our American college education. In this blog, I want to address the first major issue regarding American higher education: a growing lack of mental discipline from students.
This growing lack of mental discipline is observed in three basic ways: ignorance, distractedness, and fatigue. Because of the noetic effects of the Fall, we are all subject to these issues in varying degrees. The Fall has clouded our ability to understand the world around us and has weakened the mental capacities of our mind. Therefore, to some extent, a sense of ignorance, fatigue, and distractedness is axiomatic.
However, it does appear that our intellectual ignorance is growing, despite the claims of a more enlightened society. What cultural forces have contributed to “dumbing down” of the American mind and what impacts do these have on the quality of college education?
A Common Diagnosis
Many commentators have monitored these issues and the most cited cause of this is the transition from print media to video media. Unsurprisingly, print journalists are among the loudest voices that decry our current situation and they were among the first to note that this trend has accelerated with the past decade or so because of the explosion of social media. Journalist Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America, adds his perspective:
The rise of idiot America today represents–for profit mainly, but also and more cynically, for political advantage in the pursuit of power–the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they are talking about. In the new media age, everybody is an expert.
I believe that Pierce has targeted a symptom of a deeper problem in his above statement. The social media revolution in particular (and the internet revolution of the 1990s in general) has given us unprecedented access to information and news, but it has also devolved the American mind in its wake. Despite having 24/7 access to news and events, we remain ignorant of many basic things and we tend to only have a surface-level/partial understanding of the things that we know.
The age of social media has trained us to become very adept at skimming large amounts of information, but it has also deteriorated our ability to think critically. Since we are losing our critical analysis skills, this means that we are also losing our intellectual discernment. We are losing the ability to determine what is intellectually valuable, who is intellectual credible, what is trivial, and what is purely speculative. In essence, we are the generation that is “always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”
Since our minds our withering away, we are now much more prone to distractedness and mental fatigue. This is not merely a commentary to the young generation, but it also applies to many of us who went through higher education before the internet revolution and have become progressively dumber due to its gradual impacts on our mind. Many of us have gotten to the point where we would agree with the modern adage of our day “Why spend time learning about history and dates when you can google it?”
A New Diagnosis
While it’s convenient to point the finger at the current generation because of its addiction to the internet, I want to ask a question that is rarely asked: Why has this change in media become so attractive? If it has been documented that the internet is dumbing us down, then why are so many still drawn to? I believe that the honest answer is that this mentality is the fruit of a long history of pragmatism and anti-intellectualism within American life. In other words, we have forgotten the primary and central purpose of formal education – the discipleship of the mind.
If we would be honest, the social media revolution (as well as the internet revolution of the 1990s) caters to what the modern American mind wants: a desire to know things and to appear intelligent without having to apply the necessary mental work.
The modern American mind seems to have a strong aversion toward deep, challenging, and penetrating thought and the media revolution gives us a way to remain constantly distracted without being focused on anything in particular. Because we have abandoned the very notion of the discipleship of the mind, it’s easy to understand why technological innovations that allow us to bypass the mind would become popular. The progression of anti-intellectual and pragmatic thought has borne their fruits in our generation. Those who thought that it was unnecessary to demand intellectual rigor and discipline from their children have produced a generation of unthinking, uncritical, and ignorant young adults.
Now, before we point the finger at the outside world, it’s important to realize that these cultural forces have also invaded young Christian minds. In many places, young Christian minds are just as vapid as their secular counterparts. How many of us have heard the expression: “Don’t give me theology. Give me something practical”? As mentioned previously, the mode of Biblical spirituality is more intellectual than mystical and the Christian faith places significant importance on the value of the mind for the purpose of godliness. However, the pragmatism of previous generations has led to the stereotype of the slow-witted, willfully ignorant Christian.
The Present Trajectory
This trajectory that we have observed has a very profound effect on the state of higher education. If we no longer value intellectual discipline as a nation and would rather google search all of our information, then it will be reflected in our colleges. In many ways, this means that the very mission of colleges and universities has changed. To put it bluntly, we don’t desire to educate people anymore… we train them to get jobs. This means that many degrees will be considered as worthless (i.e. most humanities) and many degrees will be created simply because the job exists (i.e. construction management).
We are already seeing these trends at the college level. There have been numerous reports on historic small liberal arts colleges that are closing their doors because they are “outdated”, whereas there continues to be rapid growth for for-profit institutions (who are notoriously known for producing shoddy education) and steady growth for technical schools. We continue to read reports of students with advanced degrees in humanities from respectable schools working as a barista, while trying to pay off $100K in college debt (a blog for another day). From the academic affairs side, it is truly sad and troubling to see that most of the faculty at colleges and universities are adjuncts because their work and skills aren’t important enough to hire them as tenure-track faculty. If trends continue as they are, then colleges and universities will be qualitatively no different than trade schools, which is a fundamental change in the mission of the university system.
In my view, this trajectory will not change unless our culture repents from its disposition towards the mind. The Christian faith exhorts us to seek wisdom and to turn from folly and to the extent that we abandon that foundation, we will reap its reward. The God who made our bodies also made our minds, and thus, He knows how it should be properly maintained. For this reason, education is not merely training to obtain employment – it is a means of discipling the mind. In other words, education is not merely a vocational issue, but it is an issue of morality. If our culture continues to throw off this connection between education and the discipleship of the mind, then we can only expect to continue to see the “dumbing down” of the American mind and the quality of American education.
This is also an exhortation to self-identified Christian colleges and seminaries. As Christians, part of “not conforming to this age” means that our disposition concerning the Christian mind and Christian education should dramatically change. If we abandon the call to diligently train our minds by yielding to the anti-intellectual disposition of our age, then our graduates (and our future pastors) will become intellectually vapid – much like the culture around us. Our witness to the world not only pertains to matters directly related to salvation, but it involves how Christ transforms the whole man – including the mind.
Picking up from where I left off, the next main point that grabbed my attention were the shifting definitions/words that egalitarians used to defend their position. Formally, this is called the equivocation fallacy, and if you read through Christians for Biblical Equality’s statement, you will see this fallacy a lot. But here is a more formal explanation taken from the book A Pocket Guide to Logic & Faith by Dr. Jason Lisle:
When debating on any topic, it is very important that we pay close attention to the meaning of words and how they are being used in the debate. Most words have more than one meaning, but only one of these meanings will properly fit the given context. When someone shifts from one meaning of a word to another within an argument, he or she has committed the fallacy of equivocation.
Now, my husband likes to call the equivocation fallacy a ‘bait and switch’, and I think that this is a good way of thinking about this fallacy in general and also in considering the egalitarian arguments. For a brief example, consider this tenth point under their Biblical Truths section:
The Bible defines the function of leadership as the empowerment of others for service rather than as the exercise of power over them (Matt 20:25-28, 23:8; Mark 10:42-45; John 13:13-17; Gal 5:13; 1 Peter 5:2-3).
On the surface, it is kind of easy to agree with them. However, you have to consider their word choices and why they used the words in the way they did. For instance, they speak of the “function of leadership”. Does the function of leadership nullify the role of a leader? Or does the function of leadership change the fact that leaders, by definition, have authority and rule over the people they are in charge of? (Why else would you call them your leader?) And if not, why would they say that the function of leadership is meant to empower others for service rather than exercise power over them?
This is just a small example of what you will see as you read through their document, and the matter becomes worse when you actually read the Scripture references they have listed in support of their positions. When you read those Scriptures, I encourage you to read before and after the verses for a better context and understanding of what those verses mean, and then, think about whether those verses are really applicable at all to their point.
Let me look that up…
Ultimately, it is crucial for Christians to recognize how easily people change words or equate the same meaning to different words to further their own arguments. When it comes to what we believe from the Bible, being firm and confident in our understanding of the Scriptures is paramount in living a victorious Christian life, and it keeps us from being “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Ephesians 4:14). Consequently, as Christians, our only safeguard against this error is to know the Word of God for ourselves and to be willing to tear down faulty arguments that stand against the truth of God’s Word, recognizing that we must be prepared to not only work the defense, but also the offense in this spiritual war (2 Corinthians 10:3-5).
This is also why I commend the complementarians who crafted the Danvers Statement and appreciate the fact that they pointed out this serious concern in their rationale statements:
8. The increasing prevalence and acceptance of hermeneutical oddities devised to reinterpret apparently plain meanings of Biblical texts;
9. The consequent threat to Biblical authority as the clarity of Scripture is jeopardized and the accessibility of its meaning to ordinary people is withdrawn into the restricted realm of technical ingenuity;
The issue that is ultimately at stake is the authority of the Bible over the Christian life. If we say that Scripture is not clear enough, or if we underhandedly change the meaning of scriptures, distort the context, or read things into the text that are not there, then we are undermining the fact that the Word of God was given to us by God Himself to be the “only sufficient, certain and infallible rule of all saving knowledge, faith, and obedience” (LBC 1.1)
Therefore, I encourage all of my egalitarian brothers and sisters to carefully examine the Scriptures again. Consider the fact that God is immutable, His Word is never contradictory, and “the infallible rule of interpretation of Scripture is the Scripture itself; and therefore, when there is a question about the true and full sense of any Scripture (which are not many, but one), it must be searched by other places that speak more clearly.” (LBC 1.9)
My final encouragement for my complementarian brothers and sisters (and all those people who waver or find themselves moderately in the camp) is that you would also carefully study and examine the Scriptures for yourself. Know why you believe what you believe, and be able and ready to give an answer for your beliefs and your choices in living out this Christian life.
“Concert” by Lorenzo Costa
Recently I tuned in to watch a live stream of a conference. The leader had given a welcome and began the time with prayer. As he prayed, members of the worship team walked onto the stage, cued up the songs on the MacBook, and got their instruments ready. Immediately after the prayer was ended, the music began.
This article is not to debate whether churches should have praise teams. This episode occurred at a conference put on by a para-church organization that advocates “gospel-centered principles and practices that glorify the Savior”, and not at a church. Conferences can be an encouraging and edifying time for Christians. However, several questions arose in my head from observing these “behind the scenes” actions:
1) What are these events considered to be? And what is the purpose of such events? There is prayer, song, and a talk on a theological topic. Would this be some form of informal worship service?
2) Why did the praise team not join in praying? Are they not part of the event, but merely “players”? Now I was watching this on the computer, but if I were physically there, as a Christian, shouldn’t I participate in the prayer? I could understand if there were an emergency, like my toddler had to go NOW or the baby was screaming. But if you’re on the praise team, can’t it wait? You may be praying while setting up the lyrics on your computer, but generally it is considered respectful to be still and wait for the prayer to be over. Does this not apply if you are part of the leadership?
3) How important is the “flow” of a service? Is a 10 second delay to be avoided at all costs? Will you lose your “congregation” if there is a pause between the end of prayer and the beginning of music? Or is this not a meeting of the church, but a performance? In a performance, timing is everything. Cueing the lights and music at the right time is crucial for the desired effect upon the audience.
4) So what is the intended effect on the audience? Is it to provoke some mood? Could this mood be recreated without such seamless transitions? Which is more important: the mood of the audience or allowing all people at the event a chance to join in prayer?
Much thought goes into planning such conferences. Yet a simple act of a praise band setting up during a prayer implies that this is entertainment, where the audience is a spectator and those onstage are not participants in a shared experience, but performers. It also demonstrates the priority placed on singing rather than prayer. May the organizers consider how to best glorify the Savior, and whether that means musicians forego joining in prayer.
CredoCovenant 