The Blessing of Strong Walls for a Holy Church

Consider this lesson on the relationship between faith and politics from Nehemiah 8.

(These reflections are based on a sermon by Rev Benjamin Miller, "Holiday Cheer: What Happens When God Comes," at Trinity Church (OPC) in Huntington NY on November 27, 2011.)

Nehemiah has returned from Babylon to Jerusalem to lead Israel in rebuilding the city's walls. Only a week after the work was complete, the people called Ezra to preach to them in the open air, and Israel experienced remarkable revival.

Notice the timeline. First, with sword in one hand and trowel in the other, they build the city walls.  They provide for their national security. God has not given them a metaphorical city, but a real one. And even though it is God's city, it nonetheless requires the ordinary defenses that any city requires: sword and stone. Only after that, living finally in peace, they turn their attention more fully to worship and study, and enjoy the spiritual fruits of those godly occupations. Political security, backed by ordinary defenses, permits the flourishing of church life.

We saw the same truths played out in the early church. The small vulnerable band of believers preached the gospel and lived in faith, and the church spread throughout the empire, even under ferocious persecution, and often because of it. "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church," said Tertullian. But it was only after Emperor Constantine lifted the hand of opposition and established security for the church to live out the life to which Christ has called it, openly and fully, that the church began to develop theologically and no doubt also in other ways.

But the rest of the story in Nehemiah 8 tempers any hasty and carnal judgment regarding a dependence of Christ's church on civic peace and security. In Ezra's reading of the Law that day, they discovered God's command that Israel celebrate each year a festival of booths during which they were to camp out as Israel had done in their wilderness wanderings. In this way, God reminded his people that while governmental protection is a blessing to the church, they must never forget that the Lord God--who preserved them in the wilderness where there were no walls--is their ultimate defense.

"[T]he joy of the Lord is your strength" (v.10).

Ascending the Christian Mountain

When you read the Bible biblico-theologically, i.e., with attention to the unfolding themes and images in their didactic and Christological significance, it begins to make sense like never before and the excitement of reading it intensifies.

For example, there are parallels between certain events in Israel's Sinai moment and the layout of the temple. I found it eye opening.

In Exodus 19, just before we read the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, we read of a remarkable communion with God before Israel receives the Law. "I...brought you to Myself" (v.4). "[Y]ou shall be a special treasure to Me above all people; for all the earth is Mine" (v.5). "[Y]ou shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" (v.6). God wants Israel to hear what he says and to trust him (v.9), i.e., to live by faith in him.

In Exodus 24, we see a threefold progression of communion that parallels the pattern of the temple and even of the altar within the temple. God called Israel to gather at the foot of the mountain. He then called Aaron, Nadab, Abihu, and the 70 elders up the mountain (though not to the top) where they "saw God" and they ate and drank (v.11). Then Moses proceeded to the top, with Joshua, into the cloud and thunder where he communed with God and received the Law (vv.12-13).

This parallels what we see in the temple: first the outer court, then the holy place where we find the shewbread, then the holiest place with the Shekinah glory-cloud. In the central place, the altar itself has three ascending regions: blood is sprinkled on the the base and in the middle, and on top is the sacrifice with the smoke and fire.

The Bible often represents the fullness of God's presence with smoke and fire.

It occurred to me that the Christian life parallels, in a way, that three-stage progression. First we encounter the call of baptism. Yes, God gives his covenant people infant baptism. When one grows to the point that he or she can understand the gospel and affirm personal trust in it, there is communion, as the elders and Aaron the priest communed on the mountain with God. For the covenant child, this may come very early in life, perhaps 5 years of age, or perhaps 15 or 25. But this stage is further up the mountain from the time of infancy and the call of baptism. This is an argument against paedo-communion.

But professing one's faith and coming to the Lord's Table is not the peak of the Christian life and the fullness of Christian maturity. There is still more mountain to ascend. After justification comes the life-long process of sanctification, of growing communion with and obedience to the Lord. That process culminates in glory. Notice that it is wrong to look for remarkable sanctification as a precondition of communion, i.e., as an evidence of saving faith. This is an argument against putting off our young ones until they have shown the victory of faith over the temptations of teenaged life, i.e., against legalism.

Evangelical Worship

My church has started a new congregation, Trinity Church, in Huntington on Long Island's north shore. What distinguishes it from many Orthodox Presbyterian Churches is the slightly more formal, more responsive liturgy that we employ. In Reformed circles, it goes by the name "covenant renewal worship." Today, in Sunday school, Pastor Ben Miller began teaching us why we are worshipping God this way, how it is biblical, how it is covenantal in particular, and how it is anything but novel.

First, he described what Christian worship is NOT. Evangelicals and specifically reformed people (at their worst) tend to see worship as essentially or primarily one of these four Es, though worship is in part all of these things.

Evangelism - Worship is not directed chiefly to the unbeliever in the pew. The worship should testify to such people, and we pray that the Lord would use the worship to impart grace to such people and bring them to conversion. But that is not the focus of the service.

Education - Some treat the worship service as though it is pre-game plus a sermon. If you come in late, but have not missed the sermon, then you haven't missed anything important. In this view, the sermon is not just central; it is all there really is or all there needs to be. Worse, it is an interesting and informative lecture. This is a terrible distortion.

Experience - This is the charismatic error. They distinguish between "preaching" and "praise and worship." Notice that receiving the ministry of the word is not worship. People who see worship as primarily an experience are often looking for a sort of ecstasy, a substantial anticipation of the beatific vision. And if they don't feel something strongly, they don't think (feel?) they have truly worshipped. This is an over-realized eschatology.

Exaltation - This is an overreaction to the "experience" error. People who hold this view claim that you should no consideration to what you "get out of" worship. It is all for God who should be your exclusive focus. But this makes light of worship as a means of grace to the worshipper. We glorify God by receiving what only God can give. We glorify God by enjoying him now and forever.

In covenant renewal worship, God's people re-enact the story of God's covenant. This is the pattern of the worship in the temple and it is the pattern of redemptive history. It has five stages.

1. God calls - The call to worship. Cf. God called Abraham, calls believers at baptism or at conversion.

2. God cleanses - Confession of sin & assurance of pardon. Cf. passover, the Red Sea, the cross, baptism.

3. God consecrates - The ministry of the Word. Cf. God speaking to Israel at Sinai, giving the covenant.

4. God communes - The Lord's Supper. Cf. the communion meal on Sinai.

5. God commissions - The benediction, the blessing for action. Cf. the Aaronic blessing.

This brought to mind what my co-author in Left, Right and Christ, Lisa Sharon Harper, said this week in summarizing what an Evangelical is. She drew upon David Bebbington's well known four marks of Evangelicalism from his book Evangelicalism in Modern Britain, viz. biblicism, crucicentrism, conversionism, and activism, known as Bebbington's quadrilateral.

I noticed that the four marks correspond with four of these five features of covenant renewal worship.

In the call, you can see the Evangelical emphasis on the need for conversion, God's call to turn away from sin back to him. A covenantal view of God excludes conversionism, however, as it recognizes God's initiative in salvation, conversion as an act of God's free grace, and even the call of the covenant child in his or her baptism. Conversionism, as opposed to the necessity for conversion or spiritual rebirth, is essentially Baptist. It rejects the covenantal status of the children of believers and thus the special relationship they have with God simply by virtue of their place within his gracious covenant.

In the cleansing, you can see the Evangelical crucicentrism. Evangelical Christians are cross-centred, and there is no worship of God in spirit and in truth without the cross. It is the crux of everything Christian. Although in Evangelical worship, the cleansing is generally understood to take place at the Lord's Supper. Here we have introspection, silent confession of sin, and contemplation of the cost that Christ endured for our sins. This is fine, but it generally makes for something more akin to a funeral than a wedding feast and divine fellowship. Also, Evangelicals generally celebrate the Lord's Supper infrequently, at best monthly and perhaps even quarterly. So as far as cleansing in the weekly worship is concerned, it is generally not reaffirmed but taken for granted.

In the consecration, you can see the Evangelical confidence in the Bible. They are not only cross-centred but Bible bound. It is only through the faithful testimony of the Scriptures that we know the good news of the cross. Sadly, in all too many churches that consider themselves Evangelical, the Scriptures are not formally read. If they are, people are served up a verse or two. And then they can close there Bibles because the sermon will make no further reference to Word. Instead the congregation is treated to stories, psychology, cultural references, and whatever else passes as the pastor's wisdom. Many of my students at The King's College, a broadly though seriously Evangelical college, clearly do not know their Bible content.

The final mark in Bebbington quadrilateral is activism, which corresponds to God's commissioning. The difference, of course, is that godly activity is not activism, which by virtue of the "ism" implies a kind of ideology, a worldly hope through human action, a political gospel or what one might even call a "social gospel." Faith without works is dead, i.e, no living and saving faith at all. But while the living will love, it is not by the works of love that we will live, i.e., either justify ourselves or realize the hope of the God's kingdom. Activism seems to me just a poorly chosen word. Evangelicals have always been active in good works--the Genevan deacons, nineteenth century ministries to the industrial poor, Spurgeon's orphanages, Prison Fellowship, etc. But "activism" connotes the social gospel and, more recently, shrill political carping for evermore pervasive government intervention.

What is missing from Bebbington's quadrilateral is the fourth stage of covenant renewal worship: communion. This is no surprise because with such disagreement across the Evangelical spectrum from high to low church there is little agreement on the nature and practice of the sacraments. So they are de-emphasized. If they are inessential to Evangelical unity, they must be simply unimportant. Perhaps this is also why church government, and one of its chief pastoral functions, church discipline, are also widely neglected. Communing is what God's people do with their God. It is their great privilege in Christ who is Immanuel, God with us. God's great covenant promise is, "I will be your God and you will be my people." In the end, on the other side of Christ's second coming, we are told, "Behold, the dwelling of God is with men." This side of that day, it is not charismatic ecstasy.

The rediscovery and repositioning of the Lord's Supper, holy communion, as a means of grace and a covenantal, mountaintop meeting place is what I expect will be one of the great benefits of covenant renewal worship.

Tyranny, Freedom, and Divine Government

Pastor Benjamin Miller at Relocating to Elfland posted this helpful reflection from Karl Barth.

[God’s] authority is divinely majestic just because it has nothing in common with tyranny, because its true likeness is not the power of a natural catastrophe which annihilates all human response, but rather the power of an appeal, command and blessing which not only recognises human response but creates it. To obey it does not mean to be overrun by it, to be overwhelmed and eliminated in one’s standing as a human being.

Obedience to God is genuine precisely in that it is both spontaneous and receptive, that it not only is unconditional obedience but even as such is obedience from the heart. God’s authority is truly recognised only within the sphere of freedom: only where conscience exists, where there exists a sympathetic understanding of its lofty righteousness and a wholehearted assent to its demands – only where a man allows himself to be humbled and raised up, comforted and warmed by its voice. (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.661–62)

There are those who hate the notion of God's sovereign rule over the universe. They find it dehumanizing, a denial of their human liberty, an assignment of slave status to the whole universe. Note that though some of these people are militant atheists, others are Arminian Evangelicals who treasure their modern notions of personal autonomy above the majesty of God.

It is true that the New Testament uses the word despotes, from which we get the English word despot, ten times to refer to God as sovereign ruler of heaven and earth and to the Lord Jesus Christ as master and owner of his church.

But to equate God's government of the universe and of his human creations in particular with the government of either a tyrant or puppeteer would be willfully and carelessly ignorant. For those interested in how the absolute sovereignty of God's divine government actually elevates and completes human liberty, Barth (heretic though he was in his Neo-Orthodoxy) here is a good place to begin.

It is also a worthwhile study to compare the holy sovereignty of God as he has revealed himself in the Bible with Allah of the Muslim Koran. The Muslim Allah is the divine tyrant. He is never described as being "love," and never displays any. "Islam" means "submission," but it is an entire moral universe away from the joyful obedience of the Christian to his Redeemer. Islam is completely indifferent to what Barth here calls "obedience from the heart," "freedom," "conscience," "sympathetic understanding," and "wholehearted assent."

Objections, whether by atheists or Arminians,  to God's rule over his creation according to his sovereign will in both its decretive and prescriptive aspects, i.e., his providential and moral ordering of all things, misses this fundamental point and so battles a straw man.

There is so much more to say on this subject.

Argumentative Prayer

Daniel's Prayer (1865) by Sir Edward Poynter (1836-1919) 

Prayer is as natural to a child of God as breathing is. "While I breathe I pray," said Andrew of Crete in the eighth century. Yet we have trouble with it. We love God, but poorly. We see God, but through a glass darkly. So we are more focused on the pleasures and terrors of this world, a world that we see, or so we think, far more distinctly.

But we are not the first to face this problem. Christ's original disciples implored him, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1).

Most prayer is a self-centered worry list--letting God in on all our troubles, and whatever of other people's troubles comes to mind. One helpful discipline, however,  is to follow the acronym ACTS: adoration of God, confession of sin, thanksgiving for blessings, and supplication.

How is this helpful? Beginning with adoration fills the believer's sights with God. So we sing, "Turn your eyes upon Jesus. Look full in his wonderful face. And the cares of life will turn strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace." Before taking up your requests, consider the one to whom you are bringing them.

As you confess your sins, you remind yourself that the terrible crisis of your sin against God that was surely to separate you from your eternal rest has been resolved in Christ by the amazing mercy of God. Before coming to your needs, remember your greatest need, and view your other needs in light of Christ's provision for it.

Following up with thanksgiving brings to mind the record of God's provision before getting to requests for further provision. Needs press in on us and fill our field of vision. You can hold up your little finger and blot out the sun! You may have hurt your little finger, but God has provided the sun and rain and many other tokens of his care. It is good to keep that in mind before petitioning him for help concerning your finger.

Only after these three comes supplication.

Apply these guidelines to the prayer that the Lord Jesus gave his disciples as a model.

Our Father who are in heaven. Hallowed by thy name. -- Adoration.
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. -- Supplication.
Give is this day our daily bread. -- Supplication.
And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. -- Confession.
And lead us not into temptation. -- Supplication.
But deliver us from evil. -- Supplication.
For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory. Amen. -- Adoration.

It is interesting that there is no thanksgiving in the prayer. Surely Jesus intends that we thank God for our blessings. But Jesus did not give the prayer as a fixed liturgy (though we are free to use it in that way). Any godly believer knows that one thanks God for his mercies. As the Apostle Paul told the Philippians, "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God" (Php 4:6). Thank offerings were part of Israel's worship (Lev. 7:11-15; 2 Chron. 29:30-32).


As helpful as the ACTS outline is in structuring our prayers, Job (23:3) prompts us to pray with a slightly different understanding. When he approaches the throne of grace, this man who is so much in need does not just make his requests known. He marshals arguments. "Oh that I knew where I might find him, that I might come to his seat! I would present my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments."

Job is not coming to Santa Claus with requests, otherwise he might just spout forth his list of requests. He is not supplicating pagan gods, such that he brings gifts to bribe them and pervert whatever sense of right they might have.

He is approaching Yahweh, the Lord. As he is fully aware, this is the God who made the world through the Logos, and who made us in his image. Thus, God said through Isaiah, "Come now, and let us reason together" (1:18). He addressed us through his prophets and left us a written testimony. He has made us promises with which he binds himself. That is no limitation on his sovereignty because his promises are fully consistent with his divine character, and he is constant in his character so that he delights to keep his promises. In promising, he utters conditional statements concerning which we can reason in view of our circumstances.

And so knowing who his God is, in the confidence of God's covenant love, righteous Job in his need approaches his God with arguments, and it pleases the Lord that Job does this. The Lord's character, self-revelation, promises, and dealings invite it!

We see this in the prayers of the saints that are recorded in the Bible, for example Daniel's prayer after learning from study that his people would be a total of seventy years in captivity (Dan. 9). He begins with adoration, but he is also setting up his argument.

He "keeps his covenant and mercy" (v.4). From verses 5-8, Daniel confesses his sin and the sins of his people in which he participates, and then returns to God's character: "To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against him" (v.9). He alternates between adoration and confession until verse 16 when he begins his argument.

O Lord, according to all Your righteousness, I pray, let Your anger and Your fury be turned away from Your city Jerusalem, Your holy mountain; because for our sins, and for the iniquities of our fathers, Jerusalem and Your people are a reproach to all those around us. Now therefore, our God, hear the prayer of Your servant, and his supplications, and for the Lord’s sake cause Your face to shine on Your sanctuary, which is desolate. O my God, incline Your ear and hear; open Your eyes and see our desolations, and the city which is called by Your name; for we do not present our supplications before You because of our righteous deeds, but because of Your great mercies. O Lord, hear! O Lord, forgive! O Lord, listen and act! Do not delay for Your own sake, my God, for Your city and Your people are called by Your name.

Daniel asks the Lord to spare Jerusalem and his people their present afflictions and desolations. Why should God do this? Because of his righteous character. It is God's own sanctuary, and so Daniel calls on the Lord to defend it for his own sake. The city is his own city. It is called by his name. Finally, he appeals to the Lord's mercy to which he has made reference twice before in this prayer. Specifically, he mentions forgiveness, an aspect of love that "belongs" to the Lord (v.9). "For your own sake," pleads the holy exile. Your city. Your people. Your name.

Notice that in the Lord's Prayer the final word of adoration begins with the little word "for," as in "because." We ask God to give us daily bread and the forgiveness of our sins so that his kingdom would cover that much more of the world, so that he would show his divine power by it, and so that he would be glorified.

When the wise Christian prays, the character and promises of God dominate his perspective. The record of God's provision is foremost in his mind. "You have done it, Lord," he says. "You have always done it; so, do it again!" Like Job, and also like Paul, he argues from the greater to the lesser, as when Paul says, "He who did not spare his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things" (Romans 8:32). Having met our greatest need by paying the greatest price, he will surely meet all lesser ones.

Praying in this saintly style builds our confidence to go to prayer and secures our peace coming out of prayer.

Charles Spurgeon, the great London preacher of the Victorian age, has a much better account of this passage in his sermon, "Effective Prayer."

The Limits of Our Demystified World

“…I desire you to consider, I say, that these functions imitate those of a real man as perfectly as possible and that they follow naturally in this machine entirely from the disposition of the organs-no more nor less than do the movements of a clock or other automaton, from the arrangement of its counterweights and wheels.” René Descartes, L’homme

We live in Descartes’ world, but do we belong here? Is this the world as it ought to be?

Descartes wrote his Meditations on First Philosophy to prove (a) the existence of God, and (b) the distinction between the soul and Body. It was not out of great piety that he undertook this metaphysical task. He wanted to clear a space for the advance of the sciences by demystifying the physical world, reducing it all to mechanical bodies. Descartes is infamous for having conducted experiments on cats, dropping them into boiling water and watching their responses. He was at peace in his conscience because after all, given that animals do not have souls and that everything that does not have a soul is simply a mechanical body, animals must be simply mechanical automata. But of course, by that standard the human body is also mechanical.

Catherine Wilson informs me that Descartes caused quite a stir in his day for these views. This world is God’s world which he has ordered and which operates according to his good plan. People of the time viewed messing with it through technological science as impious, even demonic. Descartes’ project was to transform our view of nature—to demystify it—so that we could understand its principles of operation, rework it, and make ourselves masters and possessors of it, as he put it in part IV of his Discourse on Method.

I confess that demystified nature seems perfectly right and holy to me. This is a dimension of the medieval mind that I cannot fathom. It reminds me of my first (and last) reading of the Arthurian tale. People were slaughtering each other and throwing away their own lives for reasons of honor and medieval propriety that was completely beyond my ken and seemed tragically needless to me. Similarly, medieval notions of a physical world with moral and spiritual content, including notions of holy ground and holy space, strikes me a superstitious. The Temple and its contents in the Old Testament is different, of course. If God explicitly sets something or someone aside as holy then it’s holy.

In going down this road, Descartes was following Francis Bacon who was trying to accomplish the same goal and overcome the same opposition. We see this not only in his scientific writings included in The Great Instuaration, but also in the Essays. In “Of Riches” (#34) he promotes the view that anything can be bought and sold without impropriety, in contrast to Naboth’s view of his vineyard. Today, you can sell your church building or bulldoze it and put up a gas station. No problem. It’s just a building. Symbolically, it presents problems when what is architecturally a church building is transformed into an art gallery (Upton MA), a public library (Seacliff NY), or a café (Newton MA)

But am I missing something? In demystifying nature, Descartes made everything mechanical, even the human body, and thus the appropriate object of rational control. Yet, we have enough health left in us that we have not gone the whole distance in that direction. The human body is still holy in a sense. We speak of “desecrating” a corpse, an vacated human body. Is this just superstition? We might donate organs or even our whole body for research purposes. That required passing a significant threshold. But we would not donate our bodies for fertilizer in the family garden, or as food for the poor. The secret of Soylent Green was a horror.

We view other things as in a sense holy, or objects of reverence, such a things pertaining to civil religion. The flag requires particular treatment. You don’t throw it in the garbage. It must be disposed of with care and respect. We treat graveyards and battlefields the same way. Try building a shopping Mall or amusement park when the north and south spilled blood at Gettysburg or Antietam.

So are we being superstitious in these things—the battlefields and our bodies (for which we show greater respect when we’re dead than when we’re alive)? Should we fully rationalize and demystify? Or have we overly demystified? Have we hollowed out our understanding of some things that are actually more multidimensional? I think it is extremely unlikely that we have got it just right?

The Church's Praise and Mine

 Genevan Psalter, 1562

Ben Miller, my pastor, on his blog "Relocating to Elfland," has this helpful reflection on church music, pop culture, our narcissism, and our abandoned heritage. This helped me think about myself and my worship...or should I say the church's worship which, by God's grace, is mine.

The Songbook Comes With It

By Rev. Benjamin Miller, Franklin Square OPC



A few thoughts on singing, and particularly singing in the church, prompted by a second listen to Volume 88 of the Mars Hill Audio Journal:

Bay Psalm Book 1640

First, most people would agree that singing is a form of culture; but what we mean by “culture” has evolved dramatically in the last half-century, which in turn has changed the way we think about singing. In older usage, a culture was a set of traditions and forms among a particular people with a distinctive history; in more recent usage, culture is largely a conglomerate of consumable products (“pop culture” means basically stuff that is popular, i.e., what sells). Bach’s music, for example, was part of a Western culture that predated and outlived him; Bono’s performances are part of marketable culture driven by consumer demand. Celtic folk music was once an expression of a people and their history, the sort of thing one would find played and sung by the locals at a pub in a certain part of the world; Dropkick Murphys are “one of the best-known rock bands in the world, thanks in part to their ability to tap into the working-class and sports fan culture that permeates Boston and the New England area but even more so due to their reputation for phenomenal live shows” (this from their official website). The band has taken something from what was once a culture (in the older sense of the word) and gainfully commodified it for the international market (i.e., placed it in the conglomerate of pop “culture”).

Second, in the older understanding of a culture, singing was not predominately a spectator sport; it was not mostly something a crowd watched while a few performed. Rather, a culture had its songs, and the people in that culture sang them, together. This was true of the biblical Hebrews (e.g., Ps 137:3–4), it is true today in many cultures of the southern hemisphere, and it was true not long ago in the United States (one thinks of the forgotten genre of songs called Americana).

These are my observations, for which no one else is to be blamed; but now let me assume their validity and apply them to the church.

Antiphonal in Latin, 14th c.

When the average North American evangelical thinks of singing in worship, he or she thinks in the idiom of popular “culture,” that is, he or she thinks as a consumer. This is true not only of worshippers who expect to watch and listen to a praise band up front (whether such a spectator event qualifies as “worship” in any biblical sense of the word is a question I will not pause to address here); it is true also of those who expect to participate in congregational singing. The driving issue is whether “I like” this or that song, whether this music suits my tastes and meets my needs/wants. But we think this way about music and song because we think this way about culture in general. What is really radical to us is the idea that we should embrace certain songs – that we should learn not only to sing them, but also to love them – because they are a part of a culture to which we are coming (or better, in which we find ourselves) as God’s people. The Psalms are the songs of “our people,” and so we should love them, and sing them. Christians in the Reformation tradition are part of a heritage, a culture, that has bequeathed to us a wonderful corpus of music, and we should be learning it (not to mention songs of Christendom predating the Reformation, and some of much later origin). If we were honest, however, this makes about as much sense to us as the idea that we should sing certain songs because they are “American.” Says who? What if I don’t like these songs? It doesn’t fit our sovereignty complex with respect to “our” music. Who has the right to tell us what we must listen to, or what we must sing?

The question might be turned around: Who asked you whether you wanted to be an American? Or a Westerner, or an Easterner? African or Irish or Bolivian? And who asked you whether you wanted to be born among God’s covenant people? Short answer: nobody. These are your people, this is your heritage, your culture, your story. And the songbook comes with it. Which means that in the church we should pick up our songbook, dust it off, and start singing. Together. With gusto. A joyful noise, and all that. Thank God He’s the only judge here; all the others are over at American Idol.

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I can add that when I first began attending church as an undergraduate in Toronto in 1983, I had no experience of church life. The hymnody of the church was alien to me, but it never crossed my mind to question it and suggest a musical style that was more familiar to me. If this is what Christians sing in church then I will sing this in church. And I discovered that it was a fine tradition of music anyway. "Guide Me O Thou Great Jehovah" was very satisfying to belt out. I was used to listening to a wide variety of music, from Scottish folk music to jazz and classical to punk music like the Stranglers. The old hymns were just another pleasant dimension of the musical universe to discover. I have since developed my own tastes. I prefer Welsh hymns, anything by Johann Crüger (1598-1662), and the Genevan psalms using the tunes of Louis Bourgeois. But the church of Christ today should sing the praise of the church throughout the ages, otherwise, as Pastor Miller says, the church's worship becomes an extension of pop culture and commercial entertainment feeding what is already our appalling self-absorption instead of Christ-absorption as organic parts of his glorious body, the church.