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‘Come to the Table: a Conference on the Arts in
Worship’ was held at Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Abbotsford, May 23
– 24. The guest speaker was John Bell of the renowned Iona Community in Scotland. BCCN spoke
to Bell just before the conference.
BCCN: Could you define
worship?
John Bell: I see worship as
the offering of ourselves to God, and the honouring of God by intentional
time and devotion – which may happen individually, but which also is
expected by God to happen in the company of other people. Worship is a
means by which, corporately, we celebrate our relationship with God.
In any relationship, there has to be a variety, and
music is certainly one component; but there are other things that enable
the magnificence of God to be reflected.
Silence can be as important a part of worship as sound,
and symbolic action can be as important as singing . . .
There’s an arrogance in Protestantism which
believes that the word of God is only open when somebody preaches it.
People can be converted or illuminated or changed as much by what is sung
or by what they do experientially as by what is preached.
BCCN: Can you characterize
the music you sing and teach about?
JB: I don’t sing
anything. I’m not a performer. I don’t write for people to
perform, unless you understand a congregation as being performers. The most
important voice in worship is the voice of the people as they together
praise God, mourn or express other things. This corporate voice of the
people is a very biblical thing . . .
BCCN: In our earlier
interview with Brian Doerksen, he also talked about songs of lament and
folk songs.
JB: The songs of the church
should be folk songs, in that vocally they are accessible to the majority
of people.
There is a whole lot of contemporary songwriting within
the Christian church that is performer-based. You have the phenomenon all
over North America, as well as in Britain, of there being screens on which
not only the words of the song appear, but also the face of the performer
who’s leading the music.
I was speaking at a youth conference in Northern
Ireland recently. I know there’s 25 minutes of praise music first, so
I go to the back to sing along with the kids.
Well, nobody was singing. Everybody was staring at
these big screens. Nobody else was engaged because they were looking at
computers. That is anathema.
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There always is a role for performed music; but when
that’s the only thing that happens, you’re inviting people to
come to church not to worship God, but to be a spectator at somebody
else’s artistic performance.
When the songs of the church become songs that require
the gifted performer, the person who’s done voice training, then
we’re not allowing people to participate.
The songs of the church should be tuneful, and the
texts should be memorable, because you tend to remember what you sing. If
you sing it often enough, it goes inside you. But if you just watch other
people doing it, the words will never penetrate . . .
The question is: What is the song that allows the
majority of people in this place and in this time to say to God the things
that are important – and how can I enable them to do it, rather
than do it for them?
BCCN: You’re trying
to make the gospel relevant.
JB: The gospel’s
always relevant. It’s a matter of allowing the gospel to resonate in
the contemporary context.
Sometimes, when I go to church, I think this is a time
capsule, a hermetically sealed Victorian zone, in which we can have
role-play about what it was like to be Christian 120 years ago.
Then I come out the door and think, “This is the
world in which I live and in which Jesus is alive, but it hasn’t
really been represented very much in the past hour and a half.”
Our faith is about connectedness and our faith espouses
incarnation, God becoming flesh and being one of us, being among us,
speaking our language and calling us by name. That ever-contemporary
relevance is what we celebrate.
July 2008
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