Daniel Abbey

This is the first in what I hope to be a regular series of posts compiled mostly of stuff I’ve encountered online throughout the week, both religious and secular in nature. The title: “Stuff!” Of course.

Fed Up With Facebook? Delete it, and Here’s How

“In the blink of an eye, Mark Zuckerberg has gone from boy wonder to Big Brother, from Mozart to Mao. The man and his machine have suffered a populist fall precipitous enough to make even Tiger Woods wince with empathy. All this calamity, of course, begs the obvious question: “How did things go so horribly wrong?”

Why Church Kids Must Go Bad

“The model of adolescent faith is not the kid who can avoid the bad, but the kid who stares down the darkness in herself and in her world by seeking God in just such places. The model of adolescent faith is not shiny, happy kids, but honest kids, that in joy confess a God who works in backwards ways, in ways where the first are last, and the suffering are embraced, where all who taste death are promised God’s very presence. They are not good kids that avoid all that is bad, but faithful kids that go into the world to seek God in the real, in the reality of existence, which is both beautiful and horrible.”

The Lost Language of Worship

“Contemporary worship suffers from an emotional bias. It is disproportionately upbeat. I am not necessarily talking about the tempo of the music, although this bias is sometimes reflected in the tempo. I am talking about its emotional tone. The culture of evangelical worship has little tolerance for grief in the assembly.”

London unveils creepy-looking mascots for 2012 Olympics

“Olympic mascots have always been the object of scorn (remember Izzy?), but these two, uh, things take the absurdity to a whole new level. There’s a complicated backstory to the characters which was written by a children’s author. It explains why the mascots have one eye (it’s a camera lens to see the world) and yellow lights on tops of their heads (an homage to London taxicabs), but fails to tell the tale of why they look like early rejects from a Pixar movie.”

Seattle’s Best Coffee Stirs Up Heated Opinions

“Seattle’s Best Coffee revealed a redesigned logo this week. Unfortunately, its ambiguous look brings to mind a lot more than just a cup of joe.”

How a Web Design Goes Straight to Hell

While we’re still on the subject of design, here’s one take on the web design process that I’m sure every web developer can relate to. Hilarious and sobering.

Ian McKellen – Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

What would we do without the internet?

God Smacked

If Team Pyro did the Daily Show, it’d probably look like something like this.

Nike – Write the Future

Nike knows how to make commercials. But its latest World Cup ad has got to be one of its best ever. Helmed by Alejandro Inarritu (director of “21 Grams” and “Babel”) the nifty video is peppered with humorous visions of the future, skillful soccer plays, and hilarious cameos. An instant classic.

Last Wednesday I had an interesting conversation with one of our worship leaders, the multi-talented Magoo del Mundo. We were initially discussing traditional hymns and praise and worship, contrasting the styles, messages, and experience. I’m a big hymns fan and love it when the church band incorporates old hymns into the worship set. Magoo has an equal love for the timelessness and theology of many traditional hymns.

But it wasn’t his comments on the modern rendition of classic music that drove me into a fit of deep thought – it was his thoughts on what true worship is and his leftfield idea on how we might challenge traditional corporate worship.

“The Jews worshipped differently,” Magoo informed me. “They sang in response to what they heard about God.” In other words, we’ve got it wrong. We go to church on Sunday and do the bulk of our praise and worship before hearing the Word, not the other way around.

So the question is, why are we singing? Is it because Sunday morning worship is a centuries-old established pattern? Do we assume our seats and “warm up” for the sermon by singing or are we praising because we’re responding to something we learned about God’s awesomeness and Biblical truth?

My bet is that of say 100 people singing in church on a Sunday morning, only a tiny fraction are worshipping as a direct response to God and His Word. The rest of us just go through the motions because hey, that’s the pattern. We’re used to it.

What my friend postulates is this: Sunday morning praise and worship is nullified when all we do is sing because we’re used to it. True worship happens when we respond to the preaching – the Truth of God’s Word – by singing praise and adoration.

So if he had his way, and this is the cool part, the bulk of corporate praise and worship would be at the END of the service, not the beginning.

I love it when traditional paradigms get flipped on their head.

I think Magoo is right. The Bible says that true worshippers worship in Spirit and in Truth (John 4:23). A lot of us worship in Spirit, coming before the Lord on Sunday singing because it feels good and is a great way to “get started”. We may try to dig down and ask the Holy Spirit to fill our minds and buoy us as we sing, (perhaps hoping, erroneously, that a little mysticism will go a long way too).

But we don’t worship in Truth – we’re not responding to the preached Word that morning; we’re not singing because we’re absorbed in the Bible. We might simply be singing a shallow modern worship song that’s more vague that it is theologically uplifting.

There needs to be a balance; we must worship in Spirit and in Truth if it is to be acceptable and pleasing to the Father as well as meaningful for us.

I wonder if we can accomplish that by shaking things up and literally restructuring the Sunday service. What if we all arrived at church, sat down, and after a moment of prayer and perhaps one song (as a concession), the pastor plunged right into preaching? Then, after hearing the Word we give our offering and start the praise and worship in earnest?

The worship leaders would be free to choose songs that are tied into the sermon message and urge the congregation to really think about what they just heard. Like if the pastor preached on the Holiness of God we might just sing Holy, Holy, Holy with a lot more conviction and understanding. If the message was about God’s superabundant grace, Amazing Grace might turn into something more than just a timeless classic.

I’m all for experimentation within the church, especially if it means trying to Biblical over traditional.

What do you think?