{"id":563,"date":"2004-08-10T10:23:14","date_gmt":"2004-08-09T22:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=563"},"modified":"2004-08-10T10:23:14","modified_gmt":"2004-08-09T22:23:14","slug":"in-anthropological-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/archives\/563","title":{"rendered":"In anthropological mode"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bruce Waltke, in <a title=\"It's like a radio station cycling through lectures by various people at Regent seminary. I've been hanging out for Eugene Paterson\" href=\"http:\/\/www.regentbookstore.com\/radio\/\">a lecture about Biblical Theology<\/a> says that in some church services the climactic moment &#8211; the thing that everything leads up to &#8211; is the decision, existential leap, conversion or recommitment to Jesus. In other churches the climactic high point of the service is Communion, a gift, sacrifice, grace. That made me wonder if our services have a climactic moment. If they do, I think it is probably the sermon. Which I regularly have to fight to stay awake in (by which I mean no disrespect to the Pastor, you know I have to fight to stay awake at parties too). If our worship service liturgy is important, if it moulds shapes directs our lives, how do you think our Reformed way of doing things shapes us?<\/p>\n<p>Thinking a bit further &#8211; we&#8217;ve got three strands of worship style here, maybe I could call them Contemporary, Sacramental and Reformed. I&#8217;ve experienced all three, though the first two only a dozen or so times each, compared to about 2060 times for the last. <strong>Looked at from the outside<\/strong>, as a visitor from space with an interest in anthropology might see it, in contemporary services the most important person is the individual who walks to the front and has all sorts of amazing fireworks going off in her heart. In reformed services, the most important person would at first seem to be the man at front centre on the raised podium. The alien listening for a bit would after a while decide that actually, the most important person was actually God\/Jesus, whom everyone present should be holding in their minds. In sacramental services the most important person seems to be some bread and wine, which the congregation is eating and drinking, quite bizzarely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Bruce Waltke, in a lecture about Biblical Theology says that in some church services the climactic moment &#8211; the thing that everything leads up to &#8211; is the decision, existential leap, conversion or recommitment to Jesus. In other churches the climactic high point of the service is Communion, a gift, sacrifice, grace. That made me [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-563","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=563"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/563\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/mhjb.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}