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too true…
Except at a church about 1/3 would be sleeping.
you’re right, Jon. Its bad to feel a sense of belonging or excitement when we gather together as God’s people.
er… wait, what?
Hype is bad – down with hype, totally. But i really wish people (including me) got as excited about the potential of their church community to succeed as they are about the potential of their team to win the match, i wish God’s love and grace got people (me) as excited as a “great chord in a pretenders single”, i wish i got to spend more time gettin together with my mates to watch our hero. His name’s Jesus, and He’s amazing.
I’m more worried when i’m sat in yet another church meeting, seemingly just going through the motions one more time, thinkin, “Man, i’m really not feelin it”
The worry is when that ‘feeling’ is the be all and end all of there attendance.
Can’t beat a bit of “in group” and “out group” dynamics.
Ha! This is so appropriate for this very moment in time. I’m just finishing off my dissertation for Bible College which is on simple (house) churches and why they stay small! The title is “How big should my church be?”
(I’m doing it online if anyone wants to check it out: http://howbigshouldmychurchbe.wordpress.com/)
I was also thinking.
Rock concert: hands up
Football match: hands up
Church: hands in pockets
Maybe the church ‘experience’ is just a matter of being swept along with the crowd…alternatively, perhaps there is a collective spiritual consciousness ‘thing’ going on at football matches and rock concerts.
Hmmm, not enough empty seats in the football match, or the church.
just a thought, – but as an anti dualist, I’m convicted that the excitment of a footi match, a rock gig and a moment of worship, are wonderful, lavish, gifts from a loving God. (who by the way enjoyed John Terry’s goal celebration along with the rest of us)
A vaguely related point that I got from reading Exodus today – Be part of the group: don’t let the group become part of you.
This reminds me of that point. I think it’s potentially dangerous to allow oneself to get caught up in group feeling: “They responded with one voice, ‘Everything the LORD has said we will do.’” Around 40 days later the very same group (of many individuals) is building a golden calf.
I’m with Subo – I love all three!
All three are cool, but one has to be wary and alert when in a group.
i love all three and hate all three. how typical of me!
i hate footy crowds when they play follow my leader no matter where it takes them, no matter what they do or say, no matter who gets hurt. i hate rock’n'roll crowds when they play follow my leader no matter where it takes them, no matter what they do or say, no matter who gets hurt. i hate church crowds when they play follow my leader no matter where it takes them, no matter what they do or say, no matter who gets hurt.
) and how easily a crowd followed one person and how we should be careful never to let that happen again. then he started an overhead handclap and within seconds nearly everyone was joining in… i wasn’t clapping, the over bearing audacious irony of what he’d just said and done caused my jaw to hit the floor, as i witnessed thousands upon thousands of people, all in time, eager to belong. fun, chilling, brilliant and true.
i think all gatherings, church or otherwise, need to get real about crowd dynamics.
bono did an amazing thing live when i saw the zoo tv gig. after ‘bullet the blue sky’ he mentioned hitler (here we go again
Ah yes – the problems with mob mentality – or nanny state if we let it become mob mentality
I was privileged to meet some holocaust survivors and be a guide at the 60th memorial day. Don’t freak out too much about Godwin – we need to keep remembering the atrocities!
BTW – if that is what you see the audience doing you need to go see better bands
Blink 182 have a song that repeats ‘I’m feeling it!’
They’re embarrassing, but pretty much everyone loves them nonetheless.I wouldn’t tell someone to go see a ‘better band’.
Re #6 by Saint Johnny, how about “How Big is it when it becomes an event instead of church?”
Re #14 by jon, are the “eager to belong” truly belonging, or merely entertaining the momentary feeling that they do?
(daang, I’m in cynical mode tonight. Why? I mean, Kathy even bought me 1/2 dozen raspberry jelly filled donuts, usually guaranteed ‘mood enhancers’) ;-D
About the only place I’m “feeling it” nowadays is the rock concert…
Never have liked football (or any team sports really), and have gotten just a bit too cynical to be “feeling it” at church.
Jon @ 14: A certain scene in ‘Borat’ springs to mind as well
I agree with you about the need for all gatherings, church or otherwise, [..]to get real about crowd dynamics but this is a touchy issue isn’t it? Try suggesting that certain elements of worship (and I don’t just have one particular scenario in mind here) are as much about ‘learned behaviour’ as about being moved by the Spirit and you’re likely to get a pretty hostile reaction….
loved the terraces at Carrow Rd when a teenager, all that shouting and crowd stuff.
slightly less enamoured with concert hysteria.
loath ( hate detest abhore) church crowd stuff.
why? why the difference?
Feeling what exactly?
Jon (#14): have you heard of the video artist Marcus Coates? One of his films, entitled Out Of Season, shows a lone Chelsea fan standing in the middle of a wood chanting football terrace chants on his own. (I’ve tried to find the film online; I can’t find it but it might be buried on YouTube somewhere). It’s surprisingly disturbing. Perhaps there is a suggestion that someone may follow the crowd even if the crowd isn’t present?
I blame it all on the assigned seating for anyone who isn’t of Caucasian descent…
I agree with Linus. It gets me so excited to meet with a huge crowd of christians-throughout the week i hardly meet or talk with any christians, and even at church I dont get on well with them. At a christian festival its uplifting to simply look around and see im not alone but i have hundreds/thousands of brothers and sisters. Obviously, their heart needs to be in the right place, and they shouldnt act in a certain way because of the crowd atmostphere, its like anything. The heart is the most important thing. But so many times Ive heard speakers say how passionate people get at football matches or concerts but not at worshipping God-it upsets me too, which is why huge crowds, if they love God, are fantastic.
Am I being completely abtuse? But isnt this a good thing? At these events people are passionate about the thing they are doing. My pastor at church is passionate about football – he loves it and he constantly talks about the way football fans worship their team and that as christians we need to catch that passion and enthusiasm for God. In one sense these people are worshipping their choosen team/band – they are sold out and we need to be sold out too. Our God is an awesome God and we should be giving him the same support that so often is shown to bands, football teams, artists etc. Our worship should be better, more real and more contagious because who we are worshipping is more amazing than any earthly creation.
It strikes me that the trend towards bigger and bigger church gatherings (be it mega-churches or Global Day of Prayer) is at least partly to do with running away from the reality of where the church is at in Western society.
We’re an increasingly marginalised group, but instead of having the confidence to embrace the freedom to be counter-cultural, we tend to travel greater distances to remain part of “something big”.
In the meantime, locally rooted churches, which take seriously the call to be salt and light to the communities around them, are what suffer.
One of my regular prayers is that we (including me) rediscover the passion and fulfilment of local church, local mission and a way of worshipping that is culturally sensitive.
Agree with Jon (14) and rookiebaptist’s first line (27).
Ever seen Triumph of the Will? I’ve spent a lot of time walking around the Rally grounds in Nuremberg, trying to imagine those night-time rallies, with the cathedral of light and the massed ranks of party members, with the uniforms and banners. There was a reason for manufacturing an event on that scale, to render the participants susceptible to messages and to underline the insignificance of the individual versus the power of the Party. Wherever two or three are gathered together, there is a group dynamic in the midst of them.
Robb (15) – in my mind, statist intervention would represent a potentially unpopular, but socially purposeful MINority policy going AGAINST the majority (mob) sensibility, which is so often just a collective representation of the individualist “me me me and make it convenient coz I’m lazy” view.
Firstly, I think this is a great point. Secondly, it’s interesting that “songs” at football matches closely resemble worship songs (some teams like WBA – bless – even sing “The Lord’s My Shepherd!”). However, are some Christian ‘worship’ songs in danger of sounding more like football chants when declaring “You’re the defender of the weak [week]“…
Finally, I think this is probably more true of more Charismatic churches. The church I am now part of is extremely middle-class and (sometimes) frustratingly ‘disengaged’ with any part of the service. I believe there are some who appear this way because they have integrity and do not want to get involved in shallow whooping and hollering! However, it does depress me to think that, for many, they are just going to church, because that’s what you do on a Sunday. Naturally, I am qualified to decipher who is who… ahem…
Im a sunderland fan and never real feel it at the SoL
But i want to be impacted by God when i meet with his people.
I want to feel Him, I want to be changed by Him
http://www.beatthedrum.wordpress.com
I seem to spend most charismatic meetings thinking “Man, i’m really not feelin it”
commiserations btd, you might have to wait awhile now(i’m from sunderland so i hope i can get away with that)
On a serious note – so do i. and i guess that happens to me at pretty diverse times and places, in and out of church. i think we can tune into God, by the spirit, wherever or whatever the church arrangements.
A major learning for me was the realization that if I wasn’t feeling it, that was OK – and that felt much better than faking it.
Re: #23 by Rebecca “that someone may follow the crowd even if the crowd isn’t present?”
There’s a kind of sort of parallel thought track in that we do want to follow Christ even it there isn’t a crowd of Christians present.
Especially when.
BTD: what does it mean? By The D..?The web says:-
BTD Biotinidase (human gene)
BTD Boston Transportation Department (Boston, MA, USA)
BTD Brightness Temperature Difference
BTD Bleed The Dream (band)
BTD Building Trades Directory (website)
BTD Binary To Decimal
BTD Born to Die
BTD Bored To Death
BTD Bilateral Trade Database
BTD Better the Devil (record company)
BTD Better Through Design (BTD Manufacturing, Inc.)
BTD Bear Trap Dunes (Ocean View, Delaware, USA)
BTD Bit Transmission Delay
BTD Barney the Dinosaur (TV character)
BTD Best Time of the Day
BTD Brothers Till Death (gaming clan)
BTD Beat The Dow
BTD Business Travel Department
BTD Biological Therapies in Dentistry (journal)
BTD Born to Drive
BTD Born to Drink
BTD Brigade Tactical Department (US Military Academy)
BTD Beaulieu-Tan-Damen (pulse shape)
BTD Buy The Dip (stocks)
BTD Brutal Torso Dissection (Australian metal band)
BTD Beg/Begging to Differ
BTD Biomechanics Test Database (US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration)
BTD Business Technical Division (USACE)
BTD Battle Training Division (US Army)
BTD Bortezomib, Thalidomide and Dexamethasone (chemotherapy)
BTD Block-Type Decodable
Just an affectionate abbreviation for our friend beatthedrum…?
i would imagine you’re right, carole.
Sorry, most of the virtual places I inhabit abreviate me to TMM. WordPress is unusual in that I use a real name
Yes, BTD was a shortened form of beatthedrum…
Wow Carole… affectionate abbreviation…. affection on here…. towards me….
Remember – when the hugging happens – slaps on the back – not rubs……..
Aaargh Robb – that’s rather too reminiscent of a passage I had read to me recently from a totally depressing (and appallingly bad) book about why men don’t go to church. Something to do with men needing to express their spirituality in appropriately manly ways and not get sucked into all this namby-pamby femine stuff to do with relationality and the like
Erm…..there’s something in it
We don’t?
I once had a lecturer try to define sexuality as being blurred (as it is) and sexual identity as being blurred (as it is). I will paraphrase her…
“Men aren’t all ‘manly’* and women aren’t all ‘girly’*. Some men like to portray a more effeminate appearance…”
She looks at her slide [projected big screen and looks at me and make a judgement call] and decides not to read it out word for word [her lecturing style]
Slide read “Some men blur the sexual boundaries by, for example, growing their hair long and having earrings.”
I would bet that she has never had a ‘mosher’ in her lecture theatre filled with ordinands. I can pretty much guarantee she has never talked to anyone else with 11 facial piercings other than me. I can bet if she ever did meet someone with hair and piercings and a Les Paul they weren’t an ordinand……..
She looked me in the eye….
…..looked embarrassed……..
…….looked away……….
………..ignored it completely like the elephant in the room………..
I ‘blur the boundaries’ by an academics definition.
Another way of looking at it is that I am a miners son who fishes and plays guitar and rides a harley and has stuck 11 bits of metal through his face………
…..etc……
I drink beer and whiskey and go to a working mens club. I watch films staring Arnold Schwarzenegger (and know how to spell it even though I have a specific learning disability with spelling and write this stuff in word so that I can get it right-ish…..).
Yeah – I don’t like namby pamby girlyness. My miner father doesn’t either.
I don’t really make apologies for that either. Neither do I expect an apology from people who like needlework.
Using either as an argument for oppressing the other is wrong. The book you mention [I guess "why me hate church"] is a pants argument is that it is upheld as “we need to oppress women to be me and if we don’t all men are going to hell”. That’s rubbish!!
We do need to allow men to be men though. In church!! If there is a “women’s group” we celebrate it. If there is a “men’s group” they are vilified. My mate (woman) goes to the men’s group because it makes more sense for her however. I guess that is life.
*whatever that means. I think these teams don’t have a definite meaning other than “a larger portion of this sex are like this than the other**”.
**Oh pants – I’ve opened a can of worms for people to misinterpret me here!!
Well I don’t have a problem with men being ‘manly’ (whatever that means)or with accepting that men and women have some different ways and modes of being and expressing who they are etc. What enraged and depressed me about the book was its crude stereotypes, its sweeping statements,its advancement of every point only via unsupported assertions…and the implicit assumption that people have only to read this sort of uncritical rubbish to be persuaded by it (although sadly, this seems to be the case
).
Oh….and the fact that God is male; that Jesus, being male, was uninterested in ‘feminine’ stuff like relating to people; that when Jesus said to his disciples ‘I will make you fishers of men’ that was exactly what he meant; that we need to get away from thinking of God in connection with gentleness, brokenness or weakness and back to war-like imagery of God – powerful, strong, blasting the enemy; that…..I could go on, but really it is just too depressing
Like I said, I don’t have a problem with men amd women being different; I do have a problem with those differences being reduced to crude, unnuanced models of what constitutes masculinity and femininity which are then used to push a very particular agenda of how church (or indeed christian living) should be patterned; and with the whole ‘God is male’ therefore….thing.
I quite like piercings myself ..though mine are distinctly ‘girly’
Did you see the church times cartoon this week? It was on exactly that topic.
Not seen it yet – as you’ll realise from my BNP comment elsewhere, I get a bit behindhand with my CT!
Sorry to be grumpy –
Wasn’t at you – but I guess you know that. Some things just put my blood pressure up….sigh
I know
I try to walk the tightrope of embracing masculinity without oppressing or stereotyping myself or others. And then I do some batik and get the sewing machine out…..
Do’h!!
as a man who hates diy, i hate stereotyping too.
I think a batik sarong would complement the long hair and piercings very nicely Robb
Jon – I think I remember seeing on one of Clare’s cyberprofiles somewhere that it is she who does all the renovating
It is actually a batik chasuble and stole
Sort of flamey and tye dyey…
Very freshly expressed sacramental clothing
Sounds wonderful – picture?
I’ll get my camera out
Okie dokie….
When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Pat was the book “Why men dont go to church?” I have read it and found it very incitefull
There is a review of it on my blog http://www.beatthedrum.wordpress.com
Thank you. They looks wonderful.
I know some people think vestments ought to be consigned to the bin of history but I love the way they can enrich the visual and symbolic elements of worship. Yes of course there’s a time and a place – but when those are right…
My dad did his first curacy in a high-ish Anglican church – which was a completely new perspective to (teen-aged) me. But what I learned there about the power and potency of well-crafted, well-used liturgy and symbolic action – for both unlocking and deepening the mysteries, and for drawing one into the story and opening the way for encounter – have stayed with me ever since. And it still informs how I approach planning and preparing participative worship.
Your vestments go so well with the boots too
Thanks Pat.
I’m a bit of a generously orthodox charismatic freshly expressed evangelical really… with tye dye and incense and a triduum to satisfy the hippy biker within.
My peers keep trying to rebrand me as “modern catholic”. I keep telling them that “anglican” is about as small a box as I can cope with. Small boxes are where we keep dead people!
The first time I distributed communion when I had my boots on the little old lady with the hat came and told me she liked them. I told her they were my pentecost boots.
Glad you like them. I do too. High days and holidays
Now let me get back to planning a flash mob….
Lets see if a direct link will work without a subscription….
Segregation.
If not, sorry….
Enjoyed the ‘Dream’ clip – brought a sight lump to the throat and moistening of the eye if the truth be told.
BTD @ 54 – well, it certainly incited me to use some less-than-Christian language
I’ve read your review and I could, in turn, give you an account of all the reasons why I think it’s not a good book – and they are by no means all to do with ‘feminist’ issues! However Im not convinced that would really get us anywhere, and I wouldn’t want to fall out with you so…maybe we should just agree to differ on this one 
By the way – I wouldn’t have described ‘Jesus Lover of My Soul’ as a love song to Jesus. And..wasn’t it written by a man
Glad to be of service
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