FERGUSON: When I was a teenager, I had, in secular
terms, one of the greatest privileges of my life, which was playing golf for my native country.
My foursome partner...foursome is, for those of you who are not into the technicalities,
is where two people play the same ball, but take alternate shots. And my foursome
partner, who was also a very good friend, and I were one up to two holes
to play against the old enemy, the English. And the two young men we were
playing, we were teenagers at that time, went on to make considerable names for themselves
and were obviously destined to do that. So, we were a little but excited. Then my friend
with whom I played these two-ball-foursomes, as we call at home, often in competitive
matches and in whom I had every trust, then played on the seventeenth tee the worst drive
I had ever seen him hit and I had to hack the ball on behalf of Scotland out of the rough. And that
flashed back into my mind just a moment ago when Paul introduced Doug Wilson as the first speaker.
I was fervently hoping that I wouldn't have to hack myself back out of the rough this afternoon,
and I think whichever order we had spoken in you would see certain similarities running
through the things that we both want to say. The theme that was allotted to me was the theme
of "Strange Fire." Strange fire. And the concern obviously here is those of you who recognize
the Old Testament, the biblical allusion here, is to the fires that have been set
loose on our contemporary church world, particularly in our contemporary worship. It used
to be even when I was a little boy that every service of worship to which you went, probably
almost throughout the English-speaking world, began with the spine-tingling four words, "Let
us worship God." Sometime ago, I took my wife, as Doug Wilson obviously took his wife, to a
church that I thought would be safe. We were away from home in another country, but we went to
a church which I assured my wife as we travelled some distance to go it on the Sunday morning that
this would be worth the drive. I don't think I'll ever forget feeling her body stiffen beside me
when at the beginning of the service a young woman stepped forward on a platform dressed in
a very bright gown. She was the worship leader, and since in my experience there are few worship
leaders who are not extremely good looking, she was a most personable looking individual.
And instead of hearing the words that my wife anticipated she would hear, she heard in
melodic and dulcet tones an invitation for us to lift up our voices and spirits. And
the embarrassment of the moment for me, two of my children were there, and I could see
the bubble above both of their heads saying, "What has happened to our father that he has
brought us here?" The embarrassment of the moment underlined for me that what I learned as
a child is no longer true. To a certain extent I suppose it is still somewhat more true in the
culture to which I belonged and the culture to which you belong, but you no longer can
guarantee as you go to church that what you will be invited to do at the beginning and
what you will be persuaded to do by the majesty and the joy of the praise is to respond to
these great words, "Let us worship God." And I want us in these few minutes to try to
stand back a little from that situation and ask ourselves what are the forces, what are the
dynamics that have become operative in our world and have touched our churches, that have brought
about in the lifetime of most of us here, the most dramatic revolution that has taken place in church
liturgy for somewhere in the region of 1500 years so that if someone were to come from any of these
previous centuries to many church services today, they would undoubtedly feel that what they were
drawing near to was strange fire and you cannot employ strange fire without your fingers being
burnt. We have learned through Ligonier Ministry and through other influences, many of us, the
great principle that ideas have consequences. And so, I want to suggest to you as we think
further about this theme of worship, is that ideas have consequences as they impact the manner
in which we have come to view in the twenty-first century what it means to go to church, what
it means to engage in a worship service. I have got three strands of influence,
four implications I want to draw from them, and five principles to which I want to return
at the end of this little study. Three strands, three rivulets that have run into the life of the
contemporary church in general and now it seems to me have taken hold of much of the thinking
that lies behind our Christian liturgy. So, I'm not suggesting for a minute, and you will
see this as we move into these three strands, I am not suggesting for a minute
that Christians today are conscious of the strands of thought that are influencing
them. But that these three strands of thought have become manifest in contemporary
worship, I have no doubt whatsoever. The first strand is this: It is the strand of
subjectivism that can be traced almost directly to the influence of Schleiermacher. In another
conference, one might be almost embarrassed to say that kind of thing. Here, many of you are familiar
with the name of Schleiermacher and the whole liberal theology movement of the early nineteenth
century. Now, Schleiermacher was a particularly interesting figure to me for this reason, that I
am convinced that Schleiermacher's influence has come home to roost as far as worship is concerned
more clearly in the evangelical church than in any other branch of the Christian church that one
can discover. And I say that for this reason: Schleiermacher became convinced in the wake
of the Enlightenment that it was possible to rescue religion from doctrine. And so, one
of the great key themes of Schleiermacher's writing is the notion of what he calls the
sense of dependence upon God or later the sense of absolute dependence upon God, in which
Schleiermacher was really saying the thing that really matters most of all is your religious
experience. He would've agreed doctrine divides; it is experience of God that unites us. And
one of the most fascinating things about Schleiermacher was that he developed this theme
precisely in order to evangelize, as he thought, those he describes in an early book, as the
cultured despisers of religion. These cultured despisers who lived in the wake or in the darkness
of the Enlightenment, who believed that there was really nothing left in the Christian gospel,
and Schleiermacher comes along and he says, "I can explain the Christian gospel to you in such
a way that you will begin to understand that the Christian gospel is profoundly relevant for your
life." And in that sense Schleiermacher created what one might call the original "seeker-sensitive
theology," a theology that would meet contemporary man where he was. And so, it became obsessed
with meeting the needs of contemporary man and a theology that was absolutely rooted, not in
the truth of the gospel, but in the experience of the individual. And if you look throughout the
Christian church in the early twenty-first century and trace the history of that church through the
last 150 years, you will notice in a very obvious way that more and more and more the evangelical
church has become utterly focused on subjective experience to the extent that where you are likely
to hear the phrase, "Theology divides; experience unites" is in the context of evangelicalism.
And paradoxically it is in evangelicalism that liberal theology experimentally and liturgically
has come home to roost. Ideas have consequences. Most of the Christians I know have never heard
of Schleiermacher, and even those who've heard of him wouldn't be able to spell his name, doubtless.
But that there is a manifestation of that kind of liberal way of thinking in evangelical worship
is surely beyond the peradventure of a doubt. There's a second strand however that has also come
home to roost in our contemporary evangelicalism: the subjectivism of Schleiermacher, the
individualism that we tend to associate with postmodernism. It's present in other strands
of thought. It's present, as many of you know, in existentialism. Kierkegaard's great desire was
that one word would be placed on his tombstone, "The Individual." And in the great pilgrimage
to heaven, Kierkegaard thought, you have no real companions. Now, of course, that has
come home to roost in our postmodernism, in the abandonment of the idea that there
is any ultimate truth, there is only at best truth that is true for you and truth that
is good for you and truth that is true for me and truth that is good for me. We have in our
own country a man destined to become our king, who is in British history the first postmodernist
prince. He does not want to be known by the title given to Henry VIII, Defender of The Faith.
What Prince Charles wants to be known as is, "Defender of Faith." So, there is no external
truth, there is no absolute, and there is consequently a loss of historical identity with
the whole history of the Christian church that did believe in absolute truth and did believe that
God in His Word teaches us how to worship Him. I suppose most evangelicals would die rather than be
thought of as postmodernists. And yet, this is the kind of worship that works for me, this is the
kind of music that does it for me. And added to that subjectivism that flows from liberalism is
an individualism that flows from postmodernism. But there is a third strand that I think you
may see more and more in our evangelical way of thinking and it's certainly true in what
we often aspire to in our evangelical style of worship. And in some ways to me this is the most
sinister of all. It is what I would call a return to medievalism; the liberalism of Schleiermacher,
the individualism of postmodernism, and a return to medievalism. Do you remember how Luther put
his finger on the great weakness of the medieval Church and the great weakness of the medieval
church's worship as well as its theology? It was a theology of glory and the church of glory
rather than a theology of the cross and a church of the cross and a worship that was marked by the
cross. And in that medieval style of worship there were several things that were present. Number
one, performance was far more important than participation—performance was far more important
than participation. That was why, for example, as Zwingli in Zürich at the time of Reformation
actually sat down and discussed with people whether they should sing in worship services.
Why? Because nobody apart from the choir sang in worship services. Rather than participation
in the praises of God there was performance of the praises of God in which the people of God at
best shared vicariously, and performance became more important than participation. In addition,
the visual became more important than the verbal. That was one of the great burdens of the early
Reformers, that those who lead worship services at the human level were utterly ignorant of the
Scriptures and couldn't preach the Word of God, and the really significant things were the visual
effects of the service, what appealed to eye-gate rather than appealed to ear-gate. And as
a result of that, far more important than Scripture in medieval worship and church life was,
interestingly, drama, the drama of the service as it was performed. And indeed, that language was
used literally; the liturgy was performed. "Are you performing the liturgy today or is somebody
else doing it?" And perhaps the most interesting illustration of this, and I hold no brief for
smallness, is that for so many of us today, ministers and people, that to which we aspire,
that which we admire, and God forgive us, that which we covet is the megachurch rather than the
holy church. You go to a conference of ministers and listen to the chitchat among the ministers,
and somebody arrives who happens to be the pastor of a megachurch and he belongs to a different
category from the pastor who is the pastor of the little church. I'm absolutely fascinated by
the fact that building a megachurch is a medieval idea. That's what English cathedrals are, they
are megachurches, and that was why Luther was so burdened about what was happening to the church,
not because of the size or the accommodation facilities of such places, but because of the
mentality that went with such places, that the size was more important than the sanctity and in a
hundred different ways we can slip into that same mistake, can't we, thinking that the Lord Jesus is
far more manifestly present when there are three thousand than when there are fifty-two. We have
in these last few years wanted to increase the number of times we have the Lord's Supper in our
church, and those of you who know anything about the Scottish tradition know that the Scottish
tradition is that you hardly ever have the Lord's Supper. There's a historical reason for
that into which I need not go, still commonplace in Scotland of the Lord's Supper twice a year,
and the Lord's Supper has always traditionally taken place in our church on certain Sundays in
the year, quite specific, explicit Sundays, so that you could publish them in a book that would
never change. And it has been fascinating to me, as we've increased the number of occasions when
we come to the Lord's Table, how difficult it is for our people to refer to those Sundays that
we customarily came to the Lord's Supper as any other than the main communion. And I keep saying
with a smile on my face, "The main communion is the one where we have communion with the main
Jesus." Those distinctions don't exist. But there is a kind of return of a medieval instinct
that size means power, that glory means influence, and what we are called to in the gospel is not to
live under the glory, but to live under the cross. Now, those things lead to four consequences; let
me mention them briefly. Consequence number one is this, that a reversal takes place in the direction
of our worship. Let me put this as startling as I can, as Doug Wilson has also put the same
principle, startlingly, but in a different way. It should be a principle among us that all
biblical worship is seeker-sensitive worship, okay? All biblical worship is seeker-sensitive
worship. The question is, who is the one seeking the worship? The Father seeks such to worship Him.
Put in other words, all biblical worship should be seeker-sensitive to the One who seeks that
worship from His creatures and from His children, the Lord Himself. And it is so fascinating, if
tragic, to see what shock appears on people's faces when one says that the really important
thing about our worship is not that it pleases me, but that it pleases Him, that God in His Word
has told me not simply how I may be justified, but how I am to worship Him, that my pleasure
in worship is not the goal of my worship, but a by-product of the pleasure of the God that I
worship. And if that is true, then two things will always be characteristic of true worship: True
worship of the Holy Father will always produce in the one the Father seeks to worship Him an
intermingling unknown to the world of supreme awe and supreme joy, supreme agony because of our
sinfulness, supreme ecstasy because of His grace, and that means there is always going to be a
characteristic directedness in our worship, however it may be that our worship in different
places and at different times will involve different circumstances, to whatever extent it
may be appropriate given the culture in which we worship God differently to use music and
song. I do not for a moment believe that the New Testament church should sing the Psalms of the
Old Testament using exclusively Jewish tunes. So, there are differences and there may be
differences in culture, but if the really important thing is that it is God who seeks us to
worship Him and that worship is centered on Him, then as we are called to worship and approach Him,
as we approach Him in the sanctuary of His people, then our approach in awe and wonder of
Him is bound to lead to confession of sin and guilt and shame, and the seeking and
receiving on confession of that sin and shame, the pardon and absolution of our Lord Jesus
Christ in the gospel that prepares us for further instruction in that gospel and for
consecration to Him to serve Him by it. There is always a direction in worship and that
direction is always supremely to Him. But, I want you to notice, because it is supremely
to Him who is our God, our covenant God, and our Father, our Heavenly Father. There are
parts of our activity in that worship which have not only a vertical direction but a horizontal
ministry, and that is one of the reasons why worship that is directed towards the Lord is
going to be worship that will also be edifying and pleasing to His people. But the consequence
of individualism and subjectivism is always to reverse that direction and make me, the seeker,
to whom God needs to be sensitive rather than God, the Seeker, to whom I need to be sensitive.
So, reversal in the direction of worship. Secondly, inevitably there takes place, and
Doug Wilson has already touched on this, a primacy being attached to the individual
rather than to the congregation. One of the great Puritans, I think it was David Clarkson, has
a magnificent sermon entitled Public Worship to be Preferred Before Private. Now, that's almost
incomprehensible in the twenty-first century in the evangelical church, where what I do, where
what the individual does is the thing that really matters. Do you know that the Westminster Divines
when they put together the Directory for Public Worship said, "If you arrive in the service and
it's started two minutes, you do not sit down and engage in your private devotions. If you do that,
stop doing it because you're not there to engage in your private devotions," it says. You're there
to engage with the community of God's people in the worship of that community's God. Why is public
worship to be preferred before private? Partly, says Clarkson, if I remember rightly, because
public worship is that which most nearly approximates to the worship of heaven; it is
the worship of heaven, and in heaven nothing is private, nothing is private. And so, we understand
as the Word of God, especially the epistles come to us with those second person exhortations,
they are almost invariably second person plural exhortations; there's hardly any second person
singular exhortation is to be found. And we need to reverse that primacy of the individual rather
than the primacy of the congregation. There's a very interesting illustration of that, I think,
in what Paul says about singing. When you sing you make melody in your heart to the Lord, but
where is your singing directed. You're singing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs and the
melody is being directed to the Lord. But, oftentimes, and you see this if you read the
Psalms, oftentimes you discover the words are not being directed to the Lord; the words are
being directed either to yourself or to your fellow worshipers. So, the worship of God in
the New Testament is not to the exclusion of the blessedness of the individual in the context
of the congregation, but releases the individual to minister to other members of the congregation
in a manner that brings pleasure to the Lord as we are making melody to Him in our hearts,
Colossians 3:16 and 17. The same principle is in Ephesians 5:17 and 18, that in everything
the congregation takes priority over the individual because the God who has called us to
worship together is the God of the congregation. There's is a third way in which all this
has influenced contemporary church life and contemporary worship and that is in the extent
to which we see a priority given to the senses rather than to the mind. Psalm 73, that's
already been cited, as Asaph, interestingly, one of the great worship leaders of the Old
Testament church, but a profound theologian, a profound theologian. Let me rephrase that
because that's a very modern way to put it, isn't it? Worship leader of the Old Testament
church, but a profound theologian. That's not good! A profound theologian, therefore equipped to
be a worship leader of the Old Testament church, you see? And he goes into the temple in the
midst of all his confusion and difficulty and there is much that is visual and sensory about the
experience of the temple, but it's what he thought that when he was there, what he saw of His God
when he was there. It made all the difference to his thinking. The same with our Lord Jesus Christ.
What was He doing in the temple? He was having the time of His life. Make no mistake. He was
having the time of His life as a 12-year-old boy, but because He was inquiring in the temple about
the ways of God, he was using the mind. And you find this all through the Scriptures, even
those aspects of Old Testament worship that are profoundly sensory and sensual almost are
there in order to, by the means of the Word and truth of God communicated to our minds, help us to
understand the glory, majesty, and graciousness of our God, and fall down with awe and joy and
worship Him. Now, that's an important point when we discuss the whole question of drama and
dance, isn't it? I'm not surprised that people feel a tremendous impact when they see drama in
worship service. I'm not surprised by that, but I think it's very important for us to understand,
as the Greek tragedians understood, that drama does not appeal to the mind; drama functions
in order to provide a temporary catharsis, cleansing of the emotions. If you've ever seen
Hamlet you will have experienced exactly what the Greek tragedians thought drama was for, an
extraordinary powerful catharsis of your emotions, and you can go out from seeing the Royal
Shakespeare Company and still not have a blind idea what was really going on in Hamlet's brain.
It appeals to the senses, to the emotions, and the result of that inevitably is that preaching is
downplayed and because preaching is downplayed we have become a tribe of ignorant Christians.
A little boy of eight or nine in the remote fastnesses of Scotland a hundred and fifty years
ago knew more Bible and knew more Bible theology than most evangelical Christians do today, perhaps
even more than most seminary graduates know today, because everything else that appeals to the
senses does not shape and fashion the mind. And the fourth implication, well, the
fourth implication is inevitably the downplaying of the theological. I think
the most startling illustration I've seen of that recently in my very cloistered
world, and it a very cloistered world, was to see an advert for an evening with
a well-known worship leader. No preaching, no exposition, but an evening with a well-known
worship leader. And here's the point, the downplaying of the theological. Why do I say
that? Because leading worship is no longer seen in many churches as a pastoral task, but a musical
task, no longer as a doctrinal disciplining task, but largely as a sensory, emotional personality
and musical task. Similarly, hymn writing is no longer seen as a doctrinal task, and the result
is, if we are not well nourished in our praise, we will not be well nourished for our lives.
Now, these are things that later on in our question-and-answer session we will be able to
explore and discuss at greater length I'm sure. But let me just in the moment come to my final
point, my five principles. And here I can just give you the headings. Number one, in response to
all this, what do we do? The response to all this must never be mere polemic. If all you can do is
mere polemic, then you can never build the church of Jesus Christ, because the church of Jesus
Christ and the worship of God can never be built on mere polemic. So, number one, we must be sure
that our worship is absolutely centered on God the Holy Trinity. We must be sure that our worship
is absolutely centered on God the Holy Trinity, the least practical doctrine in the world for most
evangelicals, but for our Lord Jesus Christ if the Upper Room Discourse is anything to go by, the
most practical doctrine in the world... you know, Schleiermacher eliminated the doctrine
of the Trinity to an appendix because he didn't see how it could work into his
system, and much evangelicalism has done the same in its thinking and in its worship.
Worship is to be centered on God the Trinity. Second, worship is to be absolutely
dominated by God's Word, be it God's Word sung, God's Word read, God's Word
expounded, or even more fundamentally, by the undergirding principles of God's
Word that teach us the ways in which He is pleased to be worshiped, centered
on the Trinity, dominated by the Word. Thirdly, expressive of the whole person. I wish
I had another hour to deal with this. It is to be expressive of the whole person. It's as a
whole person with all the people of God that you come into the presence of the whole God
and the whole Lord Jesus Christ. He is in the business of transforming you into His likeness,
not of shrinking your humanity, but expanding and transforming that humanity. That's one of
the reasons why if you sing praises within a very selective musical band then the blessing of
worship that God intends you to have is going to be as limited as your musical bands. Or if you
sing hymns that have a very narrow focus, yes, even emotionally a narrow focus. Worship is
to be expressive of the whole person because we are to be by God's grace on the stretch as
we worship Him. And we need to be very careful, we need to be very careful that we do not
engage in polemics against fellow believers, actually on the basis of the restrictedness
of our own emotional experience. If you are a lugubrious kind of Christian, be very careful
about being critical of very happy Christians because our worship is to be expressive
of a holistic transformation in our lives. Fourthly, our worship is to
be didactic and paracletic, Colossians 3:16 and 17. We are teaching
and encouraging our fellow believers as we worship and give pleasure to God. He is our
Father, dear ones, He is our Father and it is His pleasure that in His presence we not only
bring delight to His heart, but encouragement and edification to the hearts of those who
are our brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. And finally, as Doug Wilson has already
reminded us, our great longing in worship is that our worship will be suffused
with a sense of the presence of God, that those who come in from the outside,
who do not have the Bible vocabulary to articulate what it is that they see and sense will
nevertheless whether physically or internally, be falling down on their faces and saying to
you, "I don't know any other way to put this, but God is here—God is here." And the truth
of the matter is when God is pleased to come make Himself known among His saints, so that we
know He is present, there are many things that fade into the background where they belong, but
when He is pleased, we are pleased. When we are sensitive to what He seeks, then we become very
sensitive to the manifestations of His presence. Our Father, You seek such to worship You and
we pray for grace, for wisdom from Your Word, for discipline in our thinking, for
unfettered freedom of spirit to praise You as you surely deserve, and to find in
worshiping You that this is our chief end, and Your glory is our great pleasure. We
pray in Jesus our Savior's name. Amen.
