“Hallelujah! Praise God in his sanctuary. Praise him in his mighty expanse. Praise him for his powerful acts; praise him for his abundant greatness. Praise him with the blast of a ram’s horn; praise him with harp and lyre. Praise him with tambourine and dance; praise him with strings and flute. Praise him with resounding cymbals; praise him with clashing cymbals. Let everything that breathes praise the Lord. Hallelujah!” (CSB)
Over the course of the various birth and infancy narratives of Jesus in the Gospels, every time someone encounters the baby who was God in human flesh their response is uniformly one of worship. Worship is something we are called to again and again throughout the Scriptures. Yet it often feels like worship can only happen in a limited number of ways. If you don’t happen to fall into one of those categories, too bad for you. Is this really how things are? Not for a second. Let’s talk about worship and Advent and encountering Jesus in the ways God designed us.
Most church services in most churches across the country – and, I suspect, across the world – happen the same way each week. In some churches that is a matter of intentionality as that particular faith tradition places a high value on a stable, consistent liturgy. In others, the repetition is simply a consequence of the very human tendency to fall into a rut of doing the same things over and over again. Either way, the result is that when someone is engaged with a single church setting for a period of several years during their childhood and adolescence they can begin to develop the mindset that the way they experience worship is the way worship is supposed to happen.
Whether or not this is a good thing depends. For people who have a positive experience with the church and the faith growing up, and who resonate with those particular worship rhythms, it can be a very good thing. Those patterns become warm and familiar to them, and they can’t imagine worshiping in another way. That applies both positively and negatively. They can’t imagine it in the sense that they love the way they experience worship with their church community on a regular basis. They also can’t imagine it, though, in the sense that they aren’t aware or open to other styles of worship. That’s doesn’t have to be such a bad thing unless they marry someone from outside of their worship tradition, and then they’ll have some challenges ahead of them.
For others who have a bad experience with the church or the faith growing up, or who don’t resonate with those particular worship rhythms, growing up thinking there’s only one way to worship can create a needless barrier to the faith. In this case, the individual associates negative things with that style of worship and simultaneously thinks that is the only style of worship there is. The first reaction there is totally understandable. The second is simply inaccurate.
The truth is that there are many different styles and approaches to worship. For most of these, the difference between them is not a matter of one being right and another being wrong. They are all legitimate pathways for worshiping the Lord. Some of these will resonate more with some people, and some of them will resonate more with others. This is because different people are designed to connect with God in different ways.
Author and pastor, Gary Thomas, identifies nine different styles of worship. He calls these “sacred pathways.” His book by that same title explores each of them in detail. The first pathway is the naturalist. This person loves to connect with God in nature. Being out in the world, experiencing the beauty of creation is how she will resonate most with the Spirit of God. The second is the sensate. Sensate people resonate best with worship styles that engage the senses. Sights, sounds, and smells are all spiritually significant aspects of worship for them. Traditionalists worship God best through rituals and symbols. Very liturgical worship settings are where these kinds of folks are going to thrive.
The fourth pathway is that of the ascetic. This is more of a monastic temperament. They want simplicity and even solitude when worshiping. On the opposite end of that particular perspective are the activists. These individuals worship God through confrontation. When they are tackling a matter of injustice or social disorder through the lens of the Gospel, they will be in tune with God’s Spirit in ways they won’t be in a traditional worship setting. Next are the caregivers. These folks love God best by loving others. Serving the least, last, and lost will set them in line with the heart of God.
The final trio includes the enthusiasts, who worship God with mystery and celebration, the contemplatives, who worship God through adoration, and the intellectuals, who worship God with their minds. Enthusiasts will thrive in more charismatic settings. Contemplatives are very thoughtful and intentional in their worship. They want time and space to reflect quietly on who God is and to adore Him for it. They will often resonate well with the ascetics. The intellectuals want their minds challenged more than their hearts. They’ll often tune out worship music and tune in when the preacher starts talking.
No single one of these pathways is greater or more significant than the others. They are all different ways God designed people to connect with Him in worship because He loves variety and diversity. This is why we see passages like Psalm 150 here that speak of several different ways of worshiping. The psalmist here calls for worshiping God in different ways, in different places, and for different things. If you would like to know more about these different worship pathways, Thomas’ book is well worth the investment. For a starter exploration, though, check out this page from the Vineyard Church in Ann Arbor, MI, and take this survey from Soul Shepherding to help uncover what your particular sacred pathway is.
The season of Advent has all sorts of different aspects to it. There are ways to prepare for the coming of Christ during this season that involves each of these different pathways. Be creative in how you prepare. Don’t hesitate to explore all kinds of different approaches including attending special worship services, serving others who are struggling during this season, having quiet times of reflection as a family, establishing family traditions, studying the history of the season, and so on and so forth. God made you to connect with Him uniquely. When you do that, you will experience Him best.
The Nexus 
Good morning, Pastor Wait. Do you believe that Acts 26 accurately records the historical details of Jesus’ (alleged) appearance to Paul on the Damascus Road? Yes or no?
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Why? Which argument against the historicity of the New Testament are you looking to make? And how is that question even remotely relevant to this post?
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It is an off topic question: If the author of the Book of Acts faithfully recorded Paul’s testimony before Agrippa, then Paul stated very clearly that all he saw on the Damascus Road was a bright light. If Paul can see a bright light and believe the resurrected Jesus has appeared to him, isn’t it possible that the other witnesses listed in First Corinthians 15 also only saw bright lights?
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And rather wildly so at that.
Is it possible in the sense that it’s possible I could wake up tomorrow morning, and the sky could be orange, sure. Possible in any kind of a realistic sense? Not particularly.
Using the only evidence we have available on the matter (and, yes, I know that you have, do, and will dispute the reliability of that evidence, but that’s beside the point here), none of the other eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus reported a similar experience. Offering up a theory for which there is absolutely zero evidence – even of a disputed variety – smacks of a rather desperate desire to find some reason to undermine the credibility of a story you don’t want to believe in the first place. As such, the question is too riddled with confirmation bias to be worth considering.
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But we do have evidence that at least one of the eyewitnesses to an alleged post-death Jesus appearance only saw a bright light. It is written in the Book of Acts, a first century document.
This does not prove that all the other alleged eyewitnesses saw bright lights and believed them to be appearances of the resurrected Jesus but it does prove that it is possible and plausible that first century people could see a sudden bright light and believe it to be an appearance of a heavenly being.
The fact is that we have no first century document which states that people were claiming to see a resurrected body until the writing of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke (70s or 80s CE). Paul nor the author of the Gospel of Mark say anything about appearances of a walking, talking body in their writings.
First century people were primed to believe that sudden bright lights were supernatural appearances. God allegedly appeared to Moses in a (bright) burning bush. To deny the plausibility that all the Jesus appearances were based on illusions (sightings of bright lights, shadows, etc.) is naive.
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It proves that it is possible one individual had such an experience. That same individual, after that experience, did a total 180 in his entire worldview framework. Anything beyond that is speculation. Which way that speculation leads depends on the presuppositions you bring to the text. That is, it’s riddled with confirmation bias.
Matthew and Luke and John all reported on the encounters of eyewitnesses (including their own). They made claims too that were falsifiable. Paul’s reports of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances in 1 Corinthians 15 do not explicitly mention His body, but that is what is clearly implied by a plain reading of the text there.
The idea that all the post-resurrection appearances were possibly nothing but bright lights and illusions is only naive if you start from the standpoint that it’s all made up to begin with. That is, it is a worldview driven conclusion, not one that comes out of an honest engagement with the text on its own terms.
If you are hoping to be convincing of any particular point here, you are going to have to make much more compelling arguments that are not so glaring beset by your secular worldview biases. As it stands, it just looks like you are grasping at straws for the sake of arguing with me.
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When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the [burning] bush, “Moses! Moses!” And Moses said, “Here I am.” 5 “Do not come any closer,” God said. “Take off your sandals, for the place where you are standing is holy ground.” 6 Then he said, “I am the God of your father,[a] the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.” At this, Moses hid his face, because he was afraid to look at God.
This is evidence that Jews believed that God could appear to them in the form of a bright light! In conclusion: The alleged appearances of Jesus to his disciples two thousand years ago is no more impressive than claims by modern Christians that they have seen the Virgin Mary. The detailed Resurrection Appearance Stories in the Gospels are embellished accounts of these original illusion experiences. Even evangelical NT scholar Craig Blomberg admits that first century authors sometimes added fictional stories to their works.
We have the evidence from the Bible itself of first century Jews seeing bright lights and believing God has appeared to them. Just read Acts chapter 26.
Good bye,
Gary
Author, Escaping Christian Fundamentalism blog
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As I wrote in the response that just posted, your arguments here just aren’t good. Having studied under Craig and worked for him for three years, I can tell you with a fair bit of confidence that he would laugh at the way you are trying to twist his argument around to make it sound like he is allowing for almost the paradigmatically opposite point he was actually trying to make.
The whole point of that section is that in spite of the slight possibility that there may be (not are, but may be) some historical embellishments in some of the Gospel accounts, we can have firm confidence in their overall historicity.
You’re not making a compelling case. You’re making it sound like you are a committed skeptic who is trying (badly) to make an argument against the historicity of the resurrection on the flimsiest of grounds.
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Did Blomberg state that sometimes first century authors writing historical works added (fictional) embellishments to otherwise historical facts? Yes he most certainly did! I never claimed that Blomberg said the Gospels do, as a fact, contain fictional embellishments. Period.
But the fact that Blomberg admits that in the ancient world of the first century, embellishments to historical stories were allowed at all is a major crack in the silly evangelical apologetic argument that first century people NEVER, EVER allowed embellishments into their oral stories.
Blomberg is simply confirming what another evangelical NT scholar, Michael Licona, stated in his book, “Why Are There Differences In The Gospels”: some historical documents from the first century contain fictional embellishments. This is very different from historical works written today. Imagine a biographer today inserting fictional material into the biography of a famous person. It would be a major scandal. Not so in the first century. It was accepted and even expected. It made for more interesting reading.
Michael Licona went further (he did not repeat it in the above book, however) when he stated that he believed “Matthew’s” story of dead saints shaken alive out of their graves was allegorical and not historical. For that, he was fired by his evangelical employer! Blomberg, at least so far in my reading of his book, has not said something similar. But other evangelicals scholars have! Richard Bauckman in his book “Jesus and the Eyewitnesses” states that he does not believe that the Apostle Matthew wrote the Gospel of Matthew because whoever the author was he invented the story of Matthew’s calling as a disciple, plagiarizing it from the Gospel of Mark. Bauckham then asks the reader: “Why would Matthew make up a story about his own calling? This is evidence Matthew did not write the Gospel of Matthew.” Wow!
If even some of the most prominent evangelical NT scholars admit fictional material exists in the Gospels, then how can John Q Public know which parts are fictional and which parts are historical??? I have never claimed that ALL of the Gospels are fiction. I have simply asked the question: Which parts are historical, which parts are fictional, and how would we know? Evangelicals like yourself will immediately respond: But the Gospels were written by eyewitnesses! Really? If that is the case, why can’t evangelical Bible scholars agree on the identities of these authors? Bauckham for instance not only doesn’t believe that the Apostle Matthew wrote the Gospel of Matthew, he doesn’t believe that John the Apostle, son of Zebedee, wrote the Gospel of John!
My goodness! If evangelical Bible scholars can’t even agree on the identity of these alleged “eyewitness” authors, how can we possibly be certain they were eyewitnesses???
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Gary, I’ll make you a deal. If you promise not to troll Jonathan’s blog at least until the end of Advent, I promise not to disparage atheism on Madalyn O’Hair’s birthday.
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Jonathan can tell me to stop commenting at any time and I will do so.
Why don’t you come to my blog, Thomas, and interact with me. I just posted an article that proves that Paul never saw Jesus’ resurrected body. All he saw was a talking bright light.
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If by proof, you mean your personal interpretation of the text which is steeped in confirmation bias and thus rooted in your a priori unbelief, then sure, I suppose that might count as proof to someone who is already equally unconvinced as you are. It seems a more accurate thing to say that you have faith in your interpretation just as you accuse believers of having faith in ours. And, as you would perhaps delight in pointing out in the reverse situation, mere belief is not the kind of proof I suspect you have in mind when you use that word there.
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