Nursery rhymes or horror plots?

This has been a full and busy month, and I've not made much time for blogging. Some of the highlights from our month were visits from family, birthday parties, and the requisite cake, ice cream, and other goodies. A good full month.

Speaking of goodies, with Halloween right around the corner it seems appropriate to confess that I have been listening to some very strange, haunting even, nursery rhymes (those of you with young children may understand). As I've been paying attention to the lyrics more these days, I have begun to wonder what exactly the writers were thinking when they wrote these:

Rock a bye baby on the tree top....and when the bow breaks the cradle with fall and down will come baby cradle and all.

Sing a song of sixpence, four and twenty blackbirds baked in a pie, when the pie was opened the birds began to sing....when down came a blackbird and peeked off her nose.

Three blind mice, three blind mice, see how they run, they all run after the farmer's wife, who cut off their tail with a carving knife...


Perhaps I'm just being too literal about these, but I find it funny each time I hear these sung (they are on a musical CD our kids enjoy hearing). A baby hurtling down from the treetops, birds pecking off a person's nose, a woman running after mice knife held high...somehow the words seem more appropriate for a Halloween plot than a bedtime song.

Hope your Autumn is going well.

For an old friend

RESURRECTION.
Moist with one drop of Thy blood, my dry soul
Shall—though she now be in extreme degree
Too stony hard, and yet too fleshly—be
Freed by that drop, from being starved, hard or foul,
And life by this death abled shall control
Death, whom Thy death slew ; nor shall to me
Fear of first or last death bring misery,
If in thy life-book my name thou enroll.
Flesh in that long sleep is not putrified,
But made that there, of which, and for which it was ;
Nor can by other means be glorified.
May then sin's sleep and death soon from me pass,
That waked from both, I again risen may
Salute the last and everlasting day.

ASCENSION.
Salute the last and everlasting day,
Joy at th' uprising of this Sun, and Son,
Ye whose true tears, or tribulation
Have purely wash'd, or burnt your drossy clay.
Behold, the Highest, parting hence away,
Lightens the dark clouds, which He treads upon ;
Nor doth He by ascending show alone,
But first He, and He first enters the way.
O strong Ram, which hast batter'd heaven for me !
Mild Lamb, which with Thy Blood hast mark'd the path !

Bright Torch, which shinest, that I the way may see !
O, with Thy own Blood quench Thy own just wrath ;
And if Thy Holy Spirit my Muse did raise,
Deign at my hands this crown of prayer and praise.

-John Donne (1572-1631)

Throwing out the church with the "churchy"

It recently came to our attention that the church that we are attending (a different place than one I blogged about earlier--we are still searching for a church to call home) only offers communion two times per year--at Christmas and Easter. This was a very surprising discovery for us, because in many respects, there is a lot to like about the church--it's a place with great worship and solid Biblical teaching. So, hearing that communion was only offered twice per year was very odd.

This has had my mind thinking this week about "seeker-friendly" approaches to church, because my wife and I think that this drive to be seeker-sensitive may be partly the issue here--that communion perhaps is too "traditional" or "churchy" for this church. "Seeker-friendly" and "not the church your parents went to" are clear drivers of this church (not unlike what has guided many other churches in recent years).

Sometimes it feels as if we (the church) are chasing our tails in an effort to woo those "seekers" (arguably, a label that is not very helpful to anyone--aren't we all "seekers" in a certain sense?). Are we out-thinking ourselves? Are the changes we make to the look and feel of church truly based on what we know non-believers are attracted to? Or, are we reacting more to what we think they think about church? On the other hand, isn't there something a little odd to us basing our model of church on what non-church-goers think?? If that non-church-goer never goes to our church, should we be using their opinion to drive what we look like? And, if that non-church-goer does decide one day to attend our church, won't they want to see the church as it really should be??

I'm wondering this week if perhaps we sometimes throw out the church with the churchy. The Reformation of the 1500s, at least according to my reading, in many places and among many church leaders was about getting back to what they thought of as the Biblical church. Yet, in the end, it was more of a reaction against the Catholic church than a realignment with the Bible. Similarly, the Catholic counter-Reformation was a reaction to the changes made during the Protestant Reformation, rather than a realignment with the Bible. In both cases, the church was chasing its tail in that it was measuring itself against itself, rather than the Bible.

Perhaps churches that are driven primarily to be "seeker sensitive" are, similar to what happened during the Reformation, reacting to what they see in the church culture at large rather than carefully measuring themselves against the Bible. And it seems that the more we spend time reacting to ourselves (the way others do church), the less time we'll spend truly creating church the way it was meant to be. Besides, based on what we read throughout the Bible, it's hard to expect that "church the way it was meant to be" would always be easy or comfortable.

Back to what spawned all of this....if doing communion twice a year is a reaction against what other churches do in an effort to simply be less "traditional," that seems to be a mis-placed priority. Our priority, it seems, should be more about what will make the church more Biblical and less about what will distinguish one group (church) over another.