28 March, 2024

The More We Change

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by | 22 January, 2006 | 0 comments

By John Wakefield

“Have I got questions for you!” my friend says. He knows I like to talk about worship. “What about the Lord”s Supper? Why do some observe it before the sermon? Why do deacons serve the elements? Why do we have 30-minute sermons if the Lord”s Supper is the big moment in worship?”

My mind is spinning, but he has more. “I”ve got questions about singing too. This invitation hymn. Where did we get the idea that it is a part of worship? And why don”t we sing an invitation hymn anymore?”

I want to tell my friend, “The more things change, the more they remain the same.” Stone-Campbell worship illustrates there isn”t much new under the sun. The more we change our worship, the more it remains the same. “Look at our history,” I say to my friend.

But more important than what we”ve done is why we did these things. My friend Dick Alexander of LifeSpring Christian Church in Cincinnati says, “For the Christian, the motive is everything.” He is right. We have changed worship numerous times, and keep repeating ourselves. I”m glad my friend asks why, because we haven”t always questioned the motive.

I noted once that worshipers in the British churches of Christ sat in silence at the end of their worship. A lovely practice, I thought. They cherish a moment of reflection before they reenter the noisy world.

Then I realized they didn”t necessarily sit for reflection at all. They sat because people in the dominant church of their country””the Anglican church””sit until the organ postlude is completed. But there is no organ music at the end of their services. Unfortunately many people in the churches of Christ had forgotten why they sat! The motive really is everything.

Similar Motives

Why did we practice worship a certain way? Some answers come from intriguing documentation. Some from informed theory. Most show that our motives have remained strikingly similar for 200 years””theological, biblical, cultural, and pragmatic.

Stone-Campbell churches always esteemed the Lord”s Supper””or at least have claimed to. Sometimes we observed the Lord”s Supper in the middle of the service. Sometimes we observed it at the end of the service. These days, some even place it outside the service. Why have we done these things?

Neither Campbell nor Stone decreed a worship order. In a church he visited, Campbell experienced an order that seemed biblical and worthy of copying. For a time, many churches carried out worship that way. In the center of the service, the presider stated the purpose of their meeting was to partake of the Lord”s Supper. He took the loaf, gave thanks for it, “significantly broke it, and handed it to the disciples on each side of him.”1

The Lord”s Supper was at the heart of worship for these early Stone-Campbell adherents; and preaching was not necessarily in the order at all. But this service was not “set in concrete.” Other orders were acceptable.2

Alexander Campbell described an ideal “meeting house”: “It should be a one story house, without steeple, galleries, or pulpit. . . . The Lord”s table . . . should be . . . visible to every eye in the house.”3 For Campbell, the table of the supper reflected its centrality in worship, and the absence of a pulpit supported that position. Elsewhere, Campbell advocated plain meeting houses, and decried high-ceilinged, ornamented places of worship.

But in the second generation of the movement, large neo-Gothic structures were built by Christian churches.4 Central Christian Church of Cincinnati, now razed, was such a building, and many similar edifices were constructed between 1860 and 1910 as the movement became more urban. These structures held increasingly affluent congregations who saw beauty in more ornamented buildings. Most retained the central table, but it was overpowered by a large pulpit. Preaching increased in importance.

Worship was already changing. We still said the Lord”s Supper was central to worship. Was it? Perhaps not as central as in Campbell”s day.

Performance Orientation

Architecture continued to reflect changing worship. From the 1870s through the 1920s churches constructed hundreds of “Akron Plan” buildings, named for the first such building in Akron, Ohio, in 1870. Englewood Christian Church, predecessor of First Christian Church, Chicago, was such a building. The arrangement gave greater emphasis to preaching, a polished performance by a choir, and the role of Sunday school. The Lord”s Supper was present but not so visibly central to worship.

The sanctuary was a square auditorium full of semi-circular pews facing a pulpit in the corner; the floor was often bowled and sloped toward the pulpit. Sunday School was held in a one-room unit separated from the auditorium with large rolling wooden curtains. The Lord”s Table, when it existed, was off to one side; the preacher and the choir were to be the focus. . . . 5

“The Lord”s Table, when it existed”! The more things change the more they remain the same. Though we observed the Lord”s Supper weekly, its impact may have paled before dramatic sermons and striking songs. A new book on the Akron Plan building, entitled When Church Became Theatre,6 suggests the performance orientation of worship in such a building. Our motive may have been conformity to culture. Our sacrifice may have been the centrality of the supper.

More recently, Christian church buildings have returned the table to a central position, but to one lower than the centrally placed pulpit. Is the Lord”s Supper really central to worship? Does it matter if we make certain all can see the preacher, but only the first three rows of people can see the Lord”s table? What does central mean?

And what does central mean in the sequence of the service? In the middle of the service, or at the end? Both positions come from the same motive: people stressing its importance.

Central Supper

Earl Hargrove, founding president of Lincoln (Illinois) Christian College and Seminary, taught students to place the Lord”s Supper in the middle of the service, as the point toward which the worship service led, and the point from which the preaching flowed. Thus the sermon became almost a commentary on what had just been experienced in the Lord”s Supper.7 Hargrove”s teaching influenced the placement of the supper in churches over several generations. Similar teaching elsewhere shaped the practice of other churches.

Sometimes churches who observed the Lord”s Supper in the middle of the service changed its place to the end of the service when too many people left after Communion, before the sermon! What was the motive for change? A very pragmatic motive: place the Lord”s Supper so as to keep the folks in the room.

The servers of the supper have changed over the years as well. Today teenage boys distribute the elements in some churches. In others, adult men and women do. Often the role is still reserved for male deacons. But when did deacons first serve the Lord”s Supper?

The practice was evidently followed from the beginning. W.K. Pendleton, son-in-law of Campbell, and Campbell”s coeditor, said a basic function of deacons was to “serve in worship services, minister at the Lord”s Table.”8

On the other hand, G. Edwin Osborn, perhaps the greatest authority on worship in the Stone-Campbell Movement, said it made little difference whether deacons or someone else served the elements of the Lord”s Supper. “[T]his responsibility . . . is merely to . . . make sure the observance will be in good order. Any member of the church . . . could preside at the service.”9 Numerous churches hold to that conviction today, with various individuals””deacons or not””participating in the distribution of the elements. Perhaps a question of motives is in order.

Invitation Hymns

“OK, so what about the music?” my friend asks. “When did we start doing invitation hymns, and why? And why do some not sing one today?”

A logical congregational response to a preacher”s challenge is a hymn; so we”ve probably always sung one after the sermon””but not always as an evangelistic call to the nonbeliever. In fact invitation hymns are not listed in Christian church hymnals until the later 1800s.

Did invitation hymns come into usage from the great revivals of the late 1800s? Probably. Songwriters and song evangelists of the Stone-Campbell Movement””Charles Reign Scoville, Phillip Bliss and others””circulated widely in the same fellowship as evangelists Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday. Christian church songwriters were extensively represented in the gospel songbooks of the era. The worship of Christian churches throughout the land began to include hymns of invitation.

The Rodeheaver School of Music in Winona Lake, Indiana, also helped keep evangelistic music in Christian church worship. Interdenominational in nature, the school attracted leaders of worship from many denominations in the 1930s and early 1940s. Christian church songwriters Frank Huston and the Brocks had summer homes there. Leaders from Christian churches attended the summer school to be taught “how to do it,” including the invitation hymn.

Today, some churches have discarded invitation hymns because they perceive that worship is for the believer, not the nonbeliever; and because they perceive that bringing someone to accept Christ as Savior is a matter for the rest of our week. We began using invitation hymns because others had a very evangelistic view of worship and we followed along.

Choosing Direction

My friend”s questions kept me busy for a long time, trying to understand why we do the things we do in worship. Sometimes we do them because we believe the practice is biblical, as when we observe the Lord”s Supper at either the middle of the service or at the end of the service.

Sometimes we do them because someone told us to do them that way, as when we read Alexander Campbell”s direction to keep things simple.

Maybe we do them because someone down the street did it that way, as when we sing an invitation hymn.

And sometimes we do them because they are pragmatic and we believe they will produce the results we desire. Invitation hymns probably produced dramatic results once upon a time. Today they may not produce the same kinds of results.

I listen to my friend. How shall we view our worship? What are our motives? Whose direction do we follow? The direction of the broader evangelical church? The church of historic liturgy? The teaching of professors in our colleges? The direction set by preachers of some of our influential churches? A management model? What are appropriate motives for how we act in worship and whom to follow? The more things change, the more they remain the same.

My friend isn”t satisfied. “We behave a lot like we did a hundred years ago,” he says. “Is there something for us to learn? Maybe we need a Stone-Campbell Movement in every generation. We”d better talk some more.”

I smile and reply, “I agree.”

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1Alexander Campbell, The Christian System (Bethany: Christian Publishing Co., 1839), 352, 353.
2Alexander Campbell, Millennial Harbinger (Bethany: Christian Publishing Co., 1835), 507.
3Alexander Campbell, “Meeting Houses” in Millennial Harbinger (1834), 1:7, 8.
4Frederick D. Kershner, editor, The Shane Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4, October (Indianapolis: Butler University), 1943.
5Lani Olson, Building a Witness (Indianapolis: Christian Board of Publications), 36.
6Jeffery W. Howe, When Church Became Theatre: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
7Margaret Dismore, e-mail message to author, 12 November 2005.
8The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement, ed. Douglas Foster, et. al. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Company, 2004), s.v. “Deacons, Diaconate.”
9G. Edwin Osborn, The Disciples of Christ and Worship”””Worship” and “The Ordinances”: The Communion, lecture given at Oklahoma Christian Ministers Institute, Enid, Oklahoma, 9 January 1952, 14.

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John Wakefield is associate professor at Milligan College in Tennessee.

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