Rev. John L. Bell is a member of Scotland’s Iona Community and a popular speaker on worship and music. Bell had a hand in the creation of the fourth edition of the Church of Scotland’s hymnbook.
Andrew Donaldson is also a popular speaker on music and worship, and had a hand in the creation of the Presbyterian Church in Canada’s latest hymnbook.
Bell will be speaking at the National Presbyterian Women’s Gathering in May. The Record asked Donaldson, currently in Geneva working at the World Council of Churches as a consultant in worship and spirituality, to interview Bell. They managed via email with Donaldson in Switzerland and Bell around the globe, at one point in Kamloops, B.C.
Andrew Donaldson: It’s hard to know where to begin…so I thought I would start with God.
The sense of God that I get sometimes from a good, solid Presbyterian service of worship is that God is a strong building: a bank, say, or a museum. Somewhere in one of the sermons of Iona Community founder George MacLeod, he talks about how we try to capture God, as we might try to bottle up a sparkling stream, or capture the dust-motes dancing in a ray of sunlight. He said that instead we must “put ourselves in the way of God.” Like the Wild Goose symbol for the Iona Community, this picture seems wilder, harder to control.
How does the Iona Community strive to not keep repeating its old ways but always be “born of the Spirit?”I don’t picture you gazing across the Hebridean waves, waiting for a wild moment of spiritual inspiration. How do you “put yourself in the way of God?”
John Bell: I’m not familiar with the quotation from George MacLeod about “putting yourself in the way of God,” and I suppose that on a first reading it can sound rather obstructive, like parking a huge freight vehicle longways across a busy urban street. I tend to think of the “way of God” being more of the journey to which God calls people and becoming participants rather than spectators.
My long-time colleague, Graham Maule, once had a conversation with a clearly distressed woman at a big evangelical conference where we were working. She had a T-shirt on which was emblazoned “Jesus is the Answer.” To her surprise and dismay, Graham pointed out that Jesus never said he was “the answer,” but said he was “the Way.”
He thus distinguished between passive discipleship which sees God as the one who will answer my needs and instigate what I need to do, as opposed to dynamic discipleship which recognizes that God is already active within the world and that we have no right to expect God to come to where we are, or we are unwilling to join God where he already is.
In this respect, the Iona Community continues to encourage its members to be in God’s way, particularly in areas of Christian witness where the scriptures are eloquent, but the church is reticent. Issues of social justice, the care of creation, reconciliation, and the divine injunction to “sing a new song” are some of the areas where we feel called to be particularly engaged.
For myself, I don’t gaze either on Hebridean waves or on secluded groves of academia. I work on Iona usually two weeks a year, and spend the rest of my time engaging with people in churches, colleges and conferences all over the place. Increasingly I see my role as affirming the good things that are happening and gathering stories of how the Holy Spirit is encouraging new developments. Neither I nor the Iona Community have a monopoly of good ideas or resources and so I see sharing good practice as important an activity as initiating.
AD: A thread running through songs from the Iona Community is that worship should be challenging – disturbing as well as comforting. How have you seen worship be disturbing and at the same time life-giving in Canadian churches? How do Canadian Presbyterians need to be comforted, or reassured? And finally: As you participate in worship somewhere, what gets you mad? What makes you want to jump up and overturn a few tables?
JB: It would be difficult for me to make any informed statement about worship in Canadian churches as I haven’t spent long enough in the pews. I’m usually asked to preach or lead music and I don’t think that’s the best place to gauge the spiritual temperature of the congregation.
What I am aware of, throughout Canada, as in the U.K., are two extremes pulling at each other — the conservationists who want to retain all that is good in the tradition and the populists who believe that if you make everything into a kind of religious knees up, that will attract the crowds. I don’t see anywhere in the gospels where Jesus either commanded people to keep things the same or to play to the gallery.
What is true is that for him worship was a transforming experience.
Wherever he was in a synagogue or the temple, some people were blessed and others were livid. This is a simple statement of gospel truth, borne out from the time he preached in his home synagogue, through the instances where he healed in holy precincts on the sabbath, to his pardoning of an adulteress which happened in the temple precincts.
When people say they want to keep their traditions, I have to ask whether that is the same as the liberated Hebrew slaves wanting to avoid entering the Promised Land. There is a Back-to-Egypt Brigade in every congregation which cannot seemingly cope with the fact that we are no longer illiterate 17th century worshippers who need to be spoon fed by the only educated man in the parish; nor can they appreciate that the only constant about tradition is that it changes. God calls us to be signs of the coming kingdom, not a theme park dedicated to an ecclesiastical past.
But by the same token, when worship is reduced to a feel-good factor, where people come or go depending on whether the praise band is making them happy by singing their favourite songs, then we have gone down the road of hedonism in which our ego is more important than our Maker.
We are in a new situation in which rather than bemoan low numbers, spread negative rumours or try to combat the opposition, we all have to ask what has to die that God might bring other things to life. That is the question for those who believe in the resurrection. It did not happen without a death, and the pattern holds good for corporate as well as personal life. It has fascinated me to see new life in very diverse places, and often in rural areas that where people have stopped doing what was patently failing — whether that is having a choir of three people where there used to be 30, or letting the congregation sit like strangers in a bus where worshippers should be meeting as a joined-up body.
Essentially good things happen when a congregation discovers how to be an integrated community, to scrutinise every aspect of its life as to whether hospitality or estrangement reigns, and where the insights of the scriptures rather than the threadbare practices of tired tradition inform the congregation’s life and worship.
In response to your second question: a community can only claim that name authentically if there is agreement as to what makes for the common good. That has to be a question which surfaces for discussion every so often. It saves jaded practices becoming sacred cows, and it ensures that new people are not there simply to swallow the nostrums of the past.
And seeking the common good is not simply a matter of finding the most pleasurable way of meeting, but rather discussing together and imagining together responses to the challenges with which God and the gospel confront us.
At one time, the Iona Community was predominantly pacifist in its membership. After the cold war ended we realised that the total destruction which could be effected by nuclear weapons was now possible by the misuse of the earth’s resources, so we turned more of our attention to issues of ecology.
In my own area of interest, we realised that encouraging good choral music was a fine thing; but if congregations were not singing, then they — the bedrock of the churches’ song — had to be the focus of our attention.
We used to have an old youth camp on Iona where there were around 48 beds with four cold taps and one shower. Some people wanted to keep it that way because it reminded them of their teenage years in the ’50s and ’60s. But if we were going to be attractive to teenagers in the 21st century, we couldn’t ask them to come and experience purgatory on earth. So, at a time of financial recession when charities were closing down, we felt called to rebuild — and did indeed raise enough money to open a new centre debt free, with 10 times as many showers.
George MacLeod, our founder, used to say, “Only a demanding common task can build community.” And he was right. If there is no demanding common task which demands our energy, money, commitment and prayer, we may say challenging things but they will not be matched by challenging signs.
In response to your third question: there are two things which particularly irritate me when I participate in worship. One is preachers whose illustrations come from their family or seminary life. It is unfair to a manse family, particularly the children, to have their domestic experiences offered for public consumption. Equally, the gospel cannot be communicated through the narrow filter of an academic education. With the exception of the Good Samaritan, when did Jesus ever take an example from a clergyman or from his rabbinic training in preference to language and analogies everyone could understand?
My other pet hate is worship which is sloppy: where the musician (guitar or organ) has clearly not practiced, where the scripture readers sound as if what they do is a chore rather than a privilege, where the prayers sound as if they were first offered during the reign of Queen Victoria and where the congregation sits so far apart that a visitor would suspect a deadly virus was going the rounds.
