In Acts 1 we read of the ascension of Jesus, up there among the five most earth-shattering events in human history, along with the incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, and gift of the Spirit.
Immediately after the disciples trudge back down the mount of Olives, reversing the journey they took exactly six weeks before, arriving at the same upper room they ate the Last Supper in. They’d had Jesus’ instruction, they know they’re meant to wait for the Helper to come. They do exactly what you’d expect, they hold a prayer meeting. This is, I guess, history’s most powerful prayer meeting, as it ends ten days later with Pentecost and the Spirit of God descended to dwell within the gathered believers with wind and fire. Before we have that event that’s meant to look like Sinai and reverse Babel and change the order of the cosmos, they pray.
There’s lots we could say about that, but I’d like to draw attention to a specific feature of their prayer meeting. They break, perhaps in the middle of their ten day stint, for a business meeting. The issue of who will replace Judas arises. There are lots of interesting things here: the apparent contradiction between Matthew and Acts over the manner of Judas’ death, how they chose Mattias to join the Twelve, and the way Peter uses the Bible to lead them to replace Judas. I’d like to draw attention to another, that it seems that this had to happen before the Spirit would come.
The narrative answer is obvious enough: Jesus is a new (true!) Israel, so the nascent church needs its twelve sons to start the twelve tribes before they can be driven into all the world to preach good news. That makes good sense, patterns matter. They couldn’t carry on with eleven. They couldn’t wait for Paul or James; not least because James is in the room but doesn’t meet the requirements they set. Paul isn’t in the room but wouldn’t meet them either. This new member of the twelve must have been with Jesus since his baptism so they can be a witness to the whole adventure.
There’s a wider pattern though, which I think we can apply to our own church worlds. Before the Spirit comes, they get the structure right. Structure is upstream of Power. In the charismatic world we are often not that keen on our ecclesiology—particularly clear and Biblical church government—and we are often not that keen on structure and process. We like to go with the flow. We like to wait on God. We like God to set the agenda.
It is my experience, however counter-intuitive it might sound, that if you want God to set the agenda then you need to start with an agenda. If you want a meeting to be visited by the manifest presence of the living God and be pinned to the spot by his power—and you do want that—then you can’t plan it. Hype can lead to great experiences, but not real ones. You can’t plan it, but neither can you plan nothing at all. You need some sort of structure, and you need a willingness to shift that structure as required. A structure that isn’t hidebound but does lead us forward.
Sunday worship needs a running order. The Christian word for that, though we dislike it in my circles, is a liturgy. You need a liturgy. You need to have thought about the way it communicates the story of the world, which we call the gospel, because the Spirit visits the people as they worship Jesus. You need to largely stick to it. And you need to have designed it capaciously enough that there’s room to breathe and hear what the Lord is saying to you together.
Of course, many friends of mine read that last sentence and imagine a time of waiting on God with prophetic words. To that I want to say ‘yes and;’ we hear what the Lord is saying in prophetic utterance, yes, but we hear it primarily in reading of the Bible and the preached word of God. We don’t hear it but taste it in the Lord’s Supper. We encounter God in both of these at least as much as in the tingly bit when someone plays pads on the keyboard.
I am convinced that the elements of Christian worship are there to encounter God, because as we worship him he always steps towards us. I am convinced that the Spirit wants to dynamically speak to us in the extraordinary and the ordinary means of grace. I am convinced that if we make it all about Jesus, the Holy Spirit will rend the heavens and come down to unite our hearts with him in ever deeper ways.
There are also times when the Spirit comes in a way that’s so thick in the room that its overpowering. I can recall times of being rooted to the spot unable to move my body as I spoke with the Lord, seemingly face-to-face. I can recall times of unbridled joy that seemed reminiscent of the accusations of drunkenness at Pentecost, and the inevitable discussion about whether its safe to drive home that drunk in the Spirit. Our ordinary faithful worship will be imbued with power by the Spirit. Sometimes our worship will be overtaken by the extraordinary presence of the Spirit.
We should prize both, and recognise that the extraordinary is extra-ordinary. The elders of the church need to be attentive enough to God’s work in the room to occasionally throw out the plan and dive headfirst into God’s presence, and they need to be confident enough in the ordinary means of grace that it isn’t a ‘failure’ when this isn’t realised most of the time. That’s not a failure. We can seek the experience so hard that we miss what God is doing right in front of our faces: he is present in the gathered church. You want to see Jesus? Turn to the person next to you on Sunday, and if you know them well enough, give them a hug.
Photo by Thomas Kelley on Unsplash
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