Paul in 1 Corinthians 14 is keen to express to the Corinthians that worship should be orderly. Yes, you can have a flow of charismatic life with everyone bringing their prayer, tongue, Bible reading, prophecy, and the rest, but you must also have some order.
At the very least you need to take it in turns, it should be understandable, languages (heavenly or earthly) must be interpreted, prophecies should be weighed by the elders at the time and responded to (that’s my understanding of 1 Corinthians 14’s statement on women, it won’t be everyone’s reading), and we shouldn’t have too much of any of it. There needs to be leadership to make that happen, if it happened naturally, Paul wouldn’t need to give the Corinthians, or us, these instructions.
If we wanted to use more biblical language, we wouldn’t call it leadership, we would call it governing or ‘ruling.’ Rulership involves bringing order from chaos. That’s an act of creation. The oft missed theological background for Paul’s requirement for order in 1 Corinthians 14 is the creation account in Genesis 1.
Genesis 1 is an account of chaotic waters that are tohu va bohu, formless and empty, being given form, and then being filled with life. Chaos is ordered, to remove its formlessness and then be filled with life, to stop it being empty.
Paul’s instruction is this: Do the same thing in your worship times.
If I want to be dreadfully polemic, I might suggest that many charismatics in the search for order—a necessity—manage to impose form at the cost of life. They fix tohu by causing bohu. A Sunday morning where everything is neat and stage managed and it all runs to time without the dynamic contributory life that Paul wants to encourage the Corinthians into, is like a well-manicured football field with no children playing on it.
The opposite danger is easier to see, as its essentially to be Corinthian: all the life flopping around on the floor with no boundaries doesn’t do anyone any good. In essence this is fixing bohu by causing tohu. We can’t understand your contributions because you’re just shouting at each other; you might be having a lovely time, but it’s essentially chaos. Creation requires that we take chaos and make ordered life from it.
Boundary setting is a significant component of the remit of elders. Elders should ensure orderly worship on a Sunday. If you never have to bring things into order, then something is probably not right. That isn’t a plea for Corinthian chaos that needs ordering, it’s a plea for something that needs some kind of governing authority.
If I can speak to my own constituency for a moment: I think we’ve lost the life that we had decades ago in the British new churches. There were, I’m sure, excesses. These needed to be brought into order. We shouldn’t lose the importance of order, but I think we’ve forgotten that you can have orderly worship without everything tied neatly down.
When was the last time your Sunday meeting included a run of multiple prayers of praise back-to-back? When was the last time you grabbed the mic and stopped the band because we want to hear readings from the Bible and prayers? These should be common as they are, firstly, one of the key signs of a charismatic church, and secondly signs that you are bringing order by creating space for life.
Order doesn’t just mean stopping silly things from happening, though you should do that too. You should not have more than two or three tongues and interpretations in a meeting; the Bible is very clear there. When was that last a problem that you had to deal with? Order also means creating space for life, asking for contributions, being specific, teaching your people how to do them in the context of a Sunday meeting. Sundays are for worship, so create space for worship.
I’ve mostly mentioned the sorts of contributions that are not charismatic but are common in every church, even if they aren’t spontaneous everywhere. That’s because these are the grounding for tongues, interpretations, and prophecy. One of the ways you make things orderly is you make sure Jesus is central in your worship, this tends to lead to people who prophesy the Bible rather than nonsense and whose interpretations are full of big truths that lift our hearts. Fighting hard for prayers of praise and readings of scripture in your Sundays should be prized as a component of orderly worship that will make your prophecy sharper.
One won’t automatically lead to the other, but to create fertile ground for the charismatic gifts to grow in an orderly way, first create space for people to focus on Jesus. That’s why we’re here.
The pull to be ‘missional’ has led many charismatics to back away from dynamic worship life as well as the weirder gifts. I suspect my ecclesiology is markedly different, I would also argue that the church exists to worship God and that’s what Sunday services are for, but I would also want to suggest that you want to invite people into the worship of God. In other words, making your Sunday meeting about the worship of God is missional. That’s what you want to invite people into, so invite them into it.
God’s mission is to cover the earth with the knowledge of the glory of God like the waters cover the sea (Habakkuk 2). That includes believers and unbelievers. We’re here to make disciples who worship Jesus. More than that, the gathered church is the model of the renewed cosmos, the outpost of the kingdom so that we know what we’re trying to build in the world. It should be ordered, and full of life.
Then after our charismatic life bubbling at the seams we hear the word preached and then we gather at the Lord’s table and eat and drink life and wisdom, blessing and curse, friendship and covenant. Each one these moments in our gathered meetings is a chance to encounter the manifest presence of the Lord Jesus Christ.
What I really mean is this: guys, let’s just be eucharismatics. It’s way more fun.
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