This chapter is an excerpt from Steven M. Fettke, God’s Empowered People: A Pentecostal Theology of the Laity (Wipf & Stock 2011). Read Part 1 in the Winter 2012 issue of Pneuma Review.

Forming a Nurturing Community

A mother was preparing breakfast for her two sons, Kevin, age five, and Ryan, age three. The boys began to argue over who would get the first pancake. Their mother saw the opportunity for a moral lesson. “If Jesus were sitting here, he would say, ‘Let my brother have the first pancake, I can wait.’” Kevin turned to his younger brother and said, “Ryan, you be Jesus!”

Some people can get so caught up in their own agendas and schedules that they forget that there are others around who might be hurting. Sadly, they often come across as too selfish to take time out to help those who are hurting because that might mean they would get off their strict daily schedules or they might have to hurt a bit with someone. After all, don’t they have enough troubles of their own without having to take on those of others? Let someone else deal with those hurting people. I will deal with my own needs, thank you very much. Those other folks who are hurting can deal with their own hurts themselves, just as I do.

Other people simply find themselves stressed and in need of loving nurture to sustain their faith. They need the warm embrace of a loving and accepting community as they negotiate the difficulties of living in a fast-paced society that expects so much of them in terms of job success, family wholeness, and psychological health and well being without providing the necessary supports for these things to happen. They need warm and loving nurture themselves, which often means they are unable to extend the same to others. They do not mean to be selfish and self-absorbed; they are just needy and weary.

To speak of love and nurture without recognizing real human stresses and strains is to ignore a common ailment of a hectic modern society. People are not surprised to be treated shabbily by a store clerk or fellow driver on the roadways. Who has not complained about a bored teenager who checked or bagged the groceries or a surly auto service manager who was barely civil when servicing the car? In such an atmosphere people become defensive because of the meanness encountered. Believers try not to be apathetic or mean in return, but often the atmosphere gets the better of them. At least they try to conceal their feelings with the thought that no one cares anyway, and certainly they don’t want to contribute with their own cruelty to the overall meanness already prevalent.

In addition, the notions of love and nurture have been cheapened by casual sex in television programs and in most movies. It is also common for television programs and movies to present a casual view of marriage and relationship commitments, as well as to present scenes of friends in deep conflict and division; often perpetrating great acts of cruelty upon each other. It does not help when most adult believers can tell tragic stories of churches split over some sort of un-Christian and inhumane treatment of a particular group of believers or the unjust treatment of a capable pastor.

It takes great care to speak of love and nurture to believers who might be a bit jaded by a society so casual about love and relationships. These adult believers may have become cynics about love and nurture from hearing it widely proclaimed in churches they have attended where only anger and division was experienced instead. Speaking of love and nurture is a delicate task because so many have been hurt in some way by counterfeits or by selfish people whose words of love belied their selfish actions.

This chapter is an excerpt from Steven M. Fettke, God’s Empowered People: A Pentecostal Theology of the Laity (Wipf & Stock 2011). Read Part 2 in the Spring 2012 issue of Pneuma Review.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love (1 John 4:7–8).

“Community … cannot grow out of loneliness, but comes when the person who begins to recognize his or her belovedness greets the belovedness of the other. The God alive in me greets the God resident in you. When people can cease having to be for us everything, we can accept the fact they may still have a gift for us. They are partial reflections of the great love of God, but reflections nevertheless … We see him or her as a limited expression of an unlimited love.

To live and serve and worship with others thereby brings us to a place where we come together and remind each other by our mutual interdependence that we are not God, that we cannot meet our own needs, and that we cannot completely fulfill each other’s needs. There is something wonderfully humbling and freeing about this. For we find a place where people give one another grace. That we are not God does not mean that we cannot mediate (if in a limited way) the unlimited love of God. Community is the place of joy and celebration where we are willing to say, ‘Yes, we have begun to overcome in Christ.’ Such is the victory of the Cross.

Gratitude springs from an insight, a recognition that something good has come from another person, that it is freely given to me, and meant as a favor. And at the moment this recognition dawns on me, gratitude spontaneously arises in my heart.”¹

An Invitation to Loving Hospitality

So many believers have organized their lives in such a way that the busy activities of modern life have prevented them from fully engaging their faith in ways that involve a faithful community. Often, a “fast food” approach to the faith has meant that believers quickly complete as many “vital” activities as possible during their busy week so that they might fit in all of them. Usually, this means that so many important things—family meals, times for reflection and prayer, meaningful time for building a strong faith community—get shortchanged in the midst of frantic and hectic schedules. If there are to be faith communities constructed around the offer of loving hospitality and acceptance of all people regardless of their social, economic, racial, or mental background, or their status, or abilities, then that effort takes careful and concerted effort. It will require significant amounts of time, time that modern Western believers might not be willing to give.

Hectic schedules have made so many modern believers exhausted and burned out from all they think they have to do just in the normal routines of their lives, not to mention the busy activities often planned by and through their local church. This has often led in turn to ministry burnout. It is also true that creating a loving and hospitable faith community can involve tedious yet necessary tasks: someone has to open the church on Sunday morning and start the air conditioning or heat; someone has to make sure repairs to the church building are made; someone has to deal with the confused and rebellious teens in middle school; someone has to attend to the elderly, the infirm, the troubled. A loving, nurturing community does not spring up to full possibility, maturity, and genuine welcome to all without people engaging in some hard, sometimes tedious, but always essential work. Most would rather leave the hard work to others, and some tasks seem so mundane and useless that one can get discouraged and want to give up.

A young monk once spent months at a monastery helping to weave a tapestry. One day, he rose from his bench in disgust: “I can’t do this any longer,” he exclaimed. “My directions make no sense. I have been working with a bright-yellow thread, and suddenly I’m to knot and cut it short for no reason. What a waste.”

“My son,” said an older monk, “you are not seeing the tapestry correctly. You are sitting at the back, working on only one spot.” He led the younger monk to the front of the tapestry, hanging stretched in the large workroom, and the novice gasped. He had been weaving a beautiful picture—the three kings paying homage to the Christ child—his yellow thread was part of the gleaming halo around the baby’s head. What had seemed wasteful and senseless was actually magnificent.

Creating community, any kind of community, is fraught with pitfalls—human pride, human indifference, “busyness,” work and family overload, and resistance to the completion of the tedious and mundane. Any community-creating has to be intentional, arising from fervent prayer and trust that the Spirit will make possible for diverse people a community of truth, love, and learning despite human selfishness and personal agendas for success or happiness. Thus, any effort on the part of believers to create a loving community of hospitality will have to include a focused intentionality and energy on the part of all.² Otherwise, believers will just meet to be meeting, going through the motions and not really meaning it. Such an atmosphere of indifference and fiction would not be worth the time expended.

Part One: Three Questions

All churches come together to sing, and most Christians would readily affirm that this shared musical practice is a significant element in spiritual life. Yet the exact manner in which music exerts powers of spiritual formation may seem amorphous and elusive. I will approach the subject by asking three questions:

How do song lyrics affect us?

What kinds of musical experiences may subtly exclude some Christians?

What happens when music in the church borrows from music in the culture?

I will explore each of these and then conclude with suggestions for understanding theologically rich lyrics, inviting participation from all congregants, and innovating in areas where the culture may prove unhelpful.

Question 1: How Do Song Lyrics Affect Us?

Lyrics have the power to teach, but indirectly; there are very few songs that resemble a paragraph from a seminary textbook. To illustrate the point, readers may find it amusing to try setting the following doctrinal statement to music:

We believe in one God (eternal, omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent) existing as three persons – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, one in nature, attributes, power, and glory.

Songwriters will find this text unwieldy, and a congregation will find it downright clumsy, even with a nice melody.

In the same way prosaic theological propositions do not usually make good song lyrics simply because they are too direct and too plain. Songs, by their nature, require language evoking imagery and narrative rather than asserting abstract facts, and they teach by awakening the imagination to Kingdom realities.

Even the most theologically rich lyrics reach their best moments not in assertion but in evocation: they speak more profoundly in image than in proposition. For example, the unifying theme of Immortal, Invisible is the paradox of God’s immanence and transcendence—that he is both close to us and distant from us. The finest line of the first verse is In light inaccessible hid from our eyes, which is both a vivid image (that of blinding light) and also poetically ironic (insofar as light, normally the vehicle of sight, here precludes it). The second verse also peaks in a poetic line: Unresting, unhasting, and silent as light. The reader imagines the human states of repose and hurry, and then sweeps them both aside as inadequate to describe the activity of God. Light is normally silent, but here the simile illuminates the purity, energy, and life behind even God’s unperceived deeds: he is silent as light, not quiet as a mouse.¹

Holy, Holy, Holy is an instance of Trinitarian teaching in song. Nevertheless, the direct statement God in Three Persons, blessed Trinity, while edifying, comes off as static and formulary when compared with dramatic scenes like Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. This latter line draws upon things we can imagine: we have not seen the saints casting down their crowns (let alone the glassy sea) but we do know what crowns are and we have seen the ordinary sea, so our imaginations can make the leap and the text comes to life in our minds.