The Presbyterian Polis - Connecting Churches to Churches

The critic and the tradition

As I read the FineArtsLA interview of classical music critic Alan Rich, I thought, this is the kind of criticism that church bloggers need. Let me give a couple examples of what Rich says and then show you how a similar approach could work in our criticism of the church.

... There was a story in the New York Times not too long ago called “Continental Shift.” It has to do with Esa-Pekka and concerts of new music, the management of the Philharmonic and at CalArts and other schools, and it has a little bit to do with Mark and me.

FALA: Why is new music important?

AR: That’s pretty obvious: You can’t play Beethoven and Brahms all your life.

FALA: But aren’t many orchestras content to do that?

AR: They might be content today, but sooner or later people are going to notice.

FALA: Does the audience want to hear new music?

AR: The audience doesn’t want to hear new music exclusively any more than we do. And it doesn’t have to be a piece copyright 2007, but it has to have a sensibility of novelty and intelligent programming.

FALA: So “new music” can include a piece of 200-year-old music that’s underplayed?

AR: Yes, or a piece of 200-year-old music that is well known but that be presented in a different light. When Esa-Pekka did the nine symphonies of Beethoven in his programming last year, he accompanied every one with a new piece of music that in some way, because of the contrast, said something about the Beethoven symphony.

And,

AR: I was the last classical writer for Newsweek. In 1987 I was in Houston covering the world premiere of John Adams’ “Nixon in China.” I filed my story, and got a phone call an hour later: They were killing it for a Bruce Springsteen feature.

FALA: What’s changed? Why did Time and Newsweek have so many writers devoted to classical music a few decades ago, and today have none?

AR: Probably a reader poll or something decided it.

FALA: Then why do readers not want to read about classical music?

AR: I’m afraid I can’t answer that.

FALA: In the early days when Johnny Carson hosted “The Tonight Show,” the last 30 minutes was always devoted to an author. Now there would never be a writer on a late-night talk show. Haven’t you noticed a cultural shift of serious art losing grip over the average citizen?

AR: How could I not notice? It’s my bread and butter.

FALA: Then characterize in your own words what has happened.

AR: I don’t know why it’s happening. It may have been replaced by another kind of access to high culture, it may be because people get their culture from Amazon.com or their iPod.

I have couple of friends who are in musicology at UCLA, and I’ve read some of their term papers and I’m distressed at what passes for studying musicology now because it’s not what I took under Joe Kerman. They’re reading aesthetics. It seems to be secondary whether they listen to music or not.

FALA: It’s theory driven.

AR: It’s totally theory driven.

What Alan Rich sees in classical music is not only the music as an object to be listened to, but a tradition of music making that continues to expand people's perception of what that tradition means. This is quite similar to what Alasdair MacIntyre writes about in After Virtue concerning the difference between tradition understood by Edmund Burke as something fixed, and the understanding of tradition that Aristotle characterizes as the mastering of a craft under the tutelage of a master craftsperson.

In the church, we have the same dilemma. There is the view of tradition that it is a fixed object to be studying and protected from encroachment. It exists as the singing of the same hymns every Sunday because they are the purest representation of this tradition that has been passed on. However that tradition is dead or dying.  It is why those conservatives who are Burkean have lost the culture war to those who, unwittingly, have continue to take a new tradition and continue to build on and expand it.

Here Alan Rich is honors, respects and celebrates a thousand year old tradition of music making that continues to stretch its boundaries with new music. I've heard more than once that all contemporary Christian worship is the New Traditionalism. It is not an expansion but a replacement of what has been the tradition in the church.

What I also like in Rich's interview is the underlying notion that concert music in some sense must be difficult for it to be interesting. Not difficult in being intolerable, but difficult as a challenge to learn and experience what is being offered. This not what I find in the church. The challenge is to stay awake.

When Alan Rich describes what Essa-Pekka Salonen did with the Beethoven symphonies, mixing them with different music to put them into a different listening context, so that the audience would hear them in a fresh way, I thought of how this is what is missing in the church. Why is it? 

Why is that we don't understand our tradition as something living? Why is it that we think of the church and the Christian faith as something fragile and so weak that it must be housed in the protective, hermetically seal container of the church as we know it.

What Alan Rich does as a critic is love the tradition without becoming a shill for it.  He knows it, loves it, thinks deeply about it and practices a craft of criticism that elevates the perception and appreciation for the classical music tradition by all who come into contact with his words.

We are at an odd transition point in the life of the church. To a large extent, especially in my church tradition of Presbyterianism, we are dominated by my generation whose formative experience in the church has been a mixture of social activism and denominational schism.  What has been lost in the midst of the past forty years of conflict is a larger picture of what our tradition truly is.

As critics, we need to celebrate the tradition and demand that it grow within its tradition. This is happening because a new generation of leaders are emerging that see something there that my generation has lost sight of.  When I go to church on Sunday, I am brought into a tradition of music making that elevates my perception and appreciation of not only the past, but also the reach of the church.  We sing the traditional hymns. We do call and response prayers. We hear music out of a global milieu of church music that wakes me up to the presence of Christ in the service.  It has not always been this way, but it is now.  And I suspect, in many churches, this is also beginning to happen.

The critic's job is love the tradition while never succumbing to sycophancy.  To explore the inner reaches of the tradition to tell why it is and where it is going. Alan Rich is a good example of a master craftsman of the craft that we bloggers could all do well to follow.

HT:2Blowhards

A fresh wry look at the Presbyterian ministry

One of the hallmarks of the blogosphere is the opportunity to get to know someone through their writing.  Some times, you really just know what they are thinking, on an intellectual level. Sometimes the personality comes through, and that is what makes one person's blog more interesting to read than others.

That said, I want to direct your attention to Jan Edmiston's blog, The Church for Starving Artists, and especially this posting about the first of a new worship service at her church and this one about the emerging church movement.

I've known Jan a long time, though I haven't seen her in a long time either.  But what I really like about her blog is her humor. Imagine a Presbyterian minister who knows how to use humor.  Read Jan's blog and enjoy her wry look at life in the church.

Do You Want to Know?

If you are new to blogging, there is a simple way to know when a blog has been updated.

The technology is called a news aggregator or reader.  It is run by a program called RSS- Real Simple Syndication.

Go to Bloglines, and sign up for their webbased service.  Then, when you find a site that you'd like to know when it is updated, just click either on Bloglines subscribe link that you can download or presumably on the blog page there will be a syndication link.  If you look down the left hand side of this page, you'll see that link.  Just click on it.  Then you'll need to add the Bloglines identifier.  It is a simple little program that will notify you when a site has been updated. 

Right now I have 32 sites subscribed.  I won't read them all today, but over the course of a couple weeks I will.  Some I'll read every day though.

So, syndicate this site, and you'll be able to know when I update The Presbyterian Polis.

Weblogs and Church Communication

In virtually every church and organization that I have served as a consultant, staff person or interim pastor, the one universal issue - apart from human sinfulness - is communication.

Communication in the context of a church tends to focus on getting adequate information out to members in a timely manner so they will be sufficiently informed in order to enhance their involvement in the life of the church.

Traditionally, the Sunday worship bulletin and weekly/monthly/bi-monthly newsletter has served as the means of getting information out to the congregation.  In most instances, the complaint from the church is that no one reads or pays attention to these means of communication. 

I usually say to clients that communication is a two-way street:  You have to present the information and they have to read it.  However, the church has to present it in a manner that invites them to read it.  My untested assumption is that information gets disseminated primarily by word-of-mouth, rather than by print.  That doesn't mean you should give up print, but that you build your communication strategy around how people talk with one another. 

Over the past decade or so, churches have picked up a new tool for communicating information - the church website.  These tend to be static displays of uninteresting, though accurate information about the church, its organization, mission, programs and services. While it does communicate information, it is not an easy platform for engaging the congregation with increased involvement as a result.

There is a rising perception that websites are designed, not for communication purposes, but to demonstrate the creativity of the web designer.  (Go read The One-Minute Site to understand this better.)  As a result, most sites - yes, even mine - are little more than brochures that give too much information, and do not engage the reader interactively.

This is where the advent of weblogs has the potential to change this.  Hear me, has the potential doesn't mean that it will.  People still have to go there, still have to read your blog, and get engaged in the material presented.  (This is what I am trying to do with this site.)

What a weblog can do for a church, one that doesn't replace the website, but acts as a doorway or portal to your site, is that it provides people a way to interact with the church in ways that a church bulletin, newsletter or website cannot.

Look down at the bottom of the posting, and you'll see a hyperlink for comment.  Go click on it.  What you'll find is the same posting, but now you have a place to offer your own comments, advice, experiences or criticisms.  And you can do it, and everyone else can too.

Weblogs are a good tool for team communication.  Better than Instant Messenger, that requires simultaneous participation to really be effective.  Here, I can post a thought.  You can comment.  And someone else can comment on your comment.  As a result, we all are being able to speak to one another, and do so from the comfort of our office, home, PDA, phone, etc.

Weblogs provide churches an immediacy of communication that no other form of communication can, outside of conversation in the parking lot or on the telephone. 

Let me describe how I am using this technology.

I am the scoutmaster for my sons' Boy Scout troop.  I have set up a weblog for the troop.  Now if you go to that link you'll see announcements of the sort you could find in a newsletter or bulletin.  We don't have a staff, so producing a newsletter has been an arguous task irregularly produced.  With the weblog, all I need is for the information to be emailed to me, and within a matter of a couple minutes, I can have it online.  This is particularly helpful as we draw families from three different counties.  We have homeschoolers, public and private school kids.  When the weather is bad, some may be out of school that day, and others not.  So this will allow us to post changes in our schedule late in the day, and parents can access it, and know whether we are going to meet.

Now the same holds true for a weblog as for your printed material.  You can publish it, but will they read it. 

One final topic related to church communication and weblogs.

If you set up a weblog for each committee and program/pastoral staff person, you are also opening up another aspect of communication that gets short shrift in the church.  Hugh Hewitt, lawyer, radio talk show host, blogger extraordinaire and evangelical Christian, has written - BLOG: Understanding the Information Reformation That's Changing Your World - an excellent book on the phenomenon of blogging.  As I read his book, I began to write down the benefits of blogging.  This is my list, not Hewitt's.

Interactivity -  Already noted above.  This could reduce the need for some meetings.

Accountability - It allows errors in fact to be corrected in a timely manner. 

Personal - As our lives become more activity focused, and there is less time for inter-personal interaction, here is a way that we can better know one another, our interests, concerns, and passions.

Influence -  If as a pastor you are interested in influencing your congregation, and the Sunday morning sermon, and various Bible studies do not seem sufficient, then with a blog, you have a means of sharing your thoughts on a variety of topics.  You can use a blog to have a follow up conversation about your sermon.  There are many ways you can influence people through the use of blogs.

Weblogs are personal. They are not just a fancy newsletter.  And the more personal, in the sense of reflecting the personality and voice of the blogger, the better.  People want to engage people, not technology.  So one of the skills that bloggers must develop is the ability to write with authenticity, integrity and realness. 

I hope this gets you curious.  If you have questions, comment.  I'll respond back.

Together In Christ's Service.