“Best Of” Best Quotes

With the Continuous Worship conference fast approaching, we thought we’d give it a little extra nudge by quoting some of our fav Harold Best quotes. To be honest, we folks in the worship dept at MH have kind of become Best-ians if there is such a thing. So much so that we’ve actually adopted some of the terms he uses in Unceasing Worship into our regular vernacular. Anyhoo, here’s Deacon Joel’s thoughts on his favorite quote to kick things off. Enjoy.

It’s incredibly hard to pin down my “favorite’ quote from Harold Best’s book “Unceasing Worship’, but this is one that really makes me think (watch out it’s a long one! From chapter 11):

“Sometimes I cannot help but think that in the present confusion we face the so called style and culture wars the Lord may be reintroducing us to the story of Babel. Here’s what I mean. The theological dilemma of Babel lay in human beings trying to reach the heavens by themselves, through artifactual efforts and in their way. God knew how dangerous this was and how blind the people were to the dangers. His solution, for that time, was to confuse and scatter them. Likewise today, when we spend so much time in our ecclesiastical efforts to do the construction from culture upward instead of from the kingdom downward, we too can become scattered and irreparably confused. We try this and we try that; we copy here and we “innovate’ there. All the while, the Holy Spirit is in a holding pattern until we are willing to re-own the triune God and the Author and Finisher.”

My impression of his statements here is that those of us who try to connect with culture are prone to making that connection an end in itself. All of the sudden (or in some cases, maybe not all of the sudden) the very thing we originally used to connect to culture for the sake of the gospel, becomes the gospel. All of the original styles of music, the sweet art and innovative video becomes primary and the gospel becomes the secondary. I know that at Mars Hill, though in our hearts we start with seeking God’s glory first, we can often slip into patterns of elevating worship style (in our case, it’s as an antithesis to Christian culture or “praise and worship’) above the seeking of the gospel. I know that this isn’t uncommon, even in churches around the country that love Jesus.

A friend who recently moved to Seattle and began attending Mars Hill shared some videos with me of him leading worship at his old church in Louisville, KY. He said that in his old church, though they did truly love Jesus, they had grown to a certain size and begun to be concerned with keeping butts in seats at a church in the Bible belt a very tall order. They used over-the-top video with the music because “that’s what megachurches do’ and imported music that all the other local churches imported because “that’s what people wanted to hear’ and “it’s what they could worship to’. The church catered to peoples’ “needs’ in hopes that more people would fill the seats. In all actuality, they had elevated this method of doing church and their cultural connection to Bible-belt Christian culture above the importance of the gospel. All of the work that they put forth every week was to this end, not to the end of staying true to scripture or doctrine or strengthening their individual relationships with Jesus.

The reason why I cite this recent example isn’t to point a finger, but to challenge all of us (including myself and Mars Hill) who seek to connect ourselves to culture for the sake of the gospel. Let us always work to keep the gospel of Jesus Christ as our priority above all else.