A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship Part 1 (Lim, Ruth)

[Laughter] Welcome to the Theology in Motion podcast. Join us for conversations about the theology of worship, its practice, culture, and design. The Theology in Motion podcast is by the Center for Worship Leadership, Christ College, Concordia University Irvine in California.

[Music]

Hey there, everybody. Hope you're all doing well. Before we get into our episode today, I just want to take a quick moment to invite you to our upcoming summit. The Center for Worship Leadership has something called the Worship Arts Leader Initiative. We have a gathering in Chandler, Arizona and South Phoenix coming up October 11th through 13th. Among our speakers will be Zack Hicks, sharing from the worship pastor and also his new book, *Worship by Faith Alone*. That's to be pretty exciting, pretty fun to be together. The conference itself is full of different opportunities to hear speakers, to go to breakout sessions, to explore some musical opportunities. There's even some songwriting coaching. It's been a great time. Check out our website, cwl-cwlonline.org, if you're interested in learning more. And if you're local, there are even options for one-day intensives. I think you'll like it. All right, enough of that. Check it out and hope you enjoyed this conversation with Lester Ruth and Suihan Lim.

Welcome to Theology in Motion. My name is Steve Zank, on behalf of the Center for Worship Leadership at Concordia University in Irvine. I'm glad that you're here today. We're delighted to have two distinguished guests, Doctors Lester Ruth and Sui Hong Lim. Lester Ruth is a historian of Christian worship. He works as a research professor of Christian worship at Duke Divinity School. Before arriving at Duke in 2011, he taught at the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies, Asbury Theological Seminary, and Yale Divinity School. Dr. Hong Lim is the Deer Park Associate Professor of Sacred Music at Emmanuel College in Toronto and the director of the Master's of Sacred Music program. Before joining Emmanuel in 2012, Sui Hong served as assistant professor of church music at Baylor University and lecturer of worship, liturgy, and music at Trinity Theological College in Singapore. Now, together, these two have been researching the history of contemporary worship, or contemporary praise and worship—we'll get into the terms today, the rather important part of the conversation. Their latest book is *A History of Contemporary Praise and Worship: Understanding the Ideas That Reshaped the Protestant Church*, and Baker calls it a landmark volume. Okay, well, Baker printed it, but I'll tell you I myself and many others absolutely agree about the importance of this work. And so it's a joy to be with you both today, guys. Thanks for taking the time to have this conversation with me.

Our pleasure.

Uh, well, let's start. It seems to me that one of the fundamental insights in your book, in the history of this movement, is actually identified as more than one movement. You have two major movements you identify. How did you come to the conclusion that there were these more than one streams that were leading into what we call modern worship in some places? And what are those streams? You want me to start, sweetheart?

Please do.

Um, it was a realization that we had as we were going through the material, the primary material, especially writings of the people who were trying to start it and advocate it and spread it. And what we began to notice is that even though they might be describing a way of worship that, when done, looks awfully similar, when they were explaining why we ought to worship that way, the reasons were very, very different, including especially, um, what scriptures and the scriptural support, um, and and we were actually attending a worship technology conference together in Dallas, trying to figure out a way to organize this rather complex history so that the readers didn't get whiplash having to go from here to there, you know, in the course of several pages. And it dawned on us, why don't we just separate out essentially what these two stories are? Uh, tell one of them, back up, tell the other one, and then finally tell how they kind of flowed into each other in the 1990s. And so it really was working closely with the materials themselves and noticing the different motivations and explanations that the people were giving. Anything you want to add to that, Sui Hong?

Yeah, let me chime in to say that when my previous experience was a church music director in Singapore, and when I was a music director, the Methodist church there had two different kinds of contemporary praise and worship service. There was a morning one that made use of the song, and its primary purpose was, well, this will be an alternate service form compared to the traditional worship, Methodist worship approach. There was no speaking in tongues; there was no uh, calling for healings and things like that. But then there was an evening service, and that was the one that they used the same song, but they were doing things like, well, we will enter the presence of God with praise; we will do speaking tongues; we will do deliverance; we will do prayer ministry and things like that. So even though the two different services were using the same song, the approach, the theological undergirding, were different. So I didn't know how to phrase that until we met up, you know, at the technology conference in Dallas. I said, ah, okay, and it struck a note with me. So say, okay, that's the way to go.

Yeah, I think it's such a critical insight. The way you said that is so interesting. There's an anthropologist named Geertz. He talks about thin description and thick description, and I think this is kind of key aspect of this research you've done. It's a thin description of something, like a photograph of what's happening without really understanding the meaning behind everything. So Geertz says, if you witness a boy blinking with his eye, like a wink, well, maybe that person is having an involuntary reaction; maybe that person is winking at a friend because he's got some kind of thing happening; or maybe there's a boy watching the second boy wink and is winking to make fun of that boy. You know, there's all kinds of meanings behind it. And I think this is actually a critical place to say this is where these two different streams come into play when you realize you might see, like you said, Sui Hong, all these externals that appear similar, but really what's going on couldn't be more different potentially. So let's talk about those streams. Sui Hong, what would you say then when you got into it? What, how did you identify what are the two streams? Lester?

Let's go to our favorite website. Yes, I think the probably the labels for the streams are my creations. So I'll, okay, so, um, we used an analogy of two rivers kind of flowing parallel to each other, and one of them we call the Gift River, and the other one we call the Gap River, as a way of identifying kind of, um, the core thought in each one of them. So the Gift River people see this new way of worship as a gift from God, something that's being restored back to the church, with an emphasis on praise and, through the praise, being able to experience the presence of God. So the motivation, the framework, the talking is very kind of God-oriented, in a way, this is how the church experiences the presence of God in the world today, especially when it's gathered for worship. The other river we call the Gap River, and those folks really are concerned about what they see as an increasing gap between older ways of worship and where contemporary people are right now, because of shifts in culture and society, um, and so their concern is, uh, the presence of the people, we might say the literal presence of the people. They want to make sure that people come and will stay. And so the worship adaptations occur in the Gap River, not in order to facilitate the presence of God, even though they would be concerned with that, but in order to make worship attractive and appealing, uh, to people, uh, to new contemporary people. I mean, if someone would say, well, that sounds awfully artificial, I mean, what we discovered is that there was actually a similar motivation behind all the surge and new Bible translations and paraphrases of the 1960s and 70s, increasing concern that in a modern world the King James Version could no longer be a popular version that people could actually understand. And so you get a whole surge of new versions. What's happening in the Gap River in terms of worship is just a reframing of worship in order to try to make it relevant and accessible and understandable to people. So those are the two rivers, the Gift River, uh, and the Gap River.

Wonderful. And I, and thank you. The listener, uh, these two gentlemen have agreed to be on this podcast, uh, in two parts, and so today we get a focus just on that first river, the Gift River, and I really appreciate that, and our listeners appreciate that, getting more into depth in these two rivers. And let's just start then maybe in a backwards way. This is a history. Let me start with today's practices. If we wanted to understand where the Gift River has ended up for us today, how might we identify that movement in today's practices? How do you think that shaped music, music sets, and the leading of music, Sui Hong? Because that will be a critical part, I think, right now.

Most of the time the Gift people will actually be their, their worship set or their music set will be musically driven. They are not so much constrained by the order. I think if you are Lutheran in the Concordia, you know what I'm talking about, about the fourfold pattern. That's all though they're going to be working from. Well, for the Gift people, that's not their concern. Their concern would be, would this sunset enable our congregation to encounter the divine? That would be their primary concern. So for them, uh, Bob Webber would say is a two-part worship form, praise and worship and the sermon, and that's how they would work that way. So they are not so much concerned about gathering, proclamation, responds to the word, and then sending. That is not their primary concern. And most of the time you find—we took the opportunity to analyze music from Hillsong—we are looking at possibly four to six songs, and you can see that there's a prayer section by the basis of the temple, and then there's a section on worship again by the basis of the temple. And so you find that this particular form of music driven is actually popularized, uh, within the Gift people that they experience now. Tomorrow, maybe I can talk a little bit about how music functions within the, the, the other dead people. Right? I mean, they are slightly different. I would surmise to say that they would be under constraint of the order, and you find sometimes find them having a praise and worship segment, uh, plus or juxtapose within the order. So it doesn't have the kind of function in terms of, we want to encounter the divine through our song set. That's not that function; it's a slightly different function for the, uh, the other group of people. I hope that helps.

Yeah, sweetheart, let me toss out something to see if you agree or disagree with it. Um, of the songwriters of contemporary worship songs, it seems to me that most of them actually come from the Gift River side of things, that the Gap people tend not to write the real popular songs.

Yeah, well, the Gap people tend to write musicals in the past, in the 60s, 70s, Ralph Carmichael and all that. So their focus is much more on evangelism, much more on outreach. So when you look back in the past, in the 60s, 70s, where there were continental singers, there were musicals out there. Those were the Gap people because they were using media to reach out and draw in young people into the church. So you find out that they normally don't write what we call praise and worship songs. If they don't do that, they write musicals, and somehow these works, these musicals, end up being a chorus in, uh, praise and worship form. But if we're looking at Hillsong, Bethel, Elevation, Passion, all the British worship together folks, even the, um, Stream of Praise, the Chinese, those are all Gift people.

Right?

All Gift people.

Yeah. Yeah, they, they Gift people are the one who would say, I, oh, I, God gave me a song last night, and let's try it this morning on a rehearsal. They are with that kind of mentality that they will do it, um, you don't find that in the Gap people. Gap people who really want to polish down and really tighten the thing, they are typical composition major people, let's put it that way, whereas a Gift people will be a folks singer coming in there and watch jeans and say, God gave me a song, let's try this. That's exactly so. If you understand where they're coming from, uh, then you begin to hear the songs, but there's no less of the logical content, and we can tell that as well, you know, um, the Gift people songs tend to say, I want to encounter God. Yeah, I want to experience God in a real way, whereas the Gap people tend to be, we sing about the praises of God, you sing about God's goodness, and not so much like I focus in that sense. So it sounds like you might even be able to say that if you encounter worship music on the radio, per se, that there's a good chance that a lot of what you hear there is, is rooted in this, this movement, potentially.

At the very least, you'll, if you listen for a few minutes, you will have heard something rooted in this movement, most likely. Would we agree with that?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, on radio you will hear people like Amy Grant, Michael W. Smith, all these people, they do write, they do write nine songs, but most of their writing, if you look at the lyrics, it's very much an encounter with God. So when you guys go back then in the history and your research, where did this come from? Where did it start in this modern American movement?

Well, it didn't start in America.

Over to you, Leicester.

Good. I don't want to brag about Canada, but it didn't work. It's Canadian.

Yeah, nor I mean North American.

Good, good. You know, because most people think when they think the start of this, they've got long-haired hippies in Southern California, right? And and they're in our story, but they're actually at the end of Chapter 3, I think it is. And uh, when we were designing the chapters, we intentionally delayed them to the end of Chapter 3, just so mentioning them when way lay everybody else's attention. So it's Canadian. It's Pentecostal. So the root sensibility that you praise in order to experience the manifest presence of God is a long-standing sort of Pentecostal sensibility. What it did is it took a particular shape in the late 1940s, especially, um, under the teaching of one Canadian Pentecostal minister, Reg Lazelle, who developed this idea into a fairly robust, complete biblical theology, and it got attached to a revival that broke out in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, of all places. So you know, most people when they think of this history, they think Orange County, California, Los Angeles, you know, they don't think, um, suburban Vancouver, right? And a small town in Saskatchewan. But you know, once the theology got attached to the revival, it very quickly disseminated across Canada and the United States, and the Pentecostals caught up in this revival were very missionary oriented, and so they were quickly taking international trips, exporting both the theology and the emerging practices from the theology, uh, to Europe, Africa, South America, um, and Asia.

Yeah. Can you talk about that, please?

Say it is, it is the theology, it's not the song. So you'll find that during the early movement period, the 1940s up to the 1960s, they were singing songs that we would be familiar with. There's a fountain filled with blood, Amazing Grace, and in four-part harmony. That was the, they was using the same song, but the theology undergirding the songs have changed, and that's something that I think our listeners need to be aware of. This movement is not music; it is theology driven. And that was how it became so fascinating for the two of us because no matter what they're singing, we can detect the theology that they were using, and that gives us a sense of consistency as well. I hope that helps.

Absolutely. I think it's one of the critical parts of your book is as how you draw out these, these movements are rooted in theological convictions and ways of interpreting the scriptures. Could we talk about, uh, Reg Lazelle a little bit? I found that the story, the story in the book about how he came to this revelation is really interesting one if we could tell it.

Sure.

Um, so he's a retired businessman from Toronto, and he had done some informal speaking in the Ontario area—that's the province—and he got an invitation from the district superintendent for the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada and the British Columbia region, which is the very far western part, Pacific boundary, lovely part of Canada, by the way. But um, um, all of Canada is lovely, I'll just say that in case any Canadians—so he goes out there, and he gets to his first church, which is in a little town, um, uh, Abbotsford, if I remember correctly.

And that writes me home.

Yeah, that's right. Okay. And the pastor's sick, and so he's got to leave the entire service, and it's going terribly. And so if you're Pentecostal, the last thing you want is just a completely flat service where God's not doing anything. So midweek, he goes in, and he, he's fasting, and he goes to the church early in the morning, and he's just praying, and he's praying, and he's praying, and this verse comes to mind, Psalm 22:3, "Thou art holy, One that inhabits the praises of Israel." And initially he thought, that's why we're not having a move of God, God is holy, I am not, and I have unconfessed, unrepented for sin in my life. So he spends the longest time confessing every possible sin that he could think of that he had done, and he's not feeling any sort of stirring in his heart, and his mind goes back to the verse, and he says, well, maybe it's the second part, "Thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel," God inhabits praise. So we said, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to spend the rest of the day filling this space with the praise of God. And he literally starts walking around the entire church building, including the bathrooms—or I forgot what Canadians would call them—

Washrooms.

Washrooms. Yes, going into the washrooms. That's the way his testimony is. Why, I mean, this is dedication to extend the praise of God even into the washrooms. The funniest part of the story is when he's telling it, he says, and I lingered at the piano because the pianist was kind of cold.

[Laughter]

Just a double dose of praise.

Yeah, yeah. And he continues on, and even as the people start to gather for that evening service, he goes up on the platform, kneels by his chair, continues the praise until the start of the service, that he stands up, turns around, announces the first hymn, and midway through the first hymn, a woman in the congregation, the Holy Spirit falls on her, and she begins to speak in tongues, and then to another and another and another and another. And that Lazelle says, this is it, God. I'm gonna put words in his mouth. God shows up when we dedicate ourselves to praising Him. And uh, he spent the rest of the week with his Bible, concordance. He didn't know Hebrew; he didn't know Greek; he was a businessman, had no theological, official, technical theological training, but he looks up every Bible passage on the word praise that he can find. Uh, Psalm 22:3 holds the centerpiece of his theology. He soon links that up with Hebrews 13:5 or 13:15. Oh, goodness, I used to know these off the top of my head, to offer the sacrifice of praise with our lips. Essentially, he sees that as a command to praise whether or not we are feeling like it.

Yeah. Continually, I think is the key in that idea.

Yeah. And so what he's reacting against is an aspect of Pentecostal pondering that he knew and that he had heard about, that you only do something if you felt the immediate movement of God, and he said, well, that's poppycock because we have an explicit biblical command of God in the Hebrew text, and we have an explicit biblical promise from God in the Psalms text. And so whether or not God's people feel like it, they need to start their services with an extended period of praising, and then when the presence of God is felt and experienced, that's when you shift into worship. And so he's developing that theology and those practices in 1946, 1947. After he returns home after his circulating for that short tour through British Columbia, the district superintendent invites him back out to pastor a church, actually just right across the Fraser River from Abbotsford, uh, which he does, and then he gets another pastorate in Vancouver, uh, year or two after that, and, um, you know, one of one of the interesting backstories that we learned is that the founder of CCLI, which everyone will recognize, guess who his pastor was and in whose church he grew up and whose Bible college he went to, and it was Reg Lazelle. And so when we interviewed, uh, Howard Versinski, the founder of CCLI, he's just, I think we surprised him that we didn't want to ask him about CCLI; we wanted to ask him about Reg Lazelle, and just talked over and over and over again about how influential that man and his theology was on his life.

Amazing.

Yeah. And so what we've done now as we told the story is we've really rooted this movement in an interpretation of biblical theology, and I think what's what you've done is you've shown that this founder of the movement in some ways was trying to trust God in what he believed to be God's promises, right? If God, take God at His word and started this theologically, then I want to ask you, Sui Hong, as this—Can I stop you right there? I'm sorry, I interrupted you. You don't mind. You know, if you think about it, the people who originate this are all what academics would call Free Church, yeah, and the critical thing for Free Church Protestants, and it's been this way for 500 years, is grappling with scripture to figure out how to worship. And as soon as we latched on to this, it's like, yeah, this makes perfectly good sense to make developing biblical theology to shape worship the centerpiece of the story.

Um, yeah. And in fact, it's almost a little surprising that no one else had really picked up on that because it's there, and it's natural to the story. That's what I was trying to say.

Yeah, thank you. As I asked Sui Hong, as you think about then this, this theological movement and this foundation, what kind of skill sets do the musicians at this movement need to develop to support it? Were there specific, uh, things that they started to do to fulfill this theology in the, in the midst of the church?

Okay, so for this question, I'm going to take off my former academic professor, sacred music head, and put on my head is a charismatic keyboardist. What I will say is sensitivity to the Spirit, because there is a move, the person who is going to be engaged in this, uh, act of worship and providing the leadership for this particular work really needs to understand flow. And I think that's something that Lester and this team of doctoral students have written on, but it is this ability to sense the movement of the Spirit. How long do you want to carry at the high point so that the engagement with the divine actually happens? Um, so it is not as simple as, well, I'm just going to play the Bach choral prelude, and then when it's done, it's done. No, it basically means I'm going to play the Bach choral, and I might be prompted to go back to the second system and do that again, or I might do the third system at a slower pace and let the people feel the individual notes. So is this act and flow that, that sensitivity that needs to be experienced, and this is something that can be taught, let's put it that way, but it takes time; it takes effort; it requires a person, uh, to have the sense of sensitivity that is there, the feeling of the particular energy in the music. That's the way to do it.

Yeah. Is that, is that because then to understand it theologically, the musician is, is helping the people sing and helping the people praise more specifically, praise God, and in that, in the praising, there's a certain place where the praising gets, is, is intense, the right word, or, uh, gets the right level that that God's manifest presence and that theology is interpreted to have to be, to be there now. Is that right? And so trying to navigate towards that space, like, for example, if, if, for, for most musicians, if they were to be serving—

In the church, and you gave before their blessed assurance by Fannie Crosby. Let's see, I'm picking himself because that's the way I teach uh, traditional musicians to be able to to move in the flow. Most of the time, people were just, well, this is verse one, we just do verse one, chorus, verse two, chorus, and just umpteen until four verses are done and the chorus is done, right? My advice or my teaching would be, look at the context of where this song is within the order, within the music. So I'm speaking to liturgical musicians now. If you know that this song is going to enter into a time of prayer, and the chorus goes, "Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine," oh what the—is why don't you capitalize that one, you know? So there's a way of where you can change the color of the music; you can change whether it be done by a soloist that just anchors and brings you into the time of prayer. Keep in mind the early movement were using hymns; they were not singing uh, songs from Hillsong; they were not; they were singing hymns, and they made use of the hymns to magnify and glorify God and anticipate God's presence. So if they have done that in the 1940s, we can do that today as well. So music is not just an artifact that we go, well, one to ten kind of thing, and and just play without any fear. Every stanza needs to be different; that's the way that we need to train our church musicians. Every organism to understand registration of the organ, well, the band cannot be playing every verse; they need to take turns; they need to move in and out, right? Because if they play all the time at the same time, it's called noise; it's not music, nature. So yeah, I mean, Paul Baloche is right when he was teaching how how do you work as a band, and and I think we as musicians need to understand this principle as well. Yeah, and that music has a particular purpose.

Yeah, yeah. I I think that's the need of sensitivity to the spirit, the place of the music in the in the worship, and what did this function and go from there. And I find interesting the story with with Reg in his case; he he was doing something very specific with the music, and it seems like the initial response to his movement, especially among Pentecostals, actually was very negative, right? They would come by his church, and they would throw rocks and fruit through the open window, and they're very against this movement. Could we talk then about how how did this—I know you call it the Latter Rain movement, I think in history, right?—the Latter Rain movement, how did it become more accepted by mainstream Pentecostalism? What was that that route like? Um, by disassociation. So the Latter Rain people and the established Pentecostal denominations got crossways with each other fairly early on, and there are official denunciations of the Latter Rain movement by the Pentecostal Assemblies of Canada and by the Assemblies of God and other people. So um, initially there was taint by association, so even the theology wasn't all that acceptable, yeah, and notwithstanding the fact that they would make fun of the particular practices. So what happened in the 1950s, but increasingly in the 60s, is you started having some other Pentecostals pick up and adopt the theology who had more agreeable pedigrees, I might call it that. In the book, we highlight Judson Cornwall especially, and I've been doing some additional work on him; I think he's an especially important figure, a long time, lifelong Assemblies of God minister who was at a particular point in his ministry; in fact, he took his last church, which he didn't really want to take, uh, after God told him that if he took it, God would show him a safe way into the divine presence. And so he's in his church, and an old Bible college friend shows up one day, a missionary to South America, Argentina, who had himself gotten had picked up on all this Latter Rain approach, and he teaches that to Judson Cornwall, um, who buys into it; he learns it; uh, he imbibes it; he teaches it to his own congregation, even though he felt like a complete novice, he says in his writings. And Cornwall was strategically, or if you want to interpret it theologically, providentially placed at just the right moment in the late 60s and early 70s to be right on the precipice of a cross-denominational speaking and writing ministry. [Music] And so you had in Judson Cornwall, and he's not the only one; he's probably the most prolific of these sort of people; you have someone who is able to mediate between the Latter Rain approach and theology with broader Pentecostalism. And Judson Cornwall is actually heavily involved in the charismatic renewal movement in mainline denominations. And so through Cornwall and others like him, you have a dissemination of the Latter Rain approach without the taint of Latter Rain association, um, and uh, just put it simply, well, if you want to interpret it theologically, the all the gift people would say, of course, it's going to spread because this is God's doing, and this is God's restoration of a biblical way of worship. A more sociological explanation might just be simple: people could do it; they could do it easily; they could do it well; and they had deep experiences of God when they did it. And so the more it spread, uh, the more people who got associated with it, and the more people that got associated with it, the more it spread. It was after you tried it out; it sounds like people often experienced the uh, manifest presence of God; they as that as that praise would one went on; they had seems like they're having a positive experience with it, which they interpreted to be the manifest presence of God, and then it from there continued to spread.

It's interesting to me is it seems like through Justin Cornwall and people like him who are more acceptable to Pentecostal and mainline and other people not; it seemed like not much change about the theology; there's additions maybe about different uh, tabernacle theologies and typological interpretations of things, but it seems like the the kernel of theology wasn't changing through the passing and the dissemination; it was the same theology. Is that true? Would you say that's the case? Yeah, um, I guess my way of saying it is if what Reg LaZelle and the Latter Rain folks built in the 40s and 50s was a pretty compact um, ranch-style house, you know, but what happens in this late 60s, 70s, and 80s is that that core is still there; it just gets built upon and enlarged and increased. And what we started noticing, Sweet Hong, and I'm part of the organizing principle, is it seems like everybody and their mother in this gift river eventually comes back to either citing, quoting, or alluding to Psalm 22:3. Yep. God inhabits the praises of his people. In fact, I had one of my doctoral students recently sent me—it was Debbie Wong, Sweet Home—sent me a YouTube clip of Leland, the well-known worship leader right now, and sure enough, he was singing a song that was based on Psalm 22:3. Um, this is so much in the water, um, and I personally knew—I we were really onto something when I was talking to one of my divinity school students here at Duke; he was in my intro to worship class, lifelong Pentecostal, Church of God, Cleveland, and I asked him one day, I said, "Have you ever heard anyone say that God inhabits the praises of his people?" And I can remember—I remember explicitly what Drew Luke said to me; he looked at me right in the eyes and he said, "Every single Sunday of my entire life I have heard that verse cited at church." And that's when I knew, okay, we're we're not just making up something; we've we've hit a core aspect that's going to stay steady, notwithstanding the changes and how it's done, not with change, and notwithstanding the changes in the song repertoire, notwithstanding the addition of mega-church versions of this, notwithstanding the addition of all the technology; ultimately, it comes down to praise God, experience God's presence, dedicate yourself to worship and adoring him; then that's what has stayed steady since the late 40s.

And I had a question about this, and maybe you will have an answer because it's not in the book, and maybe it's just not researched, or you let me know, but I was really curious about the Latter Rain movement in connection to how we do this today. Uh, some people, as they experience this gift theology of worship, the idea that if we praise God in the right manner, then his manifest presence will be amongst us; some people associate that with the Word of Faith movement, the prosperity gospel movement in America, and I wonder if that was a modern trend, but then I was reading uh, some work by uh, uh, Kate Bowler on the American uh, the prosperity gospel, and she traces some of those movements back to um, the Latter Rain movement. So I was wondering, as we're tracing this movement forward in Psalm 22 as a theological centerpiece, are there also tagalongs of prosperity gospel theology coming alongside, or is it a separate strand? Um, I'm gonna handle this if that's okay, sweetheart. Is that okay? Um, they're running parallel to each other, and the prosperity gospel folks see something in Reg LaZelle's theology that is in such good harmony with what it is that they emphasize that they can graft—graft prosperity thinking on this Latter Rain praise and worship thinking. And it comes down to the instrumental nature of the praise; so that's implicit in LaZelle's original theology is there's a causative instrumentality there; if we praise God, will be faithful to God's promise to come and dwell among us. Yeah, and it's that causative instrumentality, cause and effect; the prosperity gospel works on cause and effect, and um, and they like it; they pick up on it; they are—they bring their own articulation to it, um, it—it's almost if I can shift the analogy to languages; the prosperity gospel approach is almost like a regional accent, okay, to this Latter Rain theology. Yeah, okay. Um, I could say, um, "Sweet Hong, come here, please." That's one way of saying it. Um, I can say, "Sweet Hong, get yourself over here," or I can say, "Sweet Hong, get here; come over here, Sweet Hong; get here right now," okay? I'm saying the same thing, um, and for the listeners, I'm not making fun of people who speak like that; that's my background, okay? I'm from that part of Texas; I just imitated every one of my relatives, so I'm not making fun of them. Um, the prosperity folks, they like that instrumentality, um, in fact, I was thinking about a quote from one of them today: "Prayer asks something of God; praise takes it from God." Yeah, and it's a different accent; LaZelle never quite goes there, never quite goes there, but um, quite goes there, there, there. I do speak English, folks, um, but it—he bumps up right next to it, and what the—the boundary LaZelle bumps up right next to is a boundary that prosperity gospel shares, and they can take that notion and run with it. That was a long answer to a simple question, but I hope it made sense. It was—I thought it was very, very helpful. It sounds like there's a way in which uh, the American prosperity gospel movement is also a theological movement, having their own verses; they're not the same verses as this movement, but they would say, "Hey, this way of worshiping really works for us in our movement as well."

Oh, absolutely. And and you start—who did we highlight in the book? A fellow named Charles Trombley from the 1970s, very clearly a prosperity thinker, and you can see him picking up this Latter Rain theology and doing his own articulation of it, yeah, um, and publishing his material, his own approach to it in the 1970s. I have some more thoughts about it for our own listeners who who tend to be conservative Lutherans, or any, you know, we have some of those other people who are in art in that tradition as well, but for my sake, I'm really curious about one part of this story as you move into modern practice, especially is what do you do when you are taking these practices that are fairly, you know, they're everywhere; these practices uh, popular songs are based on this theology; what do you do when you are trying to adopt the practices but you you can't adopt the theology? It makes sense. So, you know, for example, there's all these great songs out there, written in great instrumentation, great music, exciting people like it, uh, but there's a sense of—there's churches and denominations that say, "We don't agree with this interpretation of Psalm 22:3, but we like your music." You know, how how do we navigate some of that? I got an answer, Sweet Hong, and do you want—do you want to go—your goal? I think for the more classic folks, I think the the root concern is the same, which is the sacramental presence of God in worship. The more classic approach, however, is to attach that to the sacraments. So I think where the creative thinking really needs to be done is the appropriation of some of these practices in the particular location of the liturgy where our expectations for encountering God's presence is already high and strong and righteous, especially at the Eucharist. I mean, think about it. Yeah, a Eucharistic prayer is essentially an extended time of praise and thanksgiving, at the end of which we expect to encounter the presence of God. If you frame it that way, LaZelle's saying, yeah, that makes perfectly good sense to me. The difference is is we've also got bread and wine involved in the process of um, you know, so I had a simple thing—I, you know—um, why why should we assume that everything done in the Eucharistic liturgy can only be said once? Can't have cyclical repetitions to them? Can be unconcerned with flow, right? And this is purely objective without any connection to the emotional state of the people. Um, I think that's where Mainliners have something to learn from this um, Latter Rain praise and worship theology. Um, I'm in on what Lester is saying; nobody tells us—not the border worship that we can only sing one opening hymn; we need to get out of that frame, right? You can see a medley of songs; you can see a medley of hymns and a medley of choruses for opening, I mean, and then if you really open the gateway, then straight songs like, "This is the day I uh uh I come forward in joy and thanksgiving," these are all songs in the contemporary worship world that we can actually work in, and who says that we cannot blend the two together? Have we ever thought about doing uh, a contemporary praise and worship song—we've crowned him with many crowns? It is possible; again, it takes a skilled musician to weave the two together; it is not impossible. I have done that when I taught at Baylor, and I blew them away when I put organ with bass guitar, jamboree, and the acoustic guitar, and they did the opening worship set. It is possible to marry both worship songs and hymns; it just takes practice.

I I've played around with moving the location of the worship—praise and worship set. So at my previous school, we had um, because there was—it was a little town; there was no church in town at all that had an Easter Vigil, so we had an Easter Vigil at the school, and uh, we wanted to do it in a contemporary style, so we had to ask a question: where do you put the praise and worship set, the extended time of congregational singing in a classic order of an Easter Vigil? We put it after the proclamation of the Gospel, after this continual build-up through scripture and like to this majestic proclamation that Christ has risen, and he has risen indeed; that's when it felt like appropriate to spend 25 minutes in congregational song. Um, the rubrics don't disallow that; they just don't quite countenance that, um, but I I can tell you it worked, and I think we need to get out of the North American minute limit in our worship services. If you really want to do engaging in music making so that the people can encounter God's presence, and you want to function within the order, it can be done, but it cannot be done in 60 minutes, so we need to break that mean. Um, and for me, I find that if if the service is genuine and engaging, people will be willing to spend hours—15 minutes, an hour, 30 minutes—in that particular experience, and they will come back and ask for more because it engages them. So yeah, it sounds like a message. Yeah, so we're saying that this theology may have driven musicians and church leaders to develop new skills, like how to do certain kinds of flow, how to attend to—we may be called vibe—whatever those that means, um, but uh, those those things could be used as as tools in many different traditions; you're just trying to maybe achieve different ends, but uh, the tools can be very similar, and I appreciate that. We we had a fun experiment; I don't think I've told you about this, Sweet Hong, at my my class about a month—month and a half ago; we were talking about how do you preside at a Eucharistic service in a contemporary way, and I said, "Let's call in the question that we can only do one thing at a time." So I got the class to start singing the really popular song um, by Snatch, "Waymaker," oh, we make a—yes, you know, which is a highly repetitive song; it goes over—in fact, the song itself embodies praise and worship; it starts with praise, and then it goes to worship in the structure of the song itself. So I said, "Y'all just sing this song," and we were using a YouTube clip that had all the lyrics up there, and I said, "I'm going to pray a Eucharistic prayer over the top of it," and it worked marvelously; they—the students just told me one of—and that we were just practicing; we didn't even have the Eucharistic elements set out; we just wanted to see if it would work, but the overlay of a strong praise and worship congregational song like that with a classic Eucharistic prayer, it was hand in glove; it fit well; it felt totally contemporary. I mean, the one thing I was doing—I was praying it extemporaneously, so there was—there was a better flow than what you got from just reading a written text; I was attentive to the emotional ebbs and flows in the song itself as I was praying, so I could time up what it was I was articulating and praising, thanksgiving, and what the song was saying, um, but it just—it, you know, if your listeners are thinking through their Eucharistic liturgies as presented on the page, from my end, the non-musical end, they must think of the Eucharistic liturgy as an organic thing that lives in their heart, not a static thing that's on a page, and if they can make that transition, then you can do some interesting mergers. Yeah, the things on the page—the things on a page work because they're designed, you know, at some point they just—we designed an our church body to put certain songs at certain places to achieve a certain result, and I think what you're saying is that you could use flow and design with other elements and achieve a similar result; both cases you're attending to the design and flow of that experience, yeah, in the congregation.

Yeah, my favorite example is uh, how most mainline congregations, when they're doing the Eucharistic prayer, if they have a musical setting for the song "How Great Is Our God," they'll sing it once and then quit, but if you look at the song "How Great Is Our God," it's, you know, it's a Chris Tomlin praise song; I mean, it's kind of stream of consciousness, a fusing together of three or four. And if Chris Tomlin is listening to this podcast, I apologize, you know, "Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory; Hosanna in the highest; blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord; Hosanna in the highest." I mean, that's the—I mean, that—it's, you know, it's not a hymn; it's a praise chorus, yeah, you know. Why do performance practices by us only presume that when we sing it, we sing it once, then we move on to something else? Why couldn't that become the praise underlay as the prayers being prayed over the top of it? Yeah, interesting. We're not—I would add anything there; I—I would—I will counter this if it uh, answered because we are limited by our 60 minutes, and the Eucharistic service is much longer than 16 minutes. Yes, we need to get out of that 16-minute; then we can do some serious worship stuff. So there's something—I think what we're trying to say is there's something to learn from the gift river people, the river of praise and worship, which is their term for this phenomenon. Yeah, I've really been enjoying this conversation, and especially kind of going off and some of these ideas that are maybe off the book a little bit, but based on it, I I want to ask as we start to close our conversation on the gift side of the history; can we say that a lot of this comes down—in terms of theology now—a lot of this comes down to—is it—can we say that the victory of alternate—an alternate view of sacraments than mainline traditions? Because think about the—in American history, you have uh, certain people coming in and saying, "Well, we believe that God is experienced mainly through this—the sacrament, the bread and the wine, the body and the blood," and there are other traditions in America that say, "No, no, no; this is not the main place God is experienced; that God's experienced now through—red—you're saying through our praises and through this worship experience." As we fast forward to our current age, it seems like one of those sides has won in the in the cultural Christianity in America. Is that fair to say? And and that's kind of part of the story is that the theology that God is is experienced in the most profound way through worship as opposed to traditional sacraments; this is the story of that victory for that group. Is that—I mean, my offer is that—is that kind of what this story is? What do you think, sweetheart?

Uh, I I will want to quote uh, Lester and my professor Jim White, yeah, and he reminds us that the liturgical movement is like a pendulum; it swings back and forth. So you are right; the initial part of the church began with a focus on the on the sacraments, right? But in the middle period of North America, in the 17th to the 18th century, the focus wasn't on communion or the sacraments but on preaching. So preaching became very important; rhetoric became super important. And yet those all those uh, conferences that had the weeping bench that really wanted people to repent from God just from the preach word. And then in the early 20th century, we now have this particular move of music making. I would assert that in time to come, give or take another 10 to 50 years, this sense of the pendulum will swing back to a kind of a ritual—mysticistic—mysticism approach to worship making as well. Interesting. We can see this already, I think, right? In California, if you go to Saint Gregory of Nissa and San Francisco, you begin to see some of that bubbling up as well. So I suspect there will be a kind of a move towards more ritualistic—mysticism kind of approach, but then coupled with contemporary praise and worship music, you will see that because the pendulum will never be static; that's the wise verb from Jim Hoyt. Yeah, so I don't think the answer is that who has won; I don't think anybody has won. [Music] Well, they might have won on a temporary basis, but no victory is static if the pendulum is constantly swinging because um, and I—there are times when I'm wondering if we're already kind of pushing the outer boundaries here. Um, I think one of the big developments in the last 20 years is the reliance upon the gift people for ever-increasing levels of technological sophistication to carry that sacramental sense; so not the praise itself, not the praise that is sung, but the praise that is sung in a setting with highly complex stage lighting, imag—TV, fog machines, that sort of thing. And I'm—I'm wondering if we're eventually going to reach kind of an outer boundary where you can't crank up the sound board to any higher level; you can't put in any new sort of light system, but people are no longer getting the same praise and worship buzz, if I can call it that, and they'll have to start rethinking, "Well, maybe we can find Jesus in the preaching, and maybe we can find Jesus in the communion," and here's some data for us if you're interested; Hillsong has started looking at ancient song tags. So if you Google "Hillsong and Anastasia," they have that; Michael W. Smith is writing up—day.

So, there are a lot of moves of recovering of Latin texts. Uh, Chris Tomlin is no different; he's looking at Isaac Watts. So there is already a kind of, uh, what I would call an Oxford Movement, looking backwards to what is available in the past and then incorporating that into their, their, the songwriting process. Of course, there are copyright issues that I will, and ethical issues that I would like to talk about, but this is not the place. But there is this effort of trying to swing the pendulum back, so it's possible.

Well, our last few minutes here, then let me ask you a closing question: Did we forget something that was so crucial and key we have to just take the last couple of minutes to talk about it in this movement, or we've covered it sufficiently for you guys? Um, I think I would like to clarify the rather complicated name on our book title and, and the defeating terms. Yeah, it's popped up, but I don't think either Srihang or I have actually tried to explain it.

Um, one of the things that we noticed as we were, once we had a gift river and a gap river, and we knew which literature to put in which river, we noticed different people had different technical terms for this. So generally, the folks in the gift river—so that would be all Pentecostals—and, uh, what we found out is virtually all non-white expressions of this phenomenon use the term praise and worship. Um, that's what they call it, and you can see the theology built into the label itself. When we talk in the next podcast, the gift river people, the gap river people—I mean, they're the ones who use the term contemporary worship—and that's a term that tends to be very North American, tends to be very associated with mainline denominations and very associated with white Christians, not Christians of color. Um, and so the rivers themselves are partly identifiable by which is the preferred term. Um, and so for our book, we had, rather than choose one term or the other and risk excluding the breadth of some aspect of the breadth of the story, we just fused them all together because we couldn't come up with a better alternative. Yeah, but we could have come up with a completely new term which nobody would have recognized.

That's right. So we just said contemporary praise and worship, and what we find is that, um, uh, you know, it's is broad enough and familiar enough that we've never really had anyone tell us we have no idea what it is you're talking about. So they can, they tend to find themselves in the new term that we use. Yeah, which is just the two main terms fused together. Yeah, I can't say enough about this way that this book helps structure things in really helpful ways, even just bringing that uh title that you mentioned: Praise and worship is a technical term, and I didn't realize that until recently as a, as a technical term. I always thought of it as a description of something, but the way you've used it in the book is a very technical way. And I'm going to say a quote from the book here from Charlotte Baker, who you quote: What she says about praise and worship, she says, "Praise, an operation of faith, is an instrument which will create the atmosphere for the presence of God where He is to dwell." That's praise. In contrast, worship is the expression of a response to His presence. And I found that, that once I realized that that was the theology from where this was coming, and then it made sense that this is called praise and worship because there's a technical definition of praise, a tactical definition of worship, and together they also form a tactical definition of a theology of worship. And anyway, I just want to commend you both for the way that you've dealt with the, the titles and the explaining those to us as readers.

Thank you. And one of the fun things for me is discovering what an international term praise and worship is in various languages. Um, it's, it's around the world. I usually at this point ask Wee Hong to say it in Mandarin, but I won't.

Swee Hong, Lester, thank you both for joining us for this episode of Theology in Motion. It's been a great pleasure to have you. And thank you for joining us for this episode of Theology in Motion. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did with Doctors Lester Ruth and Swee Hong Lim. Please join us next month for part two of our conversation with them and their new book.

On behalf of the Center for Worship Leadership, I'd like to invite you to our upcoming Worship Arts Leader Initiative, the Wally Summit in Chandler, Arizona, in South Phoenix. Among our speakers will be Zach Hicks talking about the worship pastor, but also I think a sneak peek into some of the material coming out in his new book, Worship by Faith Alone. That is October 11th through 13th. There are also optional intensives for locals. Check out the registration page at cwlonline.org. We really hope to see you. Thanks again for listening and for joining us. We'll see you next month. [Music]