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By Jim Coggins
'COME TO the Table: a Conference on the Arts in Worship' was held at Emmanuel Mennonite Church in Abbotsford, BC, May 23 - 24. The event was sponsored by Columbia Bible College and a group of Mennonite churches. The guest speaker for the event was John Bell of the Iona Community in Scotland. CC.com spoke to Bell just before the conference.
CC.com: Tell us about the Iona Community.
John Bell: When you mention "community," people imagine that we're dressed in monks' cowls and sing Gregorian chants. It's not like that at all. It's an intentional community that has been in existence since 1938. From its inception, it was seen as a catalyst within the churches to enable aspects of Christian witness which were not always given priority. Since the beginning, there has been a combination which some people would see as opposites -- a commitment to prayer but also to political action. We don't believe that Christianity is a dualist religion. All the world is God's and therefore the things of the church, as well as economics, society and politics, are under the responsibility of God.
We have over 250 members who are everything from Quaker through Roman Catholic, male and female. Their jobs range from retired coal miner to consulting gynecologist. We live mostly throughout Great Britain; members therefore have a primary responsibility to their own church, and their membership in the Iona Community is secondary. The vast majority of our members have secular employment, but some are ministers and priests. Only about five of us are paid by the Community because we have special responsibilities. Members, wherever they are, live out our rule, which has to do with money, time, prayer and social and political involvement. We call ourselves a Community because we meet regionally once a month in small family groups, and three or four times a year in plenary.
We're known as the Iona Community because our residential centres are on Iona, a small island on the west coast of Scotland. It's been a sacred place since at least 563, when St. Columba came from Ireland to start an evangelistic mission, which affected all of Europe. The old abbey built there by the Benedictines around the year 1000 was twice destroyed by the Vikings and once by Protestant Reformers. The founder of the Community, George MacLeod, felt called by God to allow this place, which had been a cradle of Christianity in the Western world, to live again as a place of mission and reconciliation. The old abbey was rebuilt in 1938, a new centre was built in 1992, and we have another centre on a nearby island, which is for young people and people who suffer from addiction.
CC.com: How did you get involved, and what is your role?
JB: When I was ordained, my first job was in youth work for the Church of Scotland, the mother church of the Presbyterian family. Iona had a youth program, and I linked up with them. I could send kids there who didn't have any religious affiliation, they would be accepted, and in many cases the experience was quite transforming. After a while, I applied to become a member. It was the only place in my life where people would ask me if I prayed. If you're a pastor, people presume you pray and read the Bible. Here was a community where people held each other accountable for their devotional life, their financial life, what they did with their time, what energy was devoted to the various purposes of God's Kingdom. I thought, as someone who could be an individualist, that it would be very good for me to be accountable to other people. And I liked the marriage of prayer and social action. I transferred to do youth work for them for four or five years, job-sharing with a colleague. When there was a happy ending to that work because we were building a new youth centre, both of us transferred to the area of music, worship and spirituality -- because that had become important to us during our youth work.
CC.com: What is your current ministry?
JB: Music's just a part of it. There's nothing which was planned. It just happened that we had produced quite a lot of music when we were doing youth work because what the Church of Scotland was offering young people was pretty abysmal. We were working in impoverished areas; there seemed to be nothing in the liturgy of the church that reflected the life of these communities. Out of need, we began to write. As well, partly encouraged by a South African young man who job-shared with us, we became aware of the bigger world and began to bring songs from South Africa and Zimbabwe. We would get boys and girls to sing in harmony, which was an unbelievable transformation. First of all, kids wouldn't sing, and, second kids would never sing in harmony. School singing had stopped. Unless you played a guitar and were a performer, you couldn't do music. That was about 25 years ago. It was only for our youth workers, for services in Iona, things we were doing in Glasgow. But, after a while, people asked for copies. After a while longer, we decided that we might publish some. Now I spend maybe a quarter of my time on music. I spend as much time on spirituality and worship, on how the Bible gets opened to or by laypeople.
CC.com: Could you define worship?
JB: I see worship as the offering of ourselves to God and the honouring of God by intentional time and devotion, which may happen individually but which also is expected by God to happen in the company of other people. Worship is a means by which corporately we celebrate our relationship with God. In any relationship, there has to be a variety, and music is certainly one component, but there are other things that enable the magnificence of God to be reflected. Silence can be as important a part of worship as sound, and symbolic action can be as important as singing. Where I come from, it's the preached word which was all important. There's an arrogance in Protestantism which believes that the word of God is only open when somebody preaches it. People can be converted or illuminated or changed as much by what is sung or by what they do experientially as by what is preached.
You have to go back to Scripture. Of course, Paul talks about preaching because that's what he did. But if you go back to books like Ezra and Nehemiah, one of the great things for the Jews was the reading of the word. Of course, to give some background and application, preaching is a great aid, but to think that preaching is necessary because the word is unintelligible otherwise is gross arrogance. There's an evangelical pastor in Scotland who was an atheist. Almost despite himself, one day he decided he would read the Bible. He sat down early in the morning and began at Genesis, and by the time he got to Mark's Gospel, he was a Christian. Nobody was preaching to him, but the word of God was speaking to him. The word of God is mightier than the understanding of humanity. I love preaching, I don't for a moment underestimate its importance, but I also don't overvalue it.
CC.com: Can you characterize the music you sing and teach about?
JB: I don't sing anything. I'm not a performer. I don't write for people to perform, unless you understand a congregation as being performers. The most important voice in worship is the voice of the people as they together praise God, mourn or express other things. This corporate voice of the people is a very biblical thing. Some of the music which I represent originated in the experience of my colleagues and myself where there has been a discernible gap. A lot of our songs -- about death, children dying, having a stillborn baby -- would never make a best-selling Christian CD. But three young men in the space of six months independently spoke to me about what it felt like to lose a child, what it felt like to have nothing to be read or sung at that very peculiar and singular bereavement. The church, despite the fact that one in four women in the Westernized world experience a miscarriage, has never felt that that kind of loss should be accorded respect. The church will go head over heels at anti-abortion rallies -- I'm quite constant with that -- but children die in the womb and children die at birth, and what do we do for people who are bereft? After five years, Britain and the USA are still embroiled in Iraq, but there are no songs in the church about war. We don't have many songs that celebrate marriage, really.
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Part of my job, pastorally, is to write material for situations where little abounds. Now, most of the material will be based on Scripture and maybe come from an insight. Recently we acknowledged the stories of women in the Bible, like Rizpah. I've read through the Scriptures 14 or 15 times, and I had no idea who this woman was until a female colleague began telling her story. There are songs of the church that celebrate Paul, James, John, Andrew and so on, but where are the songs that say God has used women? So quite a lot has to do with where we perceive there seems to be a lack or an insight offered from a conversation, a question.
There is no one style. I'm very happy to use folk music, indigenous folk melodies, particularly in Scotland, because we've denied the church the music of the people. Sometimes I'll compose tunes, which may be in a classical style or may be in a contemporary style. It depends on the text and the purpose. For me, a song has to be for these people at this time and this place -- a very poor congregation whose musical affectations would have more to do with country and western than they do with Bach, or a university congregation with a choir that sings in four-part harmony.
Another area that we represent is that we believe profoundly that in the 21st century we are a global church and to imagine that one community of writers or one nation will be able to express the magnificence of God is blasphemy. God has revealed himself to be the God of the whole world. We in the West have exported to the southern hemisphere a whole range of songs for 300 years, some of which geographically don't suit. "In the brief mid-winter" doesn't work in Australia because there Christmas is a very warm time. We've exported to Africa and India songs about "the heathen in his darkness bows down to wood and stone," ignorant of the fact that Hindus worship idols but Muslims certainly don't. In the 21st century, the growing church is in the southern hemisphere, and if we are a part of the global church, then there should be evidence of that in what we sing.
We didn't decide to fill a gap in the music of the British churches. We didn't decide that our music would go outside Britain. All we did was to feel what was important working in Glasgow. When we began to publish books in Britain, we were approached by publishers in the USA, and then we were approached independently by publishers in Australia, Japan, China, Scandinavia, Poland and elsewhere. Some of our songs are in 12 to 14 languages, but that's not by design. It's just that people have picked them up. It surprised me that a song which was written for two of our volunteers who were leaving, to send them off, was sung in Japan. Or a sung based on a psalm written for use in a congregation in Scotland ended up being sung at the funeral for Cardinal Bernardin in Chicago.
One of the reasons why the Psalms seem to have such a long-lasting relevance is that most of the Psalms were written out of one particular situation, of victory or defeat, abandonment or peace, a moment of clarification of the purpose of God or a moment of doubt. Because they were written for that moment with a particular human audience in view, they somehow speak across the centuries. In contrast, there's an awful thing that happens in Europe called the Eurovision Song Contest. It's an orgy of bad taste where 40 nations all try to write a song which will please the whole of Europe. The interesting thing is that, with a few exceptions, nobody remembers any of these songs because they have been attempting to please judges in 40 different countries. But if they wrote a song for the grandmother of a performer, that might actually resonate elsewhere. That's just the way it happens. That's why Jesus tells stories so often. They come from a particular situation, but 2,000 years later people are still discovering new truths in these stories.
CC.com: In our earlier interview with Brian Doerksen, he also talked about songs of lament and folk songs.
JB: The songs of the church should be folk songs in that vocally they are accessible to the majority of people. There is a whole lot of contemporary songwriting within the Christian church that is performer-based. You have the phenomenon all over North America, as well as in Britain, of there being screens on which not only the words of the song appear but also the face of the performer who's leading the music. I was speaking at a youth conference in Northern Ireland recently. I know there's 25 minutes of praise music first, so I go to the back to sing along with the kids. Well, nobody was singing. Everybody was staring at these big screens. Nobody else was engaged because they were looking at computers. That is anathema. There always is a role for performed music, but when that's the only thing that happens, you're inviting people to come to church not to worship God but to be a spectator at somebody else's artistic performance. When the songs of the church become songs that require the gifted performer, the person who's done voice training, then we're not allowing people to participate. The songs of the church should be tuneful, and the texts should be memorable, because you tend to remember what you sing. If you sing it often enough, it goes inside you. But if you just watch other people doing it, the words will never penetrate. The worship experience becomes a kind of surrogate thing that somebody else does for us rather than something that we do ourselves.
CC.com: Is that always a temptation in the church?
JB: Oh, aye. Some of these guys have two or three doctorates and are playing Bach. That's a performance. When you've a choir that can sing Handel's Messiah, that's performance. I don't despise that at all. They are doing what only practised people can do, and there is sense in which people can be drawn in to worship and drawn into closeness with God through it. But the engagement and the spiritual nurturing of that is of a different order from a whole congregation singing together.
I don't for a moment disregard or devalue the power of a performer to enable people to have an experience which is worshipful. But if the performer thinks that what I sing or what I read will be the main conduit, then that's putting the cart before the horse. The question is: What is the song that allows the majority of people in this place and in this time to say to God the things that are important, and how can I enable them to do it rather than do it for them?
CC.com: You're trying to make the gospel relevant.
JB: The gospel's always relevant. It's a matter of allowing the gospel to resonate in the contemporary context. Sometimes when I go to church, I think this is a time capsule, a hermetically sealed Victorian zone, in which we can have role-play about what it was like to be Christian 120 years ago. Then I come out the door and think, "This is the world in which I live and in which Jesus is alive, but it hasn't really been represented very much in the past hour and a half." Our faith is about connectedness and our faith espouses incarnation, God becoming flesh and being one of us, being among us, speaking our language and calling us by name. That ever-contemporary relevance is what we celebrate.
June 12/2008
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