Dr Jonathan Downie on Nostr: Weird realisation today. I was listening to an instrumental version of As The Deer ...
Weird realisation today.
I was listening to an instrumental version of As The Deer Pants today, a song that has all sorts of emotional resonances for me, especially as it was my dad's favourite.
For some reason, it always reminds me of old wooden pews, dusty hymn books, a shallow wooden offering plate and the whispering shuffle of people in their Sunday best moving wordlessly to their seats.
As someone who moved to Charismatic churches at the age of 9, I learned to view traditional churches as stale, dry, and boring. I thought they were frequented by cultural Christians who only went because their grandad did. I dismissed them as irrelevant.
It's only fairly recently that I fully worked out why (a story I'm not going to tell publicly). It's also only fairly recently that I realised that other Christians looked on Charismatic churches as loud, superficial, theologically errant and frequented by people who are more interested in fashionable ripped jeans and bass solos than in poverty relief, reflection and holiness.
The truth is that both characterisations have come from stories, sometimes too from bad experiences. So both stories come from a measure of truth. But they're not the whole truth.
I've come to appreciate why people love tradition and quiet. I've moved passed the idea that the only believers are my kind. I hope also that there's more awareness that there are thoughtful, intellectual, holy, poverty relieving Charismatics who know about history, holiness and justice and practice all three.
We are all one. The people in ripped jeans and those in vestments, those in choir robes and those in peals of laughter, the quiet reflectors and the drummers, the family with neurodiverse kids who need a church with flexibility and grace, and the family with generations of tradition handed down carefully.
We are one because Jesus died to make us so.
I was listening to an instrumental version of As The Deer Pants today, a song that has all sorts of emotional resonances for me, especially as it was my dad's favourite.
For some reason, it always reminds me of old wooden pews, dusty hymn books, a shallow wooden offering plate and the whispering shuffle of people in their Sunday best moving wordlessly to their seats.
As someone who moved to Charismatic churches at the age of 9, I learned to view traditional churches as stale, dry, and boring. I thought they were frequented by cultural Christians who only went because their grandad did. I dismissed them as irrelevant.
It's only fairly recently that I fully worked out why (a story I'm not going to tell publicly). It's also only fairly recently that I realised that other Christians looked on Charismatic churches as loud, superficial, theologically errant and frequented by people who are more interested in fashionable ripped jeans and bass solos than in poverty relief, reflection and holiness.
The truth is that both characterisations have come from stories, sometimes too from bad experiences. So both stories come from a measure of truth. But they're not the whole truth.
I've come to appreciate why people love tradition and quiet. I've moved passed the idea that the only believers are my kind. I hope also that there's more awareness that there are thoughtful, intellectual, holy, poverty relieving Charismatics who know about history, holiness and justice and practice all three.
We are all one. The people in ripped jeans and those in vestments, those in choir robes and those in peals of laughter, the quiet reflectors and the drummers, the family with neurodiverse kids who need a church with flexibility and grace, and the family with generations of tradition handed down carefully.
We are one because Jesus died to make us so.