In Spirit and Truth, Ch1

Main Points:
**The good old days weren't always good...and really, we're a lot like the actual Christian church of the past, especially in that the need for renewal and responsiveness in worship isn't new. (14-15)

**Dissatisfaction seems to fall into two camps--traditional and contemporary--that will at least agree that something needs to change (15-16)

**Both "traditional" and "contemporary" worship styles and sides of the worship wars have problems--nostalgia, confusing and archaic language and forms, difficulty relating to "seekers" for traditionalists; consumerist model that ignores tradition and its valuable aspects in favor of entertainment for contemporary desires (16-17)

**Both miss the "more basic purpose for worship:...the way God forms us through the story of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit in the practices of living according to the Truth. Worship begins in what God does in us." (17, original emphasis)

**Worship in a Post-Modern World section lays out how Enlightenment mentalities have shaped our approaches to truth, and how being stuck in Enlightenment-Modernist notions of truth and verifiable reality present us with the major problems we face in our contemporary multi-religious world.

 **One possible solution to the problems posed by our post-modern world is to "see our own particular religious tradition as our gift from God which we offer to the world with a mixture of boldness and humility as witness to what God has done among us" (21)

**Traditionalists respond to PoMo problems desire continuity and stability through looking back; nostalgia is the dominant characteristic of this view of what worship should be, and "sentimental longing for the past" is a real risk (21-22)

**Contemporary advocates want worship that meets the demands of a buyer's market, but "worship that is as transitory as the latest advertising gimmick cannot avoid appearing to be another throwaway item," and "cynicism and escapism" are the risks of this viewpoint (22)

**"Four basic levels of the Christian story: catholic..., United Methodist..., local (congregational), and individual (personal)" (24)

**"worship is essential for Christians if we want to move beyond believing with our heads to believing with our hearts. ...authentic Christian faith...must be an embodied belief" (25, original emphasis)

**DEFINITION OF RITUAL: "patterns of behavior that express the beliefs and values of a community" (25)

**Though we generally prioritize theology over ritual, ritual is inescapable. The only major questions we can really have about it are "how do we acknowledge our rituals?" and "what do we do with them when they no longer serve us well?" (The second question is mine, not the book's, but I truly think it's an important one) (27)

**Worship as Worldview subheading (28-29)--proposes an almost performative understanding of worship that focuses on acting and enacting, through repetition, the shaping of both the story and the people worshiping. Worship creates both the selves who worship and the selves who go out from worship, though there's clearly a notion of subjectivity here that wouldn't be present in Butler.

**"When our worship is empowered by the Holy Spirit, we learn how to be the Body of Christ in service to all of God's wounded creation--not only to human beings, but also to the whole planet" (30)


Things I Really Like: 
**Open acknowledgment of real failings in both contemporary churches and the historical church. No delusions of perfection at any point

**Solid chapter conclusion pgs 30-31 that clearly and usefully recaps the material.

Things I Need to Vent About:
**I don't see anything wrong or inherently problematic about being part of "a world that has lost its belief in a coherent story" (pg21). We create our own narratives about how and why things work, and sometimes they're coherent, and sometimes they're not, and sometimes they work, and sometimes they don't. We take what works, toss or revise what doesn't, and go from there. I feel like coherence is over-valued.

**Iceberg metaphors (28) are worn out and annoy me.

**There's a point that I didn't mark up well enough that claims that worship is about seeing the world as God sees it. That, to me, seems arrogant and impossible at best, and the sort of unattainable goal that could easily get in the way of other understandings and experiences of worship. I'm just SO uncomfortable with anything that claims access to Divine understanding without at the very least acknowledgment that we're not experiencing Divine understanding, we're experiencing a limited human understanding of what Divine understanding might be, that I think it's getting in my way of understanding why the authors think this is a good idea and what they want us to get from it.