Rebuild the Altar First: Starting in the Right Place
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The United Methodist Church has entered a new era, the origins of which began decades ago, and will no doubt culminate in a defining moment with the 2024 General Conference. No one truly knows what the final verdict will be after decades of conferencing over gender and other key issues. For the moment, we see things imperfectly as we peer at cloudy glass, but a time will come when we will see things with perfect clarity (1 Cor. 13:12). Until then, we are faced with how to proceed on our unknown journey, in whatever camp we find ourselves. But there is most certainly a right place to start, no matter the confusion. So, to all constituencies of Methodism, wherever you find yourselves, I exhort you to rebuild the altar first.
After the seventy years of Babylonian Exile of the Jewish people, the holy altar of God, located at the temple in Jerusalem, was abandoned and broken apart due to disuse. The stone, mortar, wood, and bronze scrap metal lay strewn on the ground as a pile of rubble. Leading up to the exile, God’s people had a lengthy track record of rebellion against Yahweh. Reading Israel’s story, we find ourselves aghast not only at their chronic mutiny but the sheer audacity of it all. It wasn’t just that the Israelites fell away from worship through disinterest or preoccupation; they became willfully defiant against God and the holiness of his dwelling place. Such in-your-face action against God showed itself over time in the abomination within the temple, the very dwelling place of God. A shocking account of the level of defilement is revealed to the prophet Ezekiel in Ezekiel 8. Imagine God’s humiliation upon experiencing such grievous infractions:
A large idol, “one that made the LORD very jealous,” is placed in the inner courtyard (vv. 3, 5).
The people were trying to drive God from the temple (v.6).
The walls of the temple displayed engravings of detestable creatures (v. 10).
A variety of idols were on the premises (v. 10).
70 elders offered incense to idols (v. 11).
The people were doing detestable things with idols in dark rooms (vss. 12-13).
Women were weeping for a false god, Tammuz (v. 14).
25 men in the inner courtyard, with their backs turned to the sanctuary, faced east while bowing low to the ground to worship the sun (v. 16).
To this, God responds, “Is it nothing to the people of Judah that they commit these detestable sins, leading the whole nation into violence, thumbing their noses at me, and provoking my anger?” (Ezek. 8:17 NIV).
Mercifully, God made good on the promise to bring back the Jewish people from exile in Babylon, to be replanted in the Land of Promise. But the altar lay in ruins. There was so much involved in picking up the pieces. They had to make choices; they wanted to start in the right place. The first wave of returning exiles (beginning in 538 B.C.), being zealous for the house of God, determined that their priority was to rebuild the altar first. They would start the reconstruction of the temple once they completed the altar. After all, it was the altar where the morning and evening sacrifices formed the heart of worship, signifying loving fidelity between God and people.
There were obstacles. The people were fearful of the locals who chided and intimidated, threatening the builders. Nevertheless, the exiles succeeded in rebuilding the altar on its original site and began to offer burnt sacrifices to God twice daily as the law required. Only after this did they repair the foundation of the temple structure.
I am not suggesting that worship in our churches compares to the violations found in Ezekiel 8. What I do wish to suggest is that we must watch with care what happens in our worship during this treacherous time in our history. It would be all too easy to neglect worship or inadvertently use it for our own purposes. With our church presently in disarray, what would it mean to rebuild the altar first? Are we starting in the right place, wherever we find ourselves on the denominational spectrum? Or are we paralyzed, unable to move in any direction at all until the General Conference finally acts? While we may feel hamstrung presently, each congregation can take the right and needful step of rebuilding the altar first.
When the exiles determined to build the altar first, they were making it a priority. It was their priority because it was God’s priority. A priority is anything that is “prior to” anything else. While the dimensions and features of the temple were very important and would be cared for in time, the altar of sacrifice came first. Rebuilding the altar involves situating ourselves before God according to God’s priorities.
The question must be asked, what is our priority for worship? We can easily find it in the way we communicate our highest goals for worship. The adjective I see most is “passionate” worship. It’s a buzzword today; it has been for many years. I have seen it all over advertisements for worship conferences, worship albums, as recommended curriculum for local churches (see Robert Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations, Revised and Updated, 2018) and whole denominations. “Passion” is even the name for one of the most popular worship bands that produces regular album releases, yearly conferences, and world tours. Apparently, passion is vital for worship. I most certainly agree.
And yet there is something about the ubiquitous use of the phrase that is unsettling to me. Why has it given me pause in recent years? The passionate worship of God is a good thing, right? Who could go wrong celebrating the unabashed fervor of Christians with hands raised in praise, faces uplifted, eyes closed, moving to the music? Currently, in many places, these features signal devotion, sincerity, and love for God. But this may be part of the problem. These images of group worship have become code for passionate worship. Want passionate worship? This is what it looks like. Express worship this way, and you have generated passion.
Passionate worship pleases God, but we are operating with a serious misunderstanding of what passionate worship truly is, given our current “Christian” cultural view. We view passionate worship as something that we do. Passion is portrayed as particular physical engagements that we have seen demonstrated over time. When worshipers fit the profile of passionate worship that is so widely depicted, it is natural to conclude that the action of worship begins and ends with us, with what we do. The count-down clock calls us to worship; ambient lighting creates an atmosphere, a run-through of tempo-driven songs take us on an emotional journey toward increasingly passionate worship. When the focus is on our action and our ability to create the semblance of passion through our own means, we easily miss that the action of biblical worship begins and ends with God.
It is God’s actions that drive worship. God calls us to the holy moment, invites us to commune with him, imparts grace to worship in spirit and truth. God forgives, God speaks, God fills us with bread and wine, God helps us link corporate worship to mission in our world. Because of divine action, we are led on a journey of communion with the Triune God. The primary action of worship will always be what God does. It is God’s passion that must be our priority. And God’s passion is most clearly seen in his glorious Son, Jesus Christ, who “radiates God’s own glory and expresses the very character of God, and he sustains everything by the mighty power of his command” (Heb. 1:3a). It is Christ who has been given complete supremacy. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things” (Col. 1:19-20a).
Our action in return is to offer responses throughout the worship service as we engage with God through Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. Yes, we will respond with Spirit-led spontaneous expressions—maybe even in the same ways mentioned above, but we will do so as response. Our passion is misplaced if we continue to look for the usual indicators as a means for confirming that we are engaging in passionate worship. Rather, we must find our passion not in the expressions of the experience of worship but in the living of worship (Rom. 12:1). Biblical worship calls us to passionate worship of a very different kind: one of action, commitment, and surrender to the will of God. In the end, truly biblical worship is the ongoing passion for responding in faith, gratitude, and obedience (Robert Schaper, In His Presence: Appreciating Your Worship Tradition, 1984, pp. 15-16). Passionate worship is the result of faithful engagement with God in Jesus Christ, not the cause.
It is no small thing to choose the words by which a church or a movement wishes to be known. “Passionate worship” has become market branding that promises an attractive event. Be careful. As seen in a recent video posted at Spirit & Truth , some young adults are defining passionate worship quite differently than we may expect:
Emma is 18 and I’m [Jenna] 21 and what we long for is the presence of Jesus. We don’t really care how culturally relevant the church is, if it has cool lights and a smoke machine. We’re longing for the presence of Jesus, to dwell in a place where there’s a family that has deep relationships, that Jesus is amongst them, that the Holy Spirit is moving and alive and active and that these people are different. Something is different about them, and that’s because they know Jesus.
But far beyond this encouraging consideration is the most important one—that the church must define herself according to God’s passion for worship. We simply must stake our claim for Christocentric worship. Let “Christ-centered worship” be our descriptor. But what if that isn’t good branding? What if it isn’t attractive? And what if, God forbid, fewer people joined us for worship as a result? Dorothy Sayers answers bluntly:
Let us, in heaven’s name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much [the] worse for the pious—others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them. If all [people] are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to [people], but to adapt [people] to Christ (Dorothy L. Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine, 2004, pp. 20-21).
Let us return to Christ-centered worship. When we do so, we will be loyal to “the faith once received.” At least we will be building the right altar first.
Constance M. Cherry is Professor Emeritus of Worship and Pastoral Ministry at Indiana Wesleyan University. She is also a founding faculty member of the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies where she teaches in the Doctor of Worship Studies program. Constance is an elder in the West Ohio Conference, UMC.