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The Why Behind Our Worship: Considering Embodiment in Worship (Week 3) · Equipped: A Podcast Platform for the Equip Ministry of Cuyahoga Valley Church

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, friends, we are gonna go ahead and dive in.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's gonna be a cozy group.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we will not, I already had planned it this way, but we definitely won't break into small groups for discussion.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: We will just chat as a little class.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: So I want to, before we dive in, recap the first two weeks.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: You guys have all been here.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but I just want us to make sure we kind of have a sense of where we've been so that we can understand where we're headed.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: So the first two weeks are live on the podcast now, and we've gotten pretty good listens, which has been fun.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Gotten to engage with some people who have listened to that.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: But our first week we talked about liturgy.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about, okay, what happens when we worship in the church and why do we worship the way that we do?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: We looked at both church history and also the foundation of scripture.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: And we did something similar last week when we talked about ordinances, we talked about baptism and the Lord's Supper, we looked again to scripture and church history, and then used all that we talked about to analyze some of what we do here today at CVC and why.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: So, as a reminder, this was all built on a class that I did at Emmaus Theological Seminary last fall.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: And for that class, I had to write like a 25 to 30 page paper.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I wrote my paper on thinking about the ways that we worship and how the idea of embodiment flows into that, how we need to consider our bodies and the goodness of our bodies in the way that we worship.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: So we today are gonna spend a little bit more time looking at the ideas that I wrestled with in my paper.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: And what we talk about today is gonna be built on the first two weeks of class.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So there are a couple of definitions that I want to give us.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_00: I want to walk through our outline and then we're gonna dive in.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: But first I'd like to pray.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: So let's pray.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: God, thanks for bringing us here.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I thank you, Lord, for the learning that we've been doing and that we're gonna do today.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: And God, I just ask that this will all be for your glory.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that as we learn more about you, we will be able to walk more closely with you each and every day of our lives.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: You are good, God.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: You have given us our minds and our bodies, our hearts and our souls to know you and to be in relationship with you and to learn more about you.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: So may we do it all to your glory.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: In your name, amen.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So today, our outline is basically gonna look like this.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm introducing it right now.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about why our worship should show us that our bodies are good, and we're gonna spend some time there because I think that's not like an intuitive thing to some of us.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about how our worship does not always show us that our bodies are good.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Then we're gonna talk about why it even matters if our worship does show us that our bodies are good, and look at two components to this: the intended purpose component and the missional component.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Then we're gonna talk about where we go from here.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about some challenges, how can we address them?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna look at three different ways we can do that, and then we're gonna spend a little bit of time thinking about what has growth looked like in this area here at CVC before we wrap up our time together.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: And we'll probably spend a little bit of time talking about the work sided, too, some of the works that I've been looking at.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: So the definitions I want to go over before we jump in.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: Today in this class, I'm gonna be using the phrase Protestant evangelical baptistic churches.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to make sure that I explain what I mean when I say this.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: So when I say Protestant, I basically just mean not Roman Catholic, right?
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: That one's pretty straightforward for us.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: We've we've kind of leaned into that conversation a little bit in here already.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: When I say evangelical, I'm talking about churches that believe it's really important to share the gospel, to share the good news about Jesus really explicitly with everybody, and that build the things in the church around that truth.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: And when I say Baptistic, I'm talking about churches generally in the Baptist tradition.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: So we are a Baptist church, we baptize by immersion, and there are lots of different types of Baptist churches.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: So when I use this category of Protestant evangelical Baptistic churches, this is a big umbrella.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: It actually captures a lot of different churches.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: My husband and I were talking about this because he always reads my lessons.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm very appreciative to him for that.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_00: And we were talking about how if you've ever walked into a church and thought, this kind of feels like CVC.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: Not definitely, but there's a good likelihood that is a church in this umbrella, a Protestant evangelical Baptistic Church.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a phrase I'm gonna use to talk about CVC and churches that are like us in some important ways as we think about this idea of worship and embodiment.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: And then before we dive in, I wanted to talk about what embodiment is and how we're gonna be thinking about it today.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: And so to do that, I actually want us to start in Genesis chapter one.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: So that'll kind of provide our framework.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna look at chapter one, verses 26 through 28, and verse 31.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you can read that with me or you can just listen.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: It says, Then God said, Let us make man in our image after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the livestock, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_00: Male and female he created them, and God blessed them.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: Now going down to verse 31.
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: God saw everything he had made, and behold, it was very good.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: So when we talk about embodiment, we're talking first of all about this fact that God created man and woman in the beginning and saw that they were good, physical bodies and all, right?
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_00: So God created us to be spiritual and physical at the same time.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: And sometimes, really from the beginning of the church, there have been groups who have said, okay, our souls are good, but our bodies are bad.
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: An early group that said this were the Gnostics.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: The Gnostics believed lots of different types of things, but often what they believed was something like, we have souls that are good that got trapped in physical bodies.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so we need to break free of our physical bodies so that we can be good again.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And on its face, this can sound okay because it can kind of merge with the Christian idea of sin.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But we need to remember that in the beginning, God created us as physical beings, right?
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: And he saw that that was good.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: So this is actually tied to the resurrection of Jesus, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: When Jesus defeated death and sin and was resurrected, he had a new physical body.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: And we're told in Scripture that one day in the new heaven and earth, we are gonna have resurrected bodies.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes we can kind of believe that like heaven is a place that we might not be physical anymore, right?
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: We might like fly around, we might just be souls, and that's not true.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_00: Scripture tells us that then, as now, we're gonna be spiritual and physical.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: And so that's important to keep in mind because we should be remembering these ideas when we worship God as well.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: It's important for us in our formation, in our liturgy, in our ordinances, to remember that our bodies are good.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And worship can actually show us that our bodies are good some of the time.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: The ordinances are always gonna be a clear example for us of this in our tradition because they engage our bodies in worship really clearly, right?
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_00: Baptism, that's really a picture of what Christ has done and also uh being raised to new life in Christ, right?
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: This is something we're doing physically with our bodies.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: We don't just talk about baptism as an idea.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_00: We don't just say, like, close your eyes and imagine you're being baptized.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: We really go and do it.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: And same with the Lord's Supper.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: We don't just say, hey, take a minute and think about what Jesus has done for you.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: We actually worship him and do that together in a way that engages our physical bodies, which is something we don't always spend a lot of time thinking about.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: It can be a little bit obvious when we say it out loud, but it's an important thing to consider that worship should actually show us in some ways that our bodies are good.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: It should remind us that our bodies are made by God and made to worship Him.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: In many churches like CVC, Protestant, evangelical, Baptistic churches, especially in the US today, intentional emphasis is placed on a Sunday morning on the preaching of the Word of God, on singing songs and prayer.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: And while these are really important, we spent, you know, two weeks talking about how these are really important.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: There can at times in churches like ours be too little emphasis placed on other moments in the liturgy, moments that engage the physical body in worship.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: These can be baptism in the Lord's Supper, but they can also be other ways too, which we're gonna talk about.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um today we're gonna look at the last two weeks of class to consider what scripture primarily and also church history have to show us about how worship can and should reveal to us the goodness of our created bodies made in God's image.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: And it's important to remember, we've spent two weeks talking about how in the liturgy, in the ordinances, we're invited to look to the Lord first and worship him.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like obviously, that is the first and most important thing we're doing.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_00: But today we're talking about something secondary, that in worship, we have this opportunity to remember: hey, God created my physical body and invites me to worship him with all that I am: heart, mind, soul, body.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so that's kind of what we're spending some time talking about today.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: We're leaning into something that sometimes our tradition leans out of in order to wrestle with it and think about it a little more deeply.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna look at how in some churches today, worship might not always show us how our bodies are good.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk a little bit about how this can be a problem, especially for us in our culture today, and also discuss how this challenge can and has been addressed at CVC and in other churches like ours today.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, worship does not always show us that or how our bodies are good in the ways that it could.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: So I would love for you guys to just spend a minute uh shouting out to me like, what are some things that we typically do on a Sunday morning at CVC in the main service?
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: It could be anything.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, we sing some songs.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: That's great, Larry.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: We pray, perfect.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: We do greet each other, we say hi, that's a great one.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: We do some announcements, we usually read scripture.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Anything else?
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: We hear we hear scripture explained, right?
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: We we have a sermon.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but a lot of those things engage our hearts and minds, right?
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like nothing that you just shouted out, maybe greeting, actually.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: Greeting is probably the one where we're like connecting with people, we're standing up, we're moving around.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of those don't specifically focus on our bodies unless we're doing some of the ordinances, right?
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_00: When we do baptism or the Lord's Supper.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_00: And there are some practical considerations that we've already talked about in this series, right?
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, space in our sanctuary and layout.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_00: We've kind of talked about how it can be difficult, like to invite people to come forward.
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_00: When we've done communion at the front, it's been like just a logistical event, right?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: Claire kind of knows that.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, also, people's health and ability to move, that goes into it.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: And the importance of prioritizing people's understanding and heart engagement.
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Because this is what we're gonna come back to, right?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Like the most important thing is that people know and love Jesus and are invited to worship him.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and and it's important that we understand true things.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So we've actually talked in our other two classes about how we and churches that are like CBC got here, thinking about the early church and the reformation and the ways that liturgy and practice of the ordinances is mandated by scripture, right?
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's built on scripture too, but it's also shaped by space and time, by history.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: We looked over the past two weeks at Matthew 28, the Great Commission, and Matthew 26, and 1 Corinthians 11.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_00: And so, for the sake of time, we're not gonna reread those passages, but we're gonna bring some of that with us as we jump in today.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: So, why does it matter if our worship does not show us that our bodies are good?
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_00: So we're gonna kind of lean into this a little bit.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: There are two primary reasons that this really does matter if the liturgy of our church doesn't remind us of the goodness of our bodies.
• 12:44
  SPEAKER_00: Now, first of all, this interferes with our intended purpose.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're called, like I've mentioned, to worship God with all that we are, with our hearts and souls and minds and mouths and bodies in the way that He's asked us to do so.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_00: So when we forget to worship God with all of ourselves, in the way that we stand and sit and eat and drink and are baptized into the life of the church, then we're at risk of forgetting that God created us with soul and body and asks us to worship him with all that we are.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: Second, there's a missional component to this problem.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: If the church doesn't communicate intentionally and explicitly that our bodies are good because God made them and invites us to use them when we worship him, then there's space created for cultural messaging, secular cultural messaging to invade the church and shape the way that Christians think about our bodies as less than good.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, if we're not engaging with this, our culture is in some ways, and that cultural, I say later, kind of discipleship is gonna be what's shaping people in our churches.
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: So there are like different examples of this.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of the examples are really personal.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the examples I'll use are kind of on the extreme ends, but they're not the only ones.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: So uh, like self-harm could fit into this, right?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's an extreme example of someone being like, my body's not good.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_00: Or eating disorders can be can be a way that this shows up.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: But there's also for our culture, issues of identity and sexuality could fit into this.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um, just ways that the world is trying to disciple people that can get into the church, and the church needs to have a really robust picture of like, what do we believe about our bodies?
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: Are they made by God?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Are they good?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: Does God invite us to use them to worship Him?
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_00: Or are they, well, as one of our writers puts, regrettable containers for our minds, right?
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like, that's like an extreme example, but like, what is our body?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: Is it just something we have to put up with, or is it a piece of how God created us to be?
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, this in turn, all of this confusion that sometimes is in our churches, it limits Christians in our ability to share the reality that God created our bodies and believed they were good too.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: One of the beautiful realities of the church, Big C, right, lived out is that at its best, the church shares the specific good news about Jesus.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: That is our mission, right?
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: To go make disciples, baptizing them and teaching them.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: But also the church has an opportunity to give a glimpse of reality in general to the world, right?
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: To a confused world.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: In our age in particular, the church is really uniquely positioned to answer cultures' anguish and confusion about the significance of human embodiment because our culture is really wrestling with this.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: And that shows up in some of those big areas that I just mentioned.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: But when the church doesn't show in worship that our bodies are good and made by God to worship Him, then the people of God are open to confusion, and the church isn't able to answer culture's confusion in the way that it could.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_00: So basically, we want to engage with this because we want to hear from Scripture.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: We want to listen to God's word and what it says about who we are and what we are to do.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And then we also, when we do that well, we're equipped to share the gospel in a way that's really, really needed.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because as I'm gonna talk about later, lost people in our world aren't often walking around thinking, I think I need Jesus, right?
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like some of them are, and it's such a beautiful thing when they walk into the walls of our church and we get to say, like, oh my goodness, we can introduce you to him.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: But a lot of lost people, they don't know they need Jesus, but they know that they're confused.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: They know that they're hurting, right?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the hurting in our world and our culture has to do with some of these embodiment issues, right?
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: And the way that we think about our bodies and the way that we think about our minds.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: So we as a church, if we're equipped here, we can share the gospel where people are open to hearing it.
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: But we have to be equipped to do that.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_00: So there's two components to this, like I said, intended purpose and component.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: When in our churches we don't think about the role of our bodies in worship, and when we don't practice and teach about the ordinances, like I mentioned, those are two clear acts of physical obedience, regularly and intentionally, we're implicitly communicating in and through our liturgy that obedience to Jesus' words is not important, whether we mean to or not, right?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: Obedience to the explicit commands of Jesus necessitate practicing the ordinances regularly, like we talked about last week, with intentionality and esteeming them highly, some of which we see with the early church.
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_00: When churches don't do this, they risk accidentally communicating that total obedience to Jesus isn't essential.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we've talked about this a little bit with Matthew 28.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: In Matthew 28, 18 through 20, Jesus' command for his followers to be baptized is tied up in his command for them to make disciples.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_00: If making disciples is to be taken seriously, and we would say definitely it is, right, then baptism is too.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: And then in 1 Corinthians 11, Paul takes for granted the Corinthians are going to practice these acts in remembrance of Jesus.
• 18:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we see that obedience to Jesus' example, right?
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: He was baptized, he implemented the Lord's Supper, his example and exportation is an expected part of the liturgy of the church.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: So we looked at some of this in the past two weeks, but I want to make sure that I state it clearly and kind of connect it back.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: And like I said, the ordinances aren't the only way that we can worship God with our bodies, but they're a really clear way that Jesus tells us to do this.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_00: And I talked a little bit about this last week, but there's an Anglican priest and professor at Yale, Andrew McGowan, who writes about how for the early church, worship was not primarily, or at least not only, what happened inside the walls of the church, but for the early Christians, the idea of worship encompassed everything they did in every aspect of life in obedience to Christ.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_00: So when we think this way as Christians, we're freed to remember that all areas of life, all thoughts and words and actions have the potential to honor Jesus and become worship of Him and for Him.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_00: But when we forget this, we are sometimes in danger of forgetting that our bodies allow us to worship God and are not obstacles in the way of knowing or worshiping Him.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of that intended purpose component.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna talk about the missional piece a little more too, but I want to see if you guys have any questions.
• 19:23
  SPEAKER_00: What are you thinking, Jan?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what's your question?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_00: Ooh, yeah, that's such a good question.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_02: So, like, totally out.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: No, actually, I think it's related because it has to do with the way we think about our bodies.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm trying to do a better job this week of repeating the questions for the podcast because that was a feedback.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: So no, I can repeat it.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because I don't know that the mic's gonna pick you up.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, you you were asking, and now you can correct me if I remembered correctly.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, you're asking, like, with some of the more traditionally conservative Baptist traditions who would say, you know, we don't dance or we only sing certain types of songs, where did that come from and why did that develop?
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: So I was talking to someone else this morning about a different question, but similarly, a lot of times with these questions, there's like the theological component that we can think about and the historical component too.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so I think that question has has kind of both threads as well.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and there's kind of a cultural piece too.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: But basically, I would say that probably flows from, and I'm not an expert on this, also, um, but it, hi Tony, it probably flows from a wanting to take the way that we live our whole lives very seriously, which is a good impulse, and then I would say probably taking it to an extreme that becomes unhelpful.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and they wouldn't say that, they would be like, no, this extreme is very helpful.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but saying, like, hey, it really does matter what we do with our bodies and our and our thoughts and the way that we express our our um emotions and worship, but I would say probably taking it to an extreme, probab maybe out of fear of saying, like, we don't, we know we don't want to engage in these cultural expressions that don't honor God, and we're not sure where the line is.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_00: So we're just gonna draw the line way over here.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: And there are some benefits to that kind of conservatism, but it also I think like it means that we miss out on worshiping God in some of the ways that we see in scripture.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like we see David, right, singing and dancing and praising the Lord.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um but yeah, that's a good question.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_00: And different tr different traditions would probably answer it differently, but that's kind of a broad answer.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: Any other questions?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's interesting to think about the ways that, and we're gonna talk about this in a minute, the ways that our cultures like de-emphasis on embodiment show up.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think one of the ways can be not not taking care of our bodies.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: We talked a little bit about different types of self-harm, or even for the Christian thinking it doesn't really matter what I do with my body.
• 22:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like it doesn't really matter if I take care of myself, it doesn't really matter if I go to worship in person.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't really, you know, all of these ways that we can kind of de-emphasize the importance of our bodies.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a good thought.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: So the second component to this is the missional component of to why it matters if our worship doesn't show us that our bodies are good.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we've talked a little bit about this.
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_00: To some extent, humanity has struggled for centuries with how to understand the do the duality of the human person.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_00: We talked a little bit about Gnosticism at the very beginning, this like ancient teaching that said, like, oh, our souls got trapped in physical bodies, that's so regrettable.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_00: Can we get them out somehow, right?
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's an extreme version, but it's an old version.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: This has been a long, a long-standing thing.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a new problem.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is a person a mind trapped inside a body?
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_00: Is a person a body that just feels like it has a mind?
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: We can even, how many of you guys have seen The Matrix?
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's like a per it's like a movie from 2000, right?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Perfect.
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: This is actually a perfect example of what we're talking about, where the whole movie is about the fact that like the people think that they have bodies, but they actually are not in their real bodies, they're just minds like connected to this giant computer, which is like a we it's a weird story, but it points to the fact that this is a question that people keep coming back to, right?
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like, what is reality and what does my body have to do with reality?
• 23:35
  SPEAKER_00: So The Matrix kind of asks, is our entire embodied experience just a mirage that's being fed to us?
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's like a less serious format, but it's the same question.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: So while this isn't a new challenge, our current age has struggled to think about embodiment in a flavor that's all its own.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: We live in an internet age, honestly, that promotes disembodiment online and tells us sometimes that our bodies are nothing but a physical hindrance.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: And we live in a society where your own identity, your sense of self has grown in significance almost to the point of being a kind of personal gospel, right?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: Like what I think about who I am has become really important to people.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: Carl Truman, he's a professor at Grove City College in Pennsylvania.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_00: He writes that, big Carl Truman fan?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: I have a couple of his books.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, Pennsylvania.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_00: Big Pennsylvania fan.
• 24:26
  SPEAKER_00: Writes that today the self is entirely plastic, and the external world, right down to our bodies, is liquid, something that offers no firm ground upon which to build an identity.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: And he's basically saying by plastic, something that can be molded, changed, he used the word fluid, like basically anything goes.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_00: And the internet has really accelerated this of like, is my body really that important, or can I just kind of become who I want to become in an online chat room?
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_00: And that might not be true of you, but it's true for some people, and those ideas are showing up all over culture.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: When we think about the rapid rate of change in our society, that's another way we can see this.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_00: Carl Truman writes elsewhere that when in a society an individual's view of their self becomes an integral piece of one's self-definition, then eventually identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_00: He's basically saying, like, in our society, what you think about yourself has become really, really, really important.
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: And what you think about yourself has kind of become unlimited, right?
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_00: Because we kind of have divorced our sense of self from our physical bodies.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not just Christians who are talking about this.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: Carl Truman is a Christian.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a British journalist and author, her name's Mary Harrington.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: She's not a Christian, but she wrote a really interesting book called Feminism Against Progress.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: I wouldn't agree with everything that she writes.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: But she writes about how there are current secular narratives that push us all, and young people in particular, to view our bodies as optional attachment to our true identities, our minds, right?
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you can kind of see this in some of the extremes of youth culture right now.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: We can see our culture's confusion in the way that our culture struggles to know if and how sex and gender matter, right?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_00: Our secular culture is really grappling with that question.
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because if we don't know if our bodies matter, then how are we supposed to know if our sex and gender really matter either?
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: Or if they're just constructs waiting to be forgotten and discarded.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: So, and these are areas where our culture recognizes its own confusion, and we've got prominent voices across the secular Western landscape shouting with different opinions about how to resolve this confusion.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: So, one example of this, I just read this past week an article on the Gospel Coalition talking about how the American Medical Association has just changed some of its guidelines for the age of transgender surgeries.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: So they were for a while, the American Medical Association was really saying, like, if a kid wants a gender-affirming surgery, we think they should get it.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they've like completely about faced and said, hey, we actually don't think we should do any of those things until at least 18, because there's not good research that it actually helps people with their gender dysphoria.
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: So they weren't making a theological decision, right?
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: They were just saying, like, looking at the data, we do not think it's wise to continue this.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: If an adult wants to make that decision, the American Medical Association's not gonna interfere with that.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: They're not like they're not a moral body.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: But they were saying we don't think it's responsible to keep doing these procedures with children based on the results that we're seeing, which is fascinating.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: But then there are people that are really mad about that in secular culture, and then as Christians, we're like, oh yeah, that makes sense to us, you know.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_00: So there, like, there's just confusion.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: Even the fact that the American Medical Association has changed its opinions so rapidly in the course of 15 years points to that confusion.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: And that confusion, I would say, goes back to does my body matter?
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is it something that God gave me so that I can worship him?
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: Did he create it to be good?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: Or is my body just something that's hindering me from accepting my true identity?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a like that is a core question that you can see all over.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: Once you, once you, it's kind of like with liturgy, like you were talking about, Jan, once you open your eyes, you're like, oh, I'm thinking, I'm thinking about this in a new way and seeing it everywhere.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there's another author named Abigail Schreier who talks about this in a book, Irreversible Damage, that um it's really about some of this same idea of uh the anguish and confusion experienced by teenage girls who don't feel at home in their bodies.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: If you've been a teenage girl, there's an element of that which is just like normal, and then there's an element of that where some girls really, really have incredible mental health crises going through puberty.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and she talks about how these girls are sometimes told by the surrounding culture that their discomfort reveals their need to change their bodies into something new and something masculine.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is that same messaging of like your body is really kind of like Carl Truman said, plastic.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_00: It's not that important.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't given to you by anyone, and you can change it as much as you want, because who's who you really are is your mind.
• 29:04
  SPEAKER_00: Another book, I'm just kind of hitting some of these to kind of show how widespread this is.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: I have it here.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's called The Toxic War on Masculinity by Nancy Pearcy, and in it she talks about how Western culture has really struggled to create a cohesive story in the past 50 years, if you can trace it longer, about what a good man is and does and whether it's worth trying to be a good man at all.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: And she would say, like, our secular narrative of manhood has just totally broken down to where there's a lot of confusion about like what should a man be like.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: She does this really interesting, she she leans on this really interesting study where men were asked two different questions, young men in particular, what's a good man?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: And they described a good man, like these qualities of a good man.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_00: And then they were asked, what's a real man?
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And they gave like a completely different list.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a she was like, that reveals something really important.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_00: That men are like stuck in this tension of like, do you want to be a real man or do you want to be a good man?
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Because they're not the same.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and that our society has nothing better to offer them, um, I would say outside of Christ, right?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I don't think you both like any real man maybe.
• 30:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's a good question, Larry.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_02: Qualities conflicting.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yeah.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: So like a real man is someone who's tough, who doesn't take no for an answer, who is like powerful, you know, and a good man is someone who is kind and considerate and listens.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but then you have these two, like it's almost like you like the average young man has these two competing ideologies, because we haven't, as a society, said, here's a picture of what to aim for.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you can kind of see this in different areas in culture too, right?
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like, I can't speak to it personally, um, but just in thinking about like what are we asking our young men to step into, especially if you remove the church.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_00: And we don't really, we don't really have a good script as a as a secular society.
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, what all of these, these are like really varied examples, but the point of them is that today many people from many different backgrounds and belief systems in the West are confused about what it means that we have physical bodies and how important they are to who we are as humans.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: Um, what are you guys thinking so far?
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_00: Are you thinking like, oh, I've seen some of that, or like, oh, this doesn't make any sense to me.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and we're taught, I agree with you, Larry, we do need we do need older men pouring into younger men in the church.
• 31:38
  SPEAKER_00: And one of the things that we're getting to is that really it's only in Christ that we are able to speak to this anguish.
• 31:46
  SPEAKER_00: And what we're talking again about the missional component, so to say, okay, our culture is really confused and hurting, and they're aware of it.
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so this is why it's so important that this is one of the areas we as the church are equipped to step in and be ready to share the gospel into this and say, hey, the Lord made your body and it is good and intentional the way that it is.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_00: And not only did God make your body and have a plan for your body, he has a plan for all of you.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that plan involves knowing Jesus Christ, right?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: This is the reason this is important is because it gives us a way to share the gospel and in a space where people in our culture see their own confusion.
• 32:26
  SPEAKER_00: They look around and they say, We are really confused about this.
• 32:30
  SPEAKER_00: What do we do with that?
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think there's any cohesive answer apart from who Jesus is and who God has created us to be.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_00: But that's why this matters for the church.
• 32:39
  SPEAKER_00: It can seem a little bit theoretical, but it helps us know how to share the gospel.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like if you were going to be a missionary in another culture.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_00: You would study that culture from the outside to help you understand it before you stepped into it.
• 32:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're kind of doing the reverse of that.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_00: We're saying, okay, we're thinking about our culture, and we want to step back a little bit to say, what are the big ideas that people are wrestling with, that lost people are wrestling with?
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_00: And how does the gospel of Jesus Christ speak to those ideas?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that we can step back into our culture and say, with hearts of compassion and with the truth of Jesus, here's the good news that you need to know.
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the point.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: It can feel a little bit theoretical, but it really, there's an application here.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a hopeful sign to me that there are many faithful churches, churches like CVC existing across the cultural West, right?
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_00: Across the US, across the spaces where these questions are being asked.
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_00: But like I said earlier, some of these churches aren't able to speak in culture's confusion very well, either because they share some of that confusion, because they're being shaped by culture, or they just haven't done the work to say, okay, where do people see their need and how can we share the gospel in a way that makes sense to them where they are.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we could go back into history.
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, we could look at how some of this confusion about embodiment flows out of the development of Protestant theology during and follow the Reformation.
• 34:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we could look at how some of uh the fear of there some of this grew out of a fear of over-reliance on physical things, right?
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Especially in the Reformation.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: So you had a church where people were told, you have to be in the church, like you have to attend services, you have to go to confession, you have to be in specific places in order to receive grace, and you have to do specific things with your body in order to receive grace.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: So then the in the Reformation, we took we've talked about the Reformers the last couple of weeks.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_00: We had Reformers saying, No, that's not true.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_00: You need to understand the gospel, and you need to give your life, you need to invite Jesus to be your forgiver and leader.
• 34:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's a that's okay.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: You're making some really great connections.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_00: Because you asked a question earlier about just like really conservative Baptistic traditions.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and that's actually, we can think about that question as we think about some of what happened after the Reformation, right?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: Good emphases.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: Like we need to focus on what people are understanding with their minds so that they know how to invite Jesus to be their forgiver and leader, to be to use CVC language.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: But sometimes that was emphasized so much that other things were being lost.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Secondary things, but still important things, like we talked about earlier.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, when we talk about worship should show us that our bodies are good, we're not saying that's the primary focus of worship, because it isn't.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: And that the Reformation was really, oh, to really simplify, a season of the church where people were focused on what are the essentials and how have we gotten away from them.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um but when we think about, okay, worship should show us that our bodies are good, we're talking about something that's secondary, but that's important, right?
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: It is one of the things that should happen when we worship together, is that we see that God wants all of us to worship Him.
• 36:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a great, great point.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: So when we have this situation that we're talking about, where either the church is being influenced by culture or the church is not really well equipped to share the gospel in the way that culture is ready to hear it, it can cause three big problems.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: It can sometimes leave the church, Big C, vulnerable to overinfluence from the culture in its dismissal of embodiment, right?
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: So unintentionally, people come to church, they have these ideas about their body being not good, and and we don't address it at church at all, right?
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: We're not we're not thinking about the way people are being shaped there, and the church, the people in the church are overinfluenced by culture.
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_00: Second, it leaves the church unable to share the gospel in an arena where secular culture sees its own confusion and is fighting for an answer, which we've talked about.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_00: And third, it can cause or contribute to kind of a downplaying in the liturgy and ordinances as they're sometimes practiced in churches like these today.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of a review.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_00: So where do we go from here?
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_00: What is the answer?
• 37:11
  SPEAKER_00: To review, we've talked about this idea that some Protestant evangelical baptistic churches today are implicitly communicating that what we do with our bodies in worship isn't that important.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: We've discussed how unintentionally this can undermine the importance of obedience to Jesus' commands in Scripture, and it can even relegate the two primary embodied moments in the liturgy of some Protestant evangelical baptistic churches, the Lord's Supper and Baptism, to a lower or secondary status.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_00: So we can start to even take the physical things we do do in worship and de-emphasize them.
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_00: We've looked at how our culture is confused about whether our bodies are a good thing or a hindrance to our minds, whether they're meaningful or disposable.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_00: And we've talked about how we have today a world that probably, or we've thought a little bit about the a world that probably for the most part doesn't understand how these things would be connected, right?
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm on the street, I'm sharing the gospel with Jan, and Jan is thinking, I'm really, really struggling with whether or not or how my body is good.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_00: I think my body's bad.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think that I yeah, I think it's not a good thing.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I share the gospel with you, and you might think, that doesn't connect to anything I'm struggling with, right?
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like people in the world don't know that Jesus is the answer to these things.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_00: So how do we address all of this stuff?
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think there's three different ways that we can think about it.
• 38:30
  SPEAKER_00: Number one is, and these are in your outline, teaching for everyone, application for the whole church body.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, teaching for a few, application in designated smaller venues, and then practice for all, opportunities for further application.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so basically, teaching for everybody, I think some of these things should be addressed.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_00: They should be taught and caught, right?
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Churches like ours will benefit from developing intentional theologies about the rhythms and practice of the ordinances.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this last week, right?
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um intentional understanding and practice.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_00: And use that understanding to make intentional decisions moving forward.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_00: We talked the last, I think we talked last week, yeah, because that was ordinances, about how some faithful churches can practice the ordinances every week, some faithful churches can practice the ordinances less often, and both are good and legitimate, but they should be intentional decisions that are being made and then taught about to the church.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_00: Because even while we seek to engage the body in worship, we don't want to leave behind the mind, right?
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_00: We want to explain to people what we're doing.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this in the liturgy week too.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_00: Like, we want to invite people into the ways that we make decisions, both so that they can grow and be stretched, and also so that they can become a part of the decision-making process.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_00: I was telling you guys that with Sunday sessions, like keep thinking about these things and don't be afraid to bring feedback about them as well.
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_00: It can be helpful to think about what other elements can be changed so that people's senses are more engaged.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_00: What encouragement could be given to help people express their whole selves and worship in new and meaningful ways?
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_00: Number two, teaching for a few application and designated smaller venues, like Sunday sessions.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_00: Like this is actually one of the things in my paper I said, it's really helpful to give people space, whether in person or on a podcast, to wrestle with some of these ideas when they want to.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: To take people who are like, oh, I would like to know more about that and give them opportunity to learn about it.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then finally, practice for all, opportunities for further applications.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I think churches have a renewed opportunity to do is do some of this work of, we would call it sometimes cultural exegesis, to say, hey, how can we take what our culture is struggling with and take the truth of the gospel and apply it in a way that, to your point, makes sense to where they are right now?
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because sometimes we can, when we share the gospel, we can, you know, this is an extreme example, but go up to Claire and be like, I know what your problem is.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: Your problem is you don't have Jesus.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_00: Invite him to be your forgiver and leader right now.
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_00: And actually that's true, right?
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: If Claire doesn't know Jesus, that is her big problem.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_00: But she might in that moment be like, that's not my problem.
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_00: My problem is that I'm in pain and that I feel stuck in a body that I don't think is made for me, right?
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: And that actually God speaks to that too.
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_00: And so that can be a place to say, hey, let's talk about that and talk about how actually the good news about Jesus does apply to that.
• 41:21
  SPEAKER_00: But you're right, we can sometimes just expect people to want to modify their behavior because of who Jesus is before they know him, um, instead of as they get to know him or as they've submitted to him, you know.
• 41:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and and how, yeah, the gospel speaks to that pain that they do understand.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: So yes.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because we're talking about broad general ideas, but you're right, every person is gonna be different.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: And so part of this is just developing eyes to see and then a heart of compassion for people uh who are lost and wanting to listen to them.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_00: That's a good that's a good story, Claire.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_00: And it's it there is that tension, right, of remembering the Lord can use everything in anything, certainly.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: But it is a good thing to be equipped to share with people in the language they can hear.
• 42:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's yeah, and we're we're called to share the gospel winsomely, and remember it's gonna be the work of Holy Spirit and hearts.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: So this is like good work to do, um, but this kind of work is not necessary for God to accomplish the work that he wants to accomplish in his kingdom, ultimately, you know.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: So those are all good things to hold intention.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: So, what has recent growth and all of this looked like here at CBC?
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: I just want to talk about a couple different things that have happened recently.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, in a sermon last October, Rick Duncan actually said, uh, sometimes coming up front and kneeling is a way for you to express something with your body that's inside your heart.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: And he said, for those that came up, we have elders and staff members in the room, maybe we can come around and pray for you.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: You know, our hands are not the hands of Christ, but maybe us touching you will help you feel Jesus touching you.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: And he said that like while I was writing this paper, and I was like, oh, this is great, you know, because it was this perfect example of how, like, yeah, on like two different good things.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, um, it can be good to express with our body something that's inside our heart.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: That can be good because we are not two different things combined together, really.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: We are one person, physical and spiritual, like we talked about.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then he also talked about, you know, our hands are not the hands of Christ, but maybe us touching you will help you feel Jesus touching you.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: That when we're able to share compassion with one another and an embodied Sense it actually is really important.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: One of the more recent examples of this idea, I think, is COVID, where like we were just talking about this in a staff meeting, Tony, where for a while a lot of churches were like really afraid that everybody was gonna start going to church online and that nobody was ever gonna come back.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: When what actually happened is that we all figured out that like online is not a satisfying experience, right?
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: It's like not, it doesn't feel real.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's just it's really it's hard to put it into words, but like nobody actually wanted to keep doing that.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_00: It I think having like an online service element, it's a great introduction to our church, and it's good if it's your only option.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_00: But none of us that were able to come and be worshiping together in person wanted to keep doing that.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that speaks to this element of like our embodiment matters and our physical bodies are created by God to worship him.
• 44:49
  SPEAKER_00: I also was thinking about our night of prayer for the sick that we did in November, where we invited people to come who were sick.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: We talked about this a little bit, I think, our first week, and we ended up praying with sick people here at CVC for over two hours.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_00: We were wanting to open it up to like we can pray for a person that you know that's sick, and we never even got there because we were praying for so many sick people who were there in the building.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that speaks to a felt need, right?
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_00: Where people were like, I have this physical suffering and I want to be prayed over.
• 45:17
  SPEAKER_00: I want to engage with my whole self into who Christ is and into the community of the church.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and this night of prayer, um, we planned for it to be mostly an kind of an internal thing, like we'll pray over people in our church.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_00: But in the group I was in, we had a couple different people who were like, I'm sick, I don't go here, but my friend invited me, so I came so that I could be prayed for.
• 45:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um one of them, in my group, one of them was, and one of them was like, I'm not sure, you know.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_00: But it was just this like ministry opportunity because of someone's felt need that they understood.
• 45:48
  SPEAKER_00: They were like, My body has a need, and so I'm here, and we have a way to meet that need.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_00: But in all of that, I see evidence of how CVC, our congregation and its leaders, are wrestling with what it means to worship with our hearts, our hands, our minds, and our bodies, with our whole selves.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_00: And ultimately, as we continue to wrestle and lean into this, we will emerge on the other side of our wrestling better for it and better able to image the picture of the church that we see Jesus exhorting his disciples to live out in the pages of Scripture.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: We have an opportunity to lean into, like Rick said, this idea that it's important for us to not only express with our body something that's inside our heart on a sporadic basis, but to develop a discipline of tying our worship from our hearts and minds to our bodies in regular rhythms because we believe this is significant and because we see it as an act of obedience to Jesus.
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: There's a book I love by Justin Whitmull Early called Habits of the Household.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_00: You may have heard me talk about it before, but he writes in there, our habits don't save us, but they do shape us.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: And this is as true for our liturgy and in our celebration of the ordinances as it is in every other part of life.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: So the point of all that we've talked about in this series is not so that CBC can have better church services that feel more liturgical, that have a different aesthetic or shake up people's expectations.
• 47:05
  SPEAKER_00: The point is that people who find a church home here or in a church like ours should be able to grow in worship that engages hearts, minds, and bodies.
• 47:14
  SPEAKER_00: This is about helping people worship in a way that best engages all of who they are.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't end with Sunday morning, but it should be rooted there.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_00: It should start there.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_00: So today we've talked about how worship should remind us of the goodness of our bodies.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: It should remind us that our bodies are made by God and made to worship Him.
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about how some Protestant evangelical Baptistic churches in the US today don't place emphasis on this in the ways that they could.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_00: We've talked about how in some churches like this, the worship doesn't necessarily show us how our bodies are good.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_00: We've looked at how this can be a challenge and how we could address it.
• 47:51
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, this is what we've been talking about.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: If we believe that our bodies matter, if we believe that our bodies are good because they're created by God, and if we believe that God invites us to engage with our bodies and minds and hearts in worship, then we must show in our churches what this looks like in the life and rhythm of the church.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: The liturgy of the body of Christ should be intentional with what it communicates about the physical bodies of those within it.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't the primary purpose of worship in the church, but it's an implicit part of our theology that we should take care to be aware of and cultivate as we seek to know Jesus better and better make him known.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_00: So the last thing I want to state is that one of the things we haven't talked about today, but is important to think about too, is how like the fallenness of man plays into this and sin, because we are fallen.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: Our bodies are good, God created them as good before the fall, but now we're fallen.
• 48:42
  SPEAKER_00: And so it's important for us to think about how to hold that tension well, right?
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: To say, hey, there is something that's not right, but it's not just that your physical body is bad and your soul is good, right?
• 48:52
  SPEAKER_00: Which is what our culture sometimes seems to think.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um, really, all of us is fallen and all of us needs to be redeemed, but all of us is part of what God said was good at the very beginning.
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: Any questions?
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is so much information.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for being here and engaging.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_00: Any more questions?
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_00: You don't have to have any today either.
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can have some later.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thanks for being a part of this series.
• 49:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a lot of fun.
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you hung in to the end, so I appreciate it.
• 49:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um let's pray.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: God, I thank you for these ideas that we've talked about.
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_00: As I said earlier, our first two weeks were pretty practical, and this week we got a little bit more abstract.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so, Lord, I just ask that you'll continue to take these ideas and help us roll them around in our minds and think about them.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: Help us to have your eyes to see both the lostness of culture and your good design.
• 49:46
  SPEAKER_00: God, I pray that you'll give us hearts of compassion for the lost, that you'll stir in us a desire to share the good news about Jesus with people in our culture who need to know you.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: And Lord, I pray that you'll just help us at CBC continue to lean into some of these things to think about okay, what we want most is for people to be able to invite Jesus to be their leader and forgiver.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_00: And that does necessitate understanding.
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_00: But then we want to show people and invite people into how all of themselves is called to worship you.
• 50:19
  SPEAKER_00: How the way that we live, the way that we think, the way that we do things, the way that we stand and sit and eat and drink, the way that we are a part of the life of the church, all of it can bring you honor and glory.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, Lord, I ask that each day you'll draw us closer to you and teach us to love you more and more.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: We love you, Lord, in your name.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_00: Amen.