Nearly a year ago, as many of you may remember, I made a trip down to Nashville to visit my friend Megan. As I wrote in my blog entry about the trip, on that Sunday I went to Christ Community Church where Rev. Scotty Smith is senior pastor. On Monday, I began my first Jan term class, Worship in Today’s Church, which is being taught by Rev. Scotty Smith. Quelle coincidence!
Now this class isn’t the M.Div. core course on worship, but an elective class, so it’s to be expected that the class wouldn’t necessarily be on the mechanics of the worship. However, the class has turned out to be very different than my expectations. Sure, there has been plenty of discussion about what worship is with regard to the regulative principle, and how that applies to what we do on Sunday, but in addition, the class has also been personally challenging in discussing our own personal idols of the heart. Even the reading list is quite unexpected. On the one hand we have Worship by the Book edited by D.A. Carson, but on the other hand we have Addictions: A Banquet in the Grave by Edward Welch. Your first reaction (and mine too) is probably to ask, “What does a book on addictions have to do with worship?” However, one of the challenges of this class, and the way such a book fits in, is to recognize addictions of all kinds, particularly our own addictions, as worship disorders—slavery to our idols.
So far this class has had a tremendous impact on both how I understand worship and also how I understand the things that my heart desires. In fact, even if the class ended right now, it would probably be the most personally impacting class that I’ve had in seminary so far. More about this later.
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For me,my most noteable class was an indepth class on Paul. Oft times the lines between scholarship and personal refection are blurred.
man do I wish I was able to actually get online (on my parent’s sucky slow computer right now) and talk to you. that and that class sounds really interesting… add that to the list of classes that are making me wish I had gone to grad school. (add a course on Tolkien taught by one of my favorite profs in the Religion Dept at E-town).