So there I was in a room full of a few hundred older, very reserved, and 99.9% white Christians who were singing a South African freedom song as if it were a 17th century hymn. It was in the middle of singing the song that I was stopped short by the thought that what we were doing there was the exact opposite of what we were proclaiming in song. How could we truly believe that the powers of oppression have no power if we weren’t embodying any visible sign of it? Beyond the oddity of having someone conduct our singing about freedom so as to ensure we hit the right pitches, the dissonance of the entire situation was unsettling. I couldn’t help but wonder if the act of appropriating a song of liberation from another culture and subduing and anglicizing it was not in itself an act of oppression of the song’s very power all for the sake of allowing us to feel multicultural an affirming of the “other.” Where were the acts of liberation? Where were the faces and voices of those others? Where in our midst was the struggle to turn the world upside-down, destroy the segregation of our churches, and humbly sacrifice our vision of how a worship service must function in order to make room for the hallelujahs of others?

These thoughts stopped my voice in the moment; I couldn’t finish singing the song. I did hear others grumbling about the song after the service. Either they had missed the explanations of the “he” referring to Satan and were upset that we would dare sing that God had no power. Or they were upset that they had to sing about the person of Satan since we all know he doesn’t actually exist. But I was met with blank stares when I suggested that I was uneasy singing a song of liberation in an unliberated space.

I am fully aware that no one there, especially not those who planned that liturgy, had such motives in mind in choosing that song. In fact I am sure they assumed that the choice was one for diversity and inclusion that challenged assumptions about what constitutes proper hymns. But as I reflected on the moment my unease remained. It made me wonder how often in the church we make that promise of freedom into a hollow platitude. Like when we spiritualize the call to release the oppressed and free the prisoners into being simply about overcoming our personal demons. Or twist the call to love our neighbor as ourselves to really be about just loving ourselves. Or preach that Christians shouldn’t be distracted by politics, or economics, or corporate greed (since addressing those issues might require us to live counter-culturally…). We speak of liberation and freedom as if they are facades. They make us look great on the outside, but are so impotent of concepts in our theologies that they do nothing to affect who we actually are. But the veneer of liberation only serves to further hide away the oppression still inside. The most empowering thing for racism is for people to believe it has been dealt with. But that isn’t true freedom.

Liberation cannot be just a guise. Inclusion cannot be trivial. Freedom from oppression cannot be spiritualized away. I had to stop singing because I felt like I was participating in the very act I was claiming to have overcome. There were voices missing in that space and I knew I couldn’t say Satan had no power in the midst of that absence. But even so, all I could do was not sing.

The conferences invites attendees with the assertion – “You are called out of the chaos of your crazy busy, constantly moving, overextended lives to a place grounded in the imagination of God.” I was asked to lead workshops on everyday justice issues as part of the conference and I appreciate the opportunity because it reflects to me a valuing of the idea that in truth everything is spiritual. I think that truth is something that most of us intellectually affirm, but which often doesn’t get translated into our day to day reality. We so narrowly define what it means to be spiritual that we end up constantly feeling disconnected from God because we can’t sustainably live what we have defined the spiritual life to be.

We all have of course heard of the mountaintop experiences – moments of spiritual connectedness that generally come from times of retreat or focused devotion. I don’t deny that those are spiritual moments, but the reality of life is that we cannot live constantly in those moments. And if we expect all spirituality to mirror the intensity of the mountaintop, we will inevitably be disappointed and feel far from God. We blame ourselves, or our church, or our culture for our distraction and disconnectedness, but perhaps the real problem is our definition of spirituality.

We have come to see spirituality as something set apart from the mundane aspects of everyday life and so become frustrated when our lives seem to get in the way of connecting to God. But God is not found in just the moments of devotion or prayer, or in the communal gathering for liturgy, or in voices lifted up in song. Those are all great tools for helping us concentrate on God, but God is the God over all creation, not just the systems the church has developed. A crazy busy world isn’t the antithesis of spirituality; it is simply a setting where spirituality can be manifest. Grounding ourselves in the imagination of God and redefining spirituality to include all aspects of life is what I think is needed to help us get over our constant struggle of feeling spiritually disconnected.

Embracing spirituality in the whole of life means understanding that even the acts that make our life crazy busy are spiritual acts. Waking up in the morning, making breakfast, and getting the kids off to school are spiritual acts. Rushing from meeting to meeting and facing project deadlines are spiritual acts. We are spiritual people in relationship with a spiritual God; everything we do therefore is a spiritual act. What matters then is if we are living our everyday life in a way that moves us closer to God or further from God. When we choose our clothes, or commute to work, or interact with our kids are we becoming more Christ-like and caring about the things God cares about or not?

Rethinking spirituality as an every moment of the day sort of thing opens us up to having God work in our lives in out of the box sorts of ways and moves us beyond the unsustainable “mountaintop experience” mentality. Embracing that we are always connected to God though is both comforting and infinitely more challenging. Everything being spiritual means we can’t shove God aside to just Sundays, or believe that God doesn’t care about what we eat or how we vote. Everything means everything. Sure, we still need times of reflection, communal worship, and retreat from the ordinary in order to help us refocus, but when every action of every day becomes a choice for God, our spiritual lives will unavoidably be transformed.

So I look forward to this conference where we will explore how to both take the time for rest and reflection as a spiritual practice and how to learn to see the world not as the enemy of spirituality but as instead the very place where our spirituality is developed and lived. It should truly be a time to leave behind the old paradigm of our crazy busy lives (in more ways than one) and discover a sustainable spirituality.

Sad thing, even as a disabled person the only reaction I ever heard about ADA was negative. People complained about the hassle of making space for the disabled. They said it was unfair that the disabled were being given special privileges (yes, seriously people were stupid enough to say something like that). And, most of all, they complained about the cost. And being in the church world, where I heard that complaint most often was from churches. Now I understand that churches often don’t have a lot of money, and to add another few hundred thousand onto a renovation budget to be ADA compliant is difficult. A church I was at once attempted to renovate their sanctuary to fit in more seating, but in the end we lost seats because of the ramp we had to put in to make the stage accessible. It was hard and forced the church to rethink where the money was to be spent, which of course led to some choice words being said about the “liberal nonsense of the ADA.” But in truth, I had to wonder why the church wasn’t the one out there doing whatever they could to include the disabled – even without being forced to by law. Jesus went out of his way to be with the disabled in his society, the church could at least do the same.

Where this gets confusing for me is the intersection of disabled people and worship. Straight-up, there is a lot that churches do in worship (especially in more experimental experiential worship) that is just plain inaccessible to the disabled. There have been a number of times at my current church where I have just sat quietly in my seat because whatever worship activity we were doing would have been impossible to do with one hand. And I always cringe a bit when we do active things, or create art, or meditate on a film and exclude the wheelchair users and the blind in our congregation. I similarly don’t wish to exclude the say, kinesthetic or visual learners in the church, but it sometimes feels as if there is no awareness of how a disabled person could enter into the worship experience. As a church have we forgotten how to go to the lengths of cutting open a roof and lowering our disabled friend in through the ceiling just so they could meet Jesus?

So as we celebrate these twenty years, I think it should be as a reminder of how far we still have to go in our culture and in the church. There are still churches that ban the disabled from serving as priests. And there are churches that see disability as a result of sin or of a lack of faith in the Lord to heal. I’ve been told to just have enough faith and the Lord will grow my arm, or to at least look forward to having two perfect arms in heaven. Disabled people need to be included in worship, but first, we need to be accepted as who we are. Not as people to be pitied or to be cured, but as children of God created the way God wanted us to be. We want to be included in community not because a law forces us to be put up with, but because the church desperately wants to love us and desires to hear our voice.

I’ve long been interested in archaeology, particularly biblical archaeology. So it caught my eye when the Jerusalem Post reported this morning that the oldest known example of written Hebrew was discovered about eighteen months ago and recently deciphered. Written on a piece of pottery shard, it was dated to the 10th century BCE, the time of King David.

Prof. Gershon Galil of the Department of Biblical Studies at the University of Haifa, who deciphered the text and determined it was an ancient form of Hebrew, explained that “This text is a social statement, relating to slaves, widows and orphans.” While not definitively determined as a biblical text, the inscription certainly could be. Prof. Galil’s reconstructed translation reads:

1′ you shall not do [it], but worship the [Lord].
2′ Judge the sla[ve] and the wid[ow] / Judge the orph[an]3′ [and] the stranger. [Pl]ead for the infant / plead for the po[or and]
4′ the widow. Rehabilitate [the poor] at the hands of the king.
5′ Protect the po[or and] the slave / [supp]ort the stranger.

I’m not surprised to learn that this three-millennia-old inscription links worshiping the Lord to pleading for the poor. From the earliest days of humanity writing down God’s instructions, worship and justice were linked. It was true then, and it is still true today.

Duane Shank is the senior policy advisor for Sojourners.

In my introductory statements on how I see mission and worship as being one and the same, I brought up what the Bible says about justice and worship.  In Isaiah 1 God says he hates our worship gatherings – finds them meaningless and detestable – if we are participating in injustices and not seeking justice for the oppressed.  And in Isaiah 58 we are told that the sort of worship practices God desires are those that "loose the chains of injustice, and untie the cords of the yoke, set the oppressed free, and break every yoke. To share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood."  Worship has to be about serving God by serving others.  Worship is mission which is seeking justice for the oppressed.  The Bible is very clear about that and I think we have strayed far too far in the modern church from this biblical conception of worship.  While most Christians might admit (hopefully) that worship isn't just the singing of songs, I think very few realize that feeding the hungery is an act of worship and devotion to God.  It is something the church must reclaim.

So I made my assertion that a missional church will be seeking justice as an act of worship and I got an interesting response from the audience in return.  One man said that these days he sees certain students caring so much about serving others that they neglect the acts of piety like doing devotions and praying so we need to be careful about encouraging things like seeking justice.  I actually didn't get a chance to respond to the statement as one of the other panel members jumped in and claimed that practices of piety should always be at the center of our worshiping practices.  My first thought though was, "did this guy miss the part in the Bible where God says he DESPISES our acts of piety if we are not seeking justice at the same time???"  But my next response was to feel heartbroken at how in the American church we have so equated worship with cultural habits that we fail to see how biblical worship is even worship at all.

I know I probably don't score very well on the typical evangelical worship meter.  I don't do the singing endless praise choruses thing.  I don't put "Praise the Lord!" in my Facebook status update at least once a day.  I don't do fill-in-the-blank "bible studies."  I don't read spiritual devotiony sort of books expecting a paragraph or two of religious sounding words to fill me up each morning.  I don't meet for marathon prayer sessions where I have to pray for someone's neighbor's cat or something.  I know all those things work for some people to help them celebrate God, and they used to work for me too, but I've realized that I cannot limit worship (and God) by insisting that those cultural habits are the only or best ways to worship God.  Sure, I dig deep into scripture, I pray, and I celebrate God, it's just that my acts of piety don't fit the 20th Century American Evangelical Contemporary Christian Subculture box.  And because of that I've been accused at times of not being a Christian.  Or at least reminded of what my faith and worship habits should be looking like.

So when I hear a pastor warn against following scripture in order to encourage these cultural habits, I get uneasy.  Worship cannot be confined to a box – be that the box of evangelical devotions or praise music or reformed liturgy or Catholic Mass.  And following the biblical mandate to worship God through seeking justice isn't in opposition to, but is instead part of personal piety and devotion to God. We are loving God, celebrating God's greatness, and reflecting God's glory by participating in the acts of service we are instructed to do.   It isn't that I seek justice some days and worship on others – it is all worship.   How I meditate on God's word and how I seek justice for the oppressed will of course look different than how others do it – but we are all still worshiping.

Worship is much bigger than ourselves, and I think to truly be a missional church we need to get over ourselves and our allegiances to cultural habits and start integrating what God said he wants from our worship into what we do.