Historical Ballast
We will be true
To thee till death!
Frederick W. Faber, 1849
I was born into a nautical
family. One doesn’t have to turn too
many pages in the Myers family picture album before boats begin to appear. My paternal grandfather was a ship’s carpenter
like his father. By the time he was
eighteen, he had built his own sloop and sailed it solo around Long Island, New
York. He spent most of his career in a
private yard, building and repairing wooden boats in Bayport, NY. My father, on the other hand, loved airplanes
and became an aeronautical electrician.
But the boat-building bug bit him, too.
There was a time when our family had nine boats in our garage or yard
that he had built. One of my two
brothers is a wooden-boat builder par
excellence, now retired from teaching so that he can devote more time to
his craft.
I didn’t catch the apple when
it fell from the tree. My best efforts
are in miniature: wooden models or ships-in-bottles. Still, I love boats and
sailing. Several years ago, my boat-building brother convinced me to buy a
fifteen-foot rowing dory from him.
(Dories are typically “double-ended” boats with flat bottoms and flared
sides.) It was a beautiful and
stoutly-built vessel. After I had owned
it for a while, I decided that I wanted to add a sailing rig. I purchased an antique book on how to make sails
and I proceeded to make my set from sturdy canvas. It was a great project. I followed the old craft of sail-making,
including broad-seaming and hand-stitched roping to produce a set of sails that
impressed even my brother. I made the
spars and installed the mast footing on the boat.
I well remember her maiden
voyage. It was a rather blustery
midwestern day; the wind was probably sustaining around 15 MPH. I loaded up the boat and took her to Brown’s
Lake near Sioux City, Iowa. I put up the
rigging and admired my handiwork and the beauty of her lines. I felt like a real Myers. When I pushed off from the dock, it was
rather slow going for a few minutes because the wind was light close to shore.
But when I got out to the middle of the lake, she nearly capsized! I had to let go of all the controlling ropes
to depower the sail, watching it flap violently
in the wind. It was a great day for
sailing but my boat couldn’t handle it!
Humiliated and greatly disappointed, I pulled the mast and sails down,
got out my oars, and rowed back to the dock.
I called my brother to ask for advice and he took me to task
for making a solid-core mast and using too heavy sailcloth. He was still the top-dog in our boat-building
clan. I called my dad and he said I
needed to put some ballast in the bottom of the boat. Looking back, I realized that any good sailor
would know that. The following week, I
took the two 70-pound sandbags that I used for traction in my truck and put them
in the bottom of the dory. She sailed
beautifully. In fact, the last time I
sailed the boat, she performed wonderfully with my brother serving as crew and
“ballast.”
Like my boat on that windy day
at Brown’s Lake, Evangelicals often try to navigate their way without the
benefit of historical ballast. We scan
the wind and the waves of our cultural context and then rig our ecclesiastical
ship with theology, methodology, and practical programs that look really nice
at first glance. But when we fail to consider
the weight of our long history and tradition, we run the risk of being
overwhelmed and overturned when we launch out to engage the world. We need the ballast of historical
perspective.
For most of my life, I
understood the history of the Church through a narrative that seemed to project
the following:
- The New Testament Church got it all right.
- The Church stayed fairly pure through its first three centuries, as evidenced by its perseverance under persecution, but quickly apostasized after the faith became the official religion of the Roman Empire.
- Nothing positive happened in the Church from the fourth century until the Reformation in the early sixteenth century.
- The Church returned to its early roots and purity after the Reformation.
Of course, the NT Church did
not always “get it right.” Correction
was a subject in many of the epistles.
The seven churches of Revelation did not survive. And the years between the Council of Nicaea
(325 A.D) and the Reformation (1517 A.D.) brought many positive developments
that affect us even today. Certainly,
not all Protestants or even those from my Baptist tradition would hold such a
narrow view as I was taught. But I’m
sure that the perspective I held is rather pervasive throughout Free Churches.
When we omit twelve hundred
years of church history from the Ante-Nicene Church (pre-325 A.D.) to the
Protestant Reformation, we are discarding
important understanding of people and events that brought us to our current
state. There are lessons to be learned,
warnings to be taken, and inspiration to be had in the happenings that occurred
in the Church during that long period.
It is true that modern Evangelicalism is a Protestant tradition. Post-Reformation history, therefore, will be
the focus of this book. But in the following pages, I will highlight some of
the people and movements that shaped our understanding and practice of worship
leading up to the Reformation and lasting until today.
The
Ante-Nicene Worship (Pentecost – 325 A.D.)
Worship
in the New Testament Church
The New Testament does not give
us specific prescriptions as to how we are to order Christian corporate
worship. The most direct instructions
given regarding public worship are found in I Corinthians where the Apostle
Paul takes the church to task for abuses at the Lord’s Table and for their
disorderly use of spiritual gifts. But
there are no complete orders of worship to be found in the Gospels, Acts of the
Apostles, or the Epistles. Instead, we
have a few “snapshots” of corporate worship through descriptions and
instructions regarding specific elements in their gatherings...
The preceding is an excerpt from Chapter 1 of Strategic Portraits. The remainder of the chapter is a broad survey of people and movements that shaped corporate worship in the church from its beginning until the Reformation. You can order your copy of Strategic Portraits: People and Movements that Shaped Evangelical Worship in print or Kindle format from Amazon.
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