Wednesday • 1/12/2022

We’re taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we’ll be thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday January 17.

Holy Restlessness (Part Two of Three)

Yesterday, we considered the way the French medieval peasant monk Suger discovered a theology of light. Today, we explore the way his audacious imagination inspired by that theology of light led him to take risks that wound up revolutionizing worship in his day. 

Audacious Imagination

Sometimes it helps to be an amateur. Because Abbot Suger had not had the blinders of formal architectural training, he was innocent of the principles that dictated thick walls and small windows. 

Happily, Suger lived in a time of much experimentation with church architecture. However, no one before him imagined bringing as many innovations together in one building, because no one had yet become so driven to implement a fresh vision of height and light to worship. 

He imagined displacing weight from the walls themselves onto faux walls that would run perpendicular to the actual walls –what we now call “flying buttresses.” Working with bold and brilliant masons, Suger combined several fresh architectural features that allowed a tall skeletal structure to support wide windows: the flying buttresses, a revolutionary arch system, and clustered columns. 

Suger’s chief contribution was the concept of a ribbed vault, or arch system, using slender diagonal ribs of stone, to support the ceiling and roof. This configuration allowed modification in the construction of walls. Instead of the earlier massive and unyielding masonry, the walls of the chapels that surrounded Suger’s chancel area consisted of sixteen wide/large stained-glass windows that told redemption’s story and beamed multi-colored light onto a polished mosaic floor. It was dazzlingly beautiful, as Suger himself noted: “The entire sanctuary is thus pervaded by a wonderful and continuous light entering through the most sacred windows.” 

Abbot Suger’s building project at Saint-Denis marked a decisive beginning for a whole new movement in architecture,  eventually named “Gothic.” Historian Daniel Boorstin summarizes: “The new luminous skeleton of stone proclaimed a Church no longer on the defensive, but reaching prayerfully up to God and triumphantly to the world in an architecture of light.” 

Free to Fail

Innovations can fail to occur for one of two reasons. Would-be innovators try things they don’t have the authority to do. Non-innovators fail to try things they could have accomplished if only they’d had the courage. 

Many years ago, a wise pastor told me: “Reggie, when it comes to authority, people mess up in one of two ways. Either they try to use authority they mistakenly think they have – for which they eventually get themselves fired. Or they don’t understand how much authority they actually do have, and they play it way too safe. They don’t have the audacity to try anything that could get them fired, so they just wither, even if they keep their job. Your temptation will be to play it safe and wither. I want you to try things that could get you fired.”  That pastor encouraged freedom and flexibility, opportunity and openness, for the staff at his church. Risk-taking in an environment with this kind of permission was an awesome and unforgettable experience.

Abbot Suger’s story provides a worthwhile study in understanding what is possible to achieve in one’s own setting. It was Suger’s happy providence to have attended the same school in the monastery of Saint-Denis alongside the future king Louis VI of France. Later, he served the King well on a number of diplomatic missions, and he received free rein to think boldly about what he could accomplish, and he had access to any resources he needed. 

That’s just not going to be the case for most of us. Few of us have access to unlimited funds, or a personal relationship with someone as powerful as an earthly king. But we all have some measure of authority and relationship with a heavenly King. And therefore, discernment is an essential element in the employment of that authority in the service of “kingdom” innovation.

Go … or Let Go?

In basketball, one of the most difficult things for a player to acquire is the intuition to know when to pass the ball and when to take the shot, when to make an attempt and when to let it go. How do you know if something is a good idea or a bad idea? Go or no-go?

Scripture redounds with wisdom for discerning what innovations you ought to attempt. For example, Saul did not have the authority to offer sacrifice, but David did have the authority to eat the showbread. Simon Magus did not have the authority to use the Spirit to turn a quick buck, but Jesus did heal on the Sabbath. 

The Gentile gift for the (Jewish) Jerusalem church, conceived by the Apostle Paul in a difficult year of consensus-building, was perhaps the single most innovative project of the entire New Testament: a concrete symbol of Gentile and Jewish oneness in the gospel. Even then, Paul knew he was taking a calculated risk, and that things might not come off smoothly (see Acts 21:10-14; Romans 15:30-33). It was a good thing that Paul factored in the possibility of “failure”: he was arrested in Jerusalem and wrongly accused of allowing Gentiles to defile the Temple. 

Paul understood the limits of his authority and the extent of the risks involved in this innovative enterprise. Yet it was a “failure” only in a short term sense. Theologically, his arrest led him to some of his richest reflections on Gentile and Jewish oneness (Ephesians 2). Missiologically, his arrest provided him the opportunity to demand an audience with the Emperor.  

Today, in this second installment of “Holy Restlessness,” we’ve considered important lessons on worship leadership from Abbot Suger’s life: how discernment requires assessing accurately your authority, ascertaining the appropriateness of your idea, recognizing resources and risks, and estimating the effectiveness of initiating an innovation. In tomorrow’s third and final instalment, we will explore the way creative and successful worship leadership works with what resources are available and exercises innovative wisdom. Meanwhile, …

…be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image: Zairon, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons