Refreshing Winds II – A bit of Iona in Winnipeg 
John Bell |
John Bell, one of the Christian church’s most influential worship leaders, spent four days in January inviting gathered 170 church leaders and 35 students into a radical practice of worship. Bell emphasized that while we tend toward a worship that makes us comfortably egocentric, biblical worship pulls us out of ourselves and into communion with God and with the global church.
Christians from across the denominations and from across the country heard Bell speak to the centrality of worship in the life of the church and to the possibility of worship as a transformative act. In particular, he brought stories from around the world that testified to the Spirit in action in people.
Bell’s approach to music from the developing world was especially helpful. Instead of seeing this music as enhancing our worship, he showed how it can bring us into solidarity with those brothers and sisters who produced it. Likewise, his approach to the Psalms was refreshingly unindividual. Rather than praying only those Psalms that express what we feel, we should use the entire Psalter, so that we can know how others feel. Those Psalms of revenge that seem unchristian to us may articulate very well the real emotions of those suffering elsewhere. Connection to these emotions in worship makes a prayerful connection with these people possible, he said.
In addition to Bell’s teaching (which itself included a great deal of singing), there were two public worship services and a range of workshops. These workshops were led by local people and served to help root the conference in real practice. They included workshops on the arts in worship, including drumming, visual arts, drama, and even the reading of Scripture as art. Other workshops addressed the structure and theology of the worship service as a whole. Participation in all the events was lively, and coffee breaks were full of discussions about how this might change the way people had been thinking about worship. After a Sunday afternoon communion service, the group dispersed to work out what they had seen and heard.
—Paul Dyck, CMU faculty
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