The Reassuring Rhythms of Worship

For as long as I can remember I have been attending church services. As a kid, that building was a most impressive space, one large room with stained glass windows, a balcony, a raised platform on which the minister stood, a choir loft, and a pipe organ.  Two things stood out about being there: the predictability and the music.

When you are ten years old, you live largely at the mercy of others. Their wishes are your commands, no matter how odd (or unwanted, or unfair, or wrong) they are.  You live by the moods of those who are over you. Those moods were unpredictable when I was growing up. But not on Sundays at 9:30AM and 7:00PM.

They were the “appointed hours” when services began at the church we attended. It was brick and architecturally non-descript. The stained glass windows had no pictures, just swirls. At night they were colorful from the outside, the opposite during the day. The exterior stairs could be icy in winter, hence the iron banisters. There was no handicap access; but I remember a polio survivor with crutches who courageously climbed those stairs, and a few more inside, to take his seat in the pews for every service. Oh, and in summer the auditorium (never the ‘sanctuary’ which sounded un-Protestant) was infernally hot, even with the wall mounted fans whirring and the windows wide-opened.

We always sat in the same location, as did the people ahead and behind us. The pews weren’t rented, but everyone knew where they belonged, almost like the assigned seats in school. The elders and deacons sat together in the front during their three year terms in the Consistory, leaving their wives to handle the kids like single moms.  It was kind of exciting on the Sunday after New Year’s Day when a third of those men resumed their seats (on the aisle) with their families.

There was a rhythm to it all, a predictability. Each morning service ended with the Doxology, each evening with “Now Blessed Be the Lord, Our God, the God of Israel.” Each morning included the Ten Commandments, each evening the Apostles’ Creed. During each baptism we were solemnly reminded that God “drowned the obstinate Pharoah and all his hosts in the Red Sea,” and the Lord’s Supper form included the extensive “following list of gross sins” we should avoid. Both sacrament ceremonies have been brightened up since then, thankfully.  But to a ten year old, even those scary words had a predictability about them that became reassuring.

Reassurance—that some things in life could always be the same, that some things in life were predictable—that gave me solace during those Sunday hours. And the songs, and the sound of the real pipe organ, and the four part harmonies the words and the instrument drew from the worshippers, and how those harmonies held when the organist stopped playing for a verse or two of “Just As I Am” or some other familiar hymn. And the fervor that the Dutch immigrants would invest in those rare occasions when this congregation founded by English-speakers would yield to singing “Ere zij God” at Christmas. To the ten year old me, those sounds were what the singing hosts in Revelation must have sounded like—if they knew English and had our organist to lead them.

I belong to Calvin Church because I still seek that reassurance I experienced as a ten year old. The songs (both old and new), the prayers, the recitations, the sermons, the accompaniment, the sights and sounds of people united in voice and focus, together saying and singing the same words, and worshipping the same God as Christians have been doing together since the time of Christ—that’s what the services mean to me. I am not alone. Sometimes, in my mind I’ll see the stained glass window that now rises above the front door of the church I grew up in that includes the words “We Are the Lord’s”.  “We are the Lord’s”—the heart of the Reformed tradition.  God’s harmony can be experienced amid the dissonance of our world. I see it each Sunday. And that’s why I belong to Calvin Church, because each Sunday I’m reminded of God’s truth, and again inspired to live it.

Written by church member Dr. Robert Schoone-Jongen