August 16, 2023 Show with Rev. Evan McClanahan on “Worship Wars”

Worship Wars and the Purpose of Christian Radio

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father, James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer, George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister, George Norcross, and sports legend, Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27, verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now here's your host, Chris Arnzen.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 16th day of August, 2023.

Before I introduce my guest, I have a very urgent prayer request, and that is for my brother, Andy. Many of you who listen to this program regularly may have heard me make on-air prayer requests for him.

He resides in a local nursing home here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, ever since he was left completely paralyzed on his left side after a major stroke a number of years ago. And he had a recent bout with pneumonia, which, by God's grace and mercy, he appears to have conquered.

But a new development has been brought to light that is life-threatening for my brother. He has a blood contamination known as sepsis, which is deadly. And he went to the hospital two nights ago and demanded to be returned to the nursing home against the doctor's insistence.

They nonetheless obliged his demand, and he is back at the nursing home, which is a lot less safe place to be in his condition. I was visiting him today, trying to convince him of the seriousness error of his decision, and I was basically speaking to deaf ears and thankfully the conversation was interrupted by a nurse who was beginning the intravenous antibiotic session that he was urgently in need of.

So I will keep you updated onto his health, and I would plead with you to please pray for my brother Andy. I am not at peace with his standing before God. I'm not at peace with his profession of faith in Christ.

So I would ask of you also, and perhaps first and foremost, that you pray for his salvation above everything. But God willing, I will have a praise report for you in the near future, but time will only tell what our sovereign Lord has in store for my brother.

So thank you all for praying, and I know I can count on my listeners as you have always revealed to me through the hundreds of emails and responses to social media posts and so on, that many of you are rallying behind me in prayer through not only this situation, but through others I've experienced in the past.

But I want to thank you all from the very depths of my heart. But today we have as a returning guest, Reverend Evan McClanahan, who is moderator and occasional participant in one of the only continuously operating debate series in the country, the First Word Debate Series at First Lutheran.

He is a writer for The Everyman and The Federalist, and pastor of the First Lutheran Church of Houston, Texas. Today we're going to be addressing the very controversial theme, worship wars. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Trip and Zion Radio, Pastor Evan McClanahan.

Well, thank you so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. Once again, we had so much fun last time. We did a two for one.

Yes.

So I'm going to try to talk faster this time so I don't steal your valuable airtime, and we'll get it done in one go round, one shot.

I hope that is not a revelation that you hate coming on this show.

No, no, no, no, not at all. Like I said,.

I hope this is not like a Band-Aid treatment. Let me rip this off like a Band-Aid and get it over with.

No, 100 not. Like I said, I'm very honored to be here. I just, you know, I don't want to take up any more of your precious time than any of my thoughts warrant. So, but I'm looking forward to the talk today, and hopefully we'll get some listener feedback as well.

I'll try to ask some questions along the way that I'd be curious to know what your thoughts are on. So it's, you know, not just going to be me talking for sure, but definitely something, this is definitely something I've thought about a lot.

And actually the one debate that we hosted at our church that I participated in other than as a moderator was on this question. A friend of mine, Clinton Wilcox, and I did have a formal debate on kind of contemporary worship, or I don't know, true Christian worship, or something to that effect.

And so I'm actually stealing, I don't know if it's theft if you're stealing from yourself, but I'm kind of lifting some of the same material with some kind of updated thoughts, because as time goes on, we do have, you know, we do have some data.

We have more data coming in, right, on kind of the state of the church. And in fact, we're in kind of the post-COVID, era, if you will, right? So I definitely, anyway, but if people wanted to see that, it's somewhere out there on YouTube on the First Lutheran Debate YouTube channel, or First Lutheran channel, I don't know.

Anyway, something to think about.

Well, since it's been a little bit, not too long, but a little bit since you've been on the program, why don't you remind our listeners about First Lutheran Church of Houston, Texas?

Yeah, First Lutheran, it goes back to the 1840s in Houston, which for your East Coasters, I know that's like a, you know, a young church, but for those of us in Texas, it's pretty old. That's when the Germans started to come up through the Gulf of Mexico.

A lot of them stopped in Galveston, but a few kept on to Houston. And so we are a German immigrant church and gone through a lot of interesting denominational changes, became Lutheran again after basically becoming independent for a number of years.

In 2001, and that was in the very, very, wasn't quite so crazy at the time, but it, you know, became obviously kind of nutty, which was the ELCA. We left that 2011, and we are a traditional church pretty much in every sense of the word.

You know, our worship is, in fact, I'm holding right here, you know, our LVW, our 1978 hymnal. And there've been a few publishing houses that have tried to update it. And, you know, I don't think there's really much out there that's better quite yet.

It's not perfect by any means, but we still use a hymnal, no screens, no rock band. We had a fire in 2011. We used that insurance money to get a brand new pipe organ. We're very committed, you know, to these traditions.

But we do, you know, outreach. You know, we have these debates. We do outreach to college students. We're part, I'm part of Theology on Tap, which is kind of an informal kind of debate, evangelism, apologetics ministry.

We have a preschool, you know. So I like to think that when it comes to worship, we hold on to traditions that have value that I'll be, you know, explaining here in this conversation. But we do a number of things to do outreach.

And next time we talk in a couple of weeks, I'll be actually talking about that a little bit, kind of a vision for the church, kind of a, maybe, dare I say, a kind of a different vision. Those words are controversial, but kind of a different vision for where the church is gonna need to end up, being a basically a wholesale community participant rather than just a place people show up to worship.

But when they show up to worship, you need to do it. Well, let's just say there are better ways to do it than others, so.

Well, you know, I have just, and believe it or not, this just came out of, popped into my head right now. I have a suggestion for a motto for your Theology on Tap. How about, all stout, no suds?

I like that. I'm pitching that. I'm pitching that. I'll give you credit, though. So, actually, that'd be great for merch, you know, with the Theology on Tap logo, all stout. I love that. It's great, yep.

And if anybody wants more information about this fine congregation, go to f, let's see. Oh, man, I need a new pair of glasses. Of flhouston .org, flhouston .org. Yep. The L, as always, when it's in lowercase, looks like an I when you have bad vision, especially.

So it's flhouston .org, and this is a conservative, confessional Lutheran church, although the denomination does accept, or believe in the ordination of women, that is not a compulsory thing for individual congregations, am I right?

That is correct, and as I've said before, I would be shocked if that were ever to happen at my church, my congregation, but if it did, it would be long after I was gone. So, yeah, that's the reality.

Upcoming Debates on Solo Scriptura, Purgatory, the Trinity, and John 6

Now tell us about the debates coming up next year with Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries, who is a dear friend.

Yes, yeah, yeah, I'm glad you asked, because actually today I put tickets on sale and put posts on my personal Facebook page. I'll shoot an email out to my debate list and all that. So I've got three nailed down.

One is in process due to some scheduling difficulties. One may not happen early next year, but, so I've got two with Dr. James White and Trent Horn of Catholic Answers. The first is on solo scriptura, and as I'm saying, you haven't heard it all before.

There are some new arguments. Of course, if you listen to Dr. White's podcast, he's pulling his apart already, so you're gonna kinda get a preview, but if you wanna see them talk about it directly to one another with ample cross-examination, I've got 20 minutes each of cross-examination in the contract, so we're gonna have lots of cross-examination.

And so it's on solo scriptura, so like I said, there are new arguments coming out.

New arguments from Trent Horn, not Dr. White.

Yes, yes, thank you.

In fact, ironically, aren't they Protestant arguments or arguments from a Protestant?

Yes, apparently he's using a book written by a Protestant who, I guess, doesn't believe that Paul even wrote 2 Timothy, and yet he's, they're looking at the God-breathed, theionoustos, that's the Greek word, theionoustos, and so Trent Horn is kind of offering a different translation from God-breathed, which seems to be the literal meaning of that phrase, and so therefore it's a debate ultimately about the nature of scripture, and so what you don't wanna see happen, even among our Catholic friends, is a denigration of scripture to get away from the authority of scripture, right?

I mean, even if you've got a high value of scripture and a high value of tradition, hey, at least you got high value of both. Maybe we can work with that in some way. I mean, there's more to debate, but if you've gotta lower the scripture and start talking about its ontological nature being in some way decreased, maybe it's not God-breathed after all, et cetera, et cetera, well, that's a problem.

So they're gonna be pulling that apart. I think it'll be really interesting. And then the Doctrine of Purgatory. Yes, again, in fact, I don't know if you hosted one of his purgatory debates.

Yes, I did. The most infamous one with Peter Stravinskis. That was where an audience member during the Q &A, tongue-in-cheek, it was a Protestant audience member who tongue-in-cheek asked Peter Stravinskis, and I'm paraphrasing because I don't have the exact transcript or hips of the debate in front of me, but the audience member said, I heard you can lessen your time in purgatory by giving a donation to the Catholic Church.

If that's true, who do I make the check out to and how much? And after a uproarious laughter occurred in the audience, Stravinskis answered, hey, pay now or pay later. And I think that Roman Catholics in the audience, or at least many of them, were shocked by that.

I'm just assuming. Yeah, wow. There was an eerie silence and some moans. Wow. I mean, the moans may have been all from Protestants, but I don't think that every Catholic was happy with that kind of a glib, but very revealing answer.

Yeah, and I'll say, you know, I like Trenton Horne. I mean, you know, he has a YouTube channel that's doing pretty well on a podcast. He just did a, like a three hour debate with a kind of a left-wing influencer named Destiny on a kind of popular podcast among the young folks called Whatever.

And I actually hope to do a review of that debate on my podcast, because I think there are some real, I mean, I think he did an okay job. I think there's some real problems with it, but, you know, I give him credit.

He's, you know, he seems like a nice enough guy. And, you know, I think Dr. White's, you know, a nice guy. And I think they'll, but, you know, they're both very serious about what they believe. And purgatory, it gets to gospel issues.

I mean, for sure. Oh, of course. It's sufficiency of the sacrifice of Christ. So it's right there. And I mean, so it's kind of exciting really to get back to these Reformation debates. You know, I mean, it's living history.

So I'm really excited about that. I mean, I cut my teeth when I got into apologetics, you know, it was, you know, kind of William Lane Craig, and then, you know, Dr. James White on YouTube. You know, that's kind of, and it was a lot of these Catholic debates, as I said on previous show that, you know, some of what you were hosting.

So I just was shocked that anyone was still debating those topics. I kind of thought they were in some way settled or something, but Dr. White does a great job of bringing them to the fore. And then after that, because as you all know, if you're fans of Dr. White, you know, he drives to his various locations on his way back through Houston.

So a couple of weeks later, March 9th, Saturday, March 9th, we've got a debate with Dale Tuggy of the Unitarian Christian Alliance. And so, yeah, that's going to be a classic Trinitarian Unitarian debate.

The question is, is Jesus Yahweh? And the contract is signed. We're good to go. So the fourth debate there, I think everyone agrees on the topic, but literally an hour ago, I was going back and forth with some emails and I don't think we've got a date that works for all parties.

So we're going to see what we can do. But if that is pulled together, it would be on John 6. And if you're a listener to, again, Alpha and Omega's podcast or The Dividing Line, you know exactly what I'm talking about, but I'm not going to be the one to name names.

So we'll see what we can pull together.

The Gospel at War Conference and the Gay Christian Debate

And while you're at it, or while we're at it, I might as well throw in a plug for a debate that I have arranged that's coming up very soon. This is a debate I arranged for my friends at the Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society.

It is a part of a three-day conference where Dr. White is the keynote speaker Friday, September 15th, through Sunday, September 17th in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, which is Lancaster County. The theme of the conference is The Gospel at War.

And Dr. White will be joined by other speakers who take different elements of how the gospel is at war with specific things in our world that involve both the church itself and things going on in society.

But on Saturdays, September 16th, from 3 .30 p .m. to 6 .30 p .m., Dr. White will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles. And Dr. Coles identifies as a gay Christian. And the theme of the debate is, is gay Christian a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's church?

And if you want to register for that conference and debate, go to futureofchristendom .org, futureofchristendom .org. Register as quickly as possible so that you get the best price possible. And you'll be hearing more about that.

But we are going to be discussing, when we return from our first commercial break, the theme of Worship Wars. And if anybody would like to join us with a question of your own for Reverend Evan McClanahan, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

Give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. Let's say you vehemently disagree with the style of worship that takes place in your own church.

Perhaps you're even the pastor and you have those complaints, but obviously don't want to draw attention to your identity at this point. We understand that. But if it's a general question, please give us your first name at least, city and state, and country of residence.

We'll be right back with Pastor Evan right after these messages. Please do not go away.

The Mid-Atlantic Reformation Society presents The Future of Christendom 2023, The Gospel at War, September 15th to the 16th in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania featuring Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

We are excited to be including a formal debate in this year's conference. Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries will be debating Dr. Gregory Coles, author of Single Gay Christian, A Personal Journey of Faith and Sexual Identity, the debate topic.

Is gay Christian a biblically acceptable identity for a member of Christ's church? So come join us for the sixth Future of Christendom conference. The event will take place at Spooky Nook Sports in Mannheim, Pennsylvania, and will run from Friday evening through all day Saturday with an invitation to the Sunday morning worship service of the Independence Reformed Bible Church.

This will be a weekend packed with practical teaching with a theme of the gospel at war in many areas of our culture, including government schools, the Supreme Court, missions, feminism, and even the church pulpits.

Head to futureofchristendom .org.

James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries here. I'm very excited to announce that my longtime friend Chris Arnzen of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio and I are heading down to Atlanta, Georgia again for the G3 National Conference.

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Make sure you stop by the Iron Sharpens Iron Radio Exhibitor booth and say hi to Chris Arnzen while you're there. Go to g3min .org and enter promo code G3ISIR for your 30 discount off the registration fee.

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So go to royaldiadem .com today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with our guest, and his name is Pastor Evan McClanahan, pastor of First Lutheran Church of Houston, Texas, and we are discussing worship wars, and I'm assuming, although I could be wrong, that this is intended to be a comparison and contrast between what has become known as traditional worship and contemporary worship.

Am I right?

Yeah, I think so, but I even want to go a little bit deeper and kind of try to ask some foundational questions about what worship is, what it's trying to accomplish. Yeah, we'll start with that. Who is God?

Who is this God that we're worshiping? So let me, it's a big topic, obviously. I don't know, it's not as debated as much as it used to be when the contemporary scene was kind of rolling on, onto the scene, I guess, in the 90s and 2000s.

Now that's the mainstream. Now we're the weirdos. Now the pastor that wears a robe and a stole and we sing out of a hymn. We don't have screens. You know, that's definitely the minority point of view now, but at one point we were kind of the majority, but I do want to challenge some basic notions that just because something old, it's good, or just because something is new, it's bad.

The question really is what are we trying to do? So let me just ask some questions to kind of get the ball rolling here. CCM, Contemporary Christian Music, it's been around for, I don't know, about 40 years or so.

And part of the reason for CCM was to offer, well, we were told, it's right there in the name, a contemporary voice to the church, right? To reach the unchurched, right? These people, all these people that weren't going to church because church was stodgy and old fashioned and everything else.

And so CCM was going to grow the kingdom or help grow the kingdom by reaching those who would not or could not be reached by old fashioned worship with, you know, vestments and organs and choirs and all of that.

So, fine. Sounds good. So here's, I guess, a question. We've been doing it long enough. You know, the data's in, right? So my question to the audience would be, what's exactly the state of American Christianity today?

To also, to what degree are CCM and the seeker-sensitive model or the attractional model or the church growth movement or the charismatic movement one and the same thing? You know, those things, after a while, they kind of get hard to pull apart.

And so those are realities, though, that we've got to pull apart, you know, because it could be that, you know, some contemporary music is just fine, but if it has the goal of, you know, the church growth movement, those are not necessarily good goals.

Likewise, there's issues in the charismatic movement and yet they use contemporary music. So anyway, so more questions for the audience. What's the purpose of worship? You know, what is it for? Now, you might think that's kind of an easy series of questions, but in fact, it's not.

Christians do not agree on what worship even is or who it's for. I mean, just to give you a little taste, is Christianity, or I'm sorry, is worship for Christians or is it for non-Christians? I was at a church conference just last week and one of our speakers in our tradition, which is a pretty, you know, fairly traditional, conservative, you know, Lutheran tradition, was that, how was it said exactly?

Basically, the church is the only organization founded for the sake of others, something to that extent. And on the one hand, that's kind of a pious sounding thing, but on the other hand, it's just not true.

I mean, what about when Jesus says to Peter, feed my sheep, is that not for the members of a church? So I think you can, as a church, you can have an outward and an inward focus, that's okay, and too much of one or the other is a bad thing.

But if worship is not for Christians, then you're gonna have the results that I think are pretty clear, which is it's a mile wide, but an inch, you know, an inch deep. A few more questions. If worship is primarily a time set aside to praise God, well, who is this God?

What's he like? How should we approach him? Are there any examples in the Bible of God making himself known to mere mortals? And how did those men react? Obviously, one thinks of, say, the burning bush or Isaiah six, right off the bat.

What are the most important characteristics of God that would dictate the way that we might approach him? If we all agree that our primary mission is to be a disciple of Jesus and to make Jesus, you know, disciples of Christ, I mean, it's right there in Matthew 28, 19, right?

Well, what role does worship have in that? Or are those two totally separate things? Is worship this thing that we do for our private piety and discipleship is the thing that we do for, I don't know, our public exposure or to bring people into the faith?

Or are these two things actually interconnected in some kind of deep, beautiful, profound way? So in sum, these are the kind of questions I think we need to be asking in the church. But the question we usually end up asking is what can we do to stem the crippling loss of members that we are experiencing at the moment, right?

How can we reach and attract more people into our group? And if we're kind of stuck on these kind of superficial questions, we're gonna keep getting really superficial answers. And I think that's where we're at.

So I'm at the point now where I think the church needs to just reevaluate things. I think we've got enough data on the worship wars in to where I, I don't know, I think it's safe to say that it maybe hasn't accomplished all that everyone thought it would accomplish, you know, has.

So anyway, I don't know if you wanna respond to any of that or you want me to just keep going or what?

Well, I'd like to give perhaps a caveat and see if you agree or disagree with it. Sometimes when we have in the church discussions like this, comparing and contrasting the idea of traditional versus contemporary worship, we have to recognize or at least should consider that there are modern Christian hymn writers, songwriters, recording artists, who sing and record their music in a way, in a manner and in a style that is very much reflective of the hymnody of the past.

The Gettys, for instance, I think have created some breathtaking music that very often at the church where I'm a member, Grace Baptist Church of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, we have a very traditional worship service, primarily using hymns from the Trinity hymnal and also using a psalter that we have, every pew has a psalter.

But in the bulletin, they typically, at least a couple of times a month, will include a contemporary song, but when sung, it just sounds like a hymn of the past where there is much biblical faithfulness and integrity in the lyrics.

The lyrics are biblically rich. They are not fluff. They are not man-centered. So don't we have to be hesitant to just throw around this idea that contemporary equals heretical or fluff or bubblegum or garbage?

Absolutely, and I'm really glad you said that. There are some wonderful writers out there. One of the benefits of older stuff is that it's kind of gone through the filter of time, so we're kind of left with the greatest hits of the church, whereas we're still trying to figure out what the greatest hits of the 2010s are.

One of my concerns with the modern, with the CCM movement, though, is that not many people are doing that kind of theological, there's just not enough people doing the theological reflection on the music.

I mean, the two biggest producers of CCM are Bethel and Hillsong, both of which are church bodies that are plagued with scandal, and I would say some pretty rotten theology that really is in contrast to Orthodox Christianity.

But yes, just because it's new doesn't mean it's bad, because everything that we like that's old was once new, even if it's a fourth-century hymn, like Of the Father's Love Begotten or something like that.

Yes, at one point it was new. So it being old doesn't make it good. Being new doesn't make it bad. I think what I would want is for the church to have the tools to evaluate, to do discernment, to kind of think this through.

And so I think as we talk through it, it'll be clear that I don't have, or I don't advocate too simple of an approach, but basically it's to give us tools to evaluate and kind of consider the purpose of it.

And you also brought up a good point that not everything old is good. And of course, old is a relative term. And please, my fundamentalist Baptist friends, my independent fundamentalist Baptist friends do not take this as a broad-brushing insult, but very often when folks from that group of the church will use phraseology like that old-time religion and things that they cherish that they think are old are mid to late 19th century, early 20th century contributions to the church that are not old when you compare them to things that are truly ancient in the church in the grand scheme of things.

And I have been at some fundamentalist churches where some of the songs they sing, and remember, I'm not broad-brushing, I'm not saying every fundamentalist church, but some of the songs they sing, even though they're almost 100 years old, perhaps a little over 100 years old, they sound silly.

They almost sound like something from a burlesque review except they're using Christian phraseology and some of it is just basically reduced to the absolute minimal level of depth of anything that is a biblical concept.

Am I making sense here?

Absolutely, and a lot of the problem with the contemporary stuff, I mean, if you really wanna get into this, you can look at the influence of literary deconstruction. It's made its way into the church, right?

We're often living through music that is evocative, but not necessarily meaningful, and I shouldn't say meaningful, it's not clear in what its meaning is. The Lord has given us this thing called language and logic and rules of language and logic, and great poets will use those rules to maybe stretch language, but to convey very particular meanings that cannot be gone beyond the words on the page.