ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 82.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> NICK: Here in the heart of Los Angeles, where more than seventy languages are used in the public schools, it is critically important to recognize culture also in worship. I feel confident that the same will be true for Paul among the Haitians of Miami and perhaps for David and Joshua, too. How can we approach the cultural dimensions of worship in a congregation? >> DR. JAMES BRAUER: The business of culture does make it more difficult. It's hard enough for people to move from the things that they would hope God would teach to what he actually teaches, to rely on the means and grace as the way of interacting and meeting God. So it's not surprising that those questions have to come up first. But eventually, there's a kind of fit that's needed to make it feel genuine and authentic people, especially when they're trying to make a response in the service. Now, we understand this rather naturally with the business of language and words. But there are other issues as well. In the design of God's work with the story of Christ and his death and resurrection being the chief thing that God wants to communicate to an individual and for that person to receive by faith, it always -- there is no exception -- must pass through the culture that surrounds that person. And for that person to express thank-you back to God, it also has to use the culture that the person knows and to express that. As a person grows in the ways of God, some of the barriers that are there are removed by the work of God in their heart and they're more open to the language of God as the Bible presents the concepts and the terms and the ways of phrasing things. And gradually, the filter is somewhat blasted away by this, if you want an image for it. But always some of that remains. Now, here is our problem in the twenty first century. Our people come with sometimes almost individual filters, and we have to find ways that are common to these people in order to communicate broadly. And sometimes when they're grouped together by type of culture, we need to make considerable adjustments so that they actually hear what it is we have to say. Now, as one who translates the Bible, you know how to do this with words. So we can express the problem another way, not the filter picture now, of the way of encoding a message and decoding it. So think of it this way: I have a concept I want you to understand. Say, it's a simple thing like would you come to my house for supper. I have to find a way to say that in language, then I encode it in my best way that I know you can understand it. It now becomes words that are in the space between us. Your ear then hears it, and you understand that sentence from how you've learned to operate the language. And when I say, come for supper, if you've used the word supper to simply mean lunch, we're in trouble because I'm thinking evening, and you're thinking noon. So vocabulary enters into this. And phrases, they carry small implications sometimes. So we know that we're translating. But then it also goes to customs that go around it and about you systems. This person may, in a sense, end up putting on a jacket, a tie and wearing their best shoes and I come to the door because it's at my home and I'm wearing shorts and one of my best T-shirts. Now, all of a sudden, he's uncomfortable because my value system said it was at my home so I'm going to be informal. And he's thinking, you know, he's going to go out, like, to dinner. So there is so much that interacts in this cultural question, it makes it hard with worship. Now, let's think about how we have to approach this. Rule number one always has to be *Lex orandi, lex credendi. We cannot have in the service things that don't fit what God says. When they don't fit the way he's revealed himself, they have to be removed. So either when I try to present for God or when the person tries to respond saying what they heard. So this is a sorting out to have the proper kind of text that fits. Also in the prayer language and the praise. Now, how can I, in a sense, work this difficult thing with a people whose value system and way of encoding is somewhat new to me. I can never be a true native to it unless I live in it for a long time, decades, in order to pick up all the nuances of their interaction. So our problem in the twenty first century, when we gather people that come from different backgrounds is, Essentially, to continue in the teaching dialogue with these people so you can ask, what did you receive in that message. Did that say what you were trying to say? Did I get across what I was trying to get across. And this is kind of a sorting out in each and every worship scene. And each pastor has to work it out there. It is not a mass marketed thing anymore. Now, I've made it a really difficult question here by emphasizing the differences. We also have mass media, the use of television and radio, that almost everyone encounters. And that is tending to, in a sense, give a common way to interact. And so we actually do have some wonderful unifying things going on that go globally. For example, it was pointed out to me by people from Ghana who had preserved the music of the villages by going and collecting it like archaeologists. Because when people got transistor radios and could run them with batteries, even those who lived in the bush, could have modern recordings and sounds. And so they were moving away from what had been their long tradition of doing it to something that fit with other cultures as well. So it's possible that Whitney Houston or Brittany Spears or somebody like that is in this bush music comes by radio. Now it's a crazy kind of question and image, but there is this kind of global interaction that unifies and assists this task. So when we're working with worship, we need to sort through these cultural dimensions with our particular people so that we can communicate and they can say in a way that appears authentic to them what they want in the way of thank you to God and encouraging one another in the faith.