The Shifting Fortunes of the Pulpit

 

St Mary's Baptist Church 1811 build: The pulpit figures prominently

The above picture shows the interior of the Regency chapel of St Mary's Baptist Church in the 19th century, a building whose foundation stone was laid in 1811 by its minister Joseph Kinghorn.  What is notable about this interior is not just the overwhelming centrality of the pulpit, but that the pulpit is installed against a blank wall - well, almost blank: As if to relieve the starkness of this wall some memorial plaques have since been fixed to it. But the message is, I think, nevertheless clear: That is, it is intended one focuses on the pulpit ministry and not be distracted by extraneous details which may not be usefully edifying. 

In those days I don't think the congregation had any instrumental accompaniment to their singing as there appears to be no space in the pew packed interior for a band, although I suspect the pews running perpendicular to the congregational pews were for a choir. It was only in 1863 after some years of resistance and three years after open communion had been won in a court battle that a small organ was gingerly introduced. Ideas were on the move and the fact that the church had presumed to adorn their pulpit wall with memorials to their esteemed forbears suggests to me they were becoming aware of themselves not just as sinful ears to be harangued from the pulpit, but also as a respectable sub-culture with a proud lineage.

As if to confirm that a revolution was slowly unfolding, in 1886 the chapel underwent a lavish Victorian refurbishment (See picture below). The pulpit wall was knocked out and extended into an apse-like chancel and this was then filled with an organ and choir stalls.  In contrast to the coy introduction of the organ over twenty years earlier, the new organ was a sophisticated and grand piece of machinery. It served as a sensational centre-piece in the refurbished building, sending a signal about the wealth of the church and its social status. But the extravagant hedge of organ pipes and the richly carved surrounding polished woodwork were in danger of upstaging the pulpit. The pulpit however was still central, if rather lost in all the competing detail; unlike the Regency chapel where the pulpit stood out against the nothingness of a pallid wall.

St Mary's Baptist Church after the Victorian refurbishment of 1886 

In 1890 St Mary's Baptist Church planted a daughter church on Sayers Street in Norwich. In 1905 this new church went on to build the pseudo-Gothic pile of Dereham Road Baptist Church, serving the sprawling Victorian & Edwardian suburbs in that area. At the sharp end of Dereham Road Baptist Church we find a central organ/choir/communion table/pulpit configuration that has striking similarities with the configuration at St Mary's Baptist Church (See the picture below). Although the pulpits of both churches were now surrounded by competing details the overall impression, however, is that both churches still gloried in the pulpit and its ministry of words. 

St Mary's daughter church; Dereham Road Baptist.

Unfortunately, St Mary's elegant regency building with its rich Victorian interior was destroyed by a combination of fire in 1939 and a WWII bombing raid in 1942. But when St Mary’s congregation came to rebuild their post war church in the late 1940s and early 1950s something strange happened: The pulpit was shifted to the left of the communion table and stood in sentry at the mouth of a well-defined chancel; a configuration found in many C of E and Catholic churches. The pulpit was no longer vying for central attention as in days of old. Instead, we find only the communion table at the centre.... See the picture below:

St Mary's post war rebuild.

This change may have come about because history was now telling these non-conformists they were no longer a persecuted sect, in fact quite the opposite: They had been sympathetic to the North American revolutionaries and were vocal in their opposition to slavery; history had come out on their side. Moreover, they were now respectable pillars of society and had behind them a history of knights, MPs, and successful businessmen.  They would have therefore felt themselves to be on a par with the state church. In fact, the architecture of Dereham Road Baptist Church is evidence that they were already flirting with an establishment look as far back as 1905; that contrasted with the early days when non-conformists preferred a secular classical look as opposed to the state church gothic look; in those days classical architecture help set them apart from the state church. But there may be more to it than this: After two devastatingly destructive mega-death world wars the like of which were unprecedented in all human history there may have been a sneaky feeling that no rationale articulated in words alone could do justice to the human predicament.

In times of crisis & doubt there is a tendency for human beings to find consolation in mystery and the esoteric. During the first world war protestant soldiers would often resort to Catholicism's arcane rituals of death in order to derive some comfort in the face of mortality. In the first half of the 19th Century the Catholic architect Augustus Pugin tried to revive the flagging devotion of the industrialized masses with the architectural finery and romantic mysticism of the gothic revival.

But many protestants were also starting to behave as if words were not the only experience to be had in church. In the above picture of St Mary's Baptist Church, the centrality of the communion table may signify that there was a shift away from pulpit culture toward the mystery of communion with God. But this relatively mild change was a portent of more fundamental shifts that came in the second half of the 20^th century when the ministry of words was to find itself jostling with the ministry of esoteric experience. This reached a crescendo in the 1960s onwards as sublime gnostic encounters with God were regarded as the acme of Christain experience..... in fact, when I once recommended a scholarly & intellectual Bible teacher of my acquaintance, I was told that his ministry was like going back to the dark ages! At that moment I knew I was now in a culturally alien landscape to which I could contribute little. In much contemporary Christian culture faith centers around the mystical "encounter" with God. "Encounter" is now a rather hackneyed buzz word, heard everywhere in today's passion centred Christian communities; it connotes a deep mystical tryst with the divine. Not that I think there is anything wrong with ecstasies and sublime encounters with God; the trouble comes when these experiences are used as a shibboleth of an underlying authoritarian "gnostic" philosophy (See here).

Today services at St. Mary's Baptist Church (Now called Norwich Central Baptist Church) look like this.....

Worship today in Norwich Central Baptist Church.

The offset pulpit is now redundant and only used as a hideaway for sound equipment and other items; it no longer serves as a way to give non-conformist sermons some kind of cathedra authority; that may not be a bad thing. However, in its place one is likely to see the animated personable talking head who has plenty of personality; no longer confined to the few square feet of the pulpit they also have plenty of maneuvering room on a large stage. This stage may also be occupied by a band which is there to help the congregants lose themselves in the reverie of the worship experience, when they are not picking their way through the pith of the ministry of words. As it is at NCBC so it is with many other modern worship venues. At NCBC, however, there remains a healthy balance between Logos and Pneuma.  

My theory is that these changes in Christian culture are driven by changes in the wider society where the church no longer has an authoritative voice in that society. The story told by the church as a sense making "cosmic mythology" no longer resonates in the wider world.  I can understand that as a cultural (over) reaction to contemporary conditions (Although I, of course, beg to differ with that reaction). In this context to appear to practice some kind of pulpit-based cathedra authority may come over as presumption, even among church goers. When words cut less ice and their impact is exhausted there is a yearning for sublime encounters with the transcendent God.  This yearning has upsides and downsides; by itself it is not entirely healthy as words are needed to regulate the potential excesses of gnosis. 

***

But in spite of these profound cultural changes, we don't have to go very far to find something that harks right back to the first half of the 19th century. Across the road from Norwich Central Baptist Church is a small Strict and Particular Baptist church which calls itself "Zoar Chapel". Inside the walls of its plain unfussy exterior, we find this:

Inside Zoar Chapel just across the road from NCBC

In this small Christian dynastic cultural pocket, it is as if nothing has changed for the last two hundred years. It has a pulpit standing against a featureless wall, thus allowing nothing to upstage the ministry of words. The only concession seems to be the small organ on the right-hand side below the pulpit. Such groups jealousy guard their doctrines. Even though the congregants at the massive pile of NCBC across the road bill themselves as faithful evangelicals (a title which must nowadays be distinguished from today's North American far-right Trumpian evangelicalism) they are likely to be regarded by Zoar Chapel to be in the grip of compromise. To the members of Zoar Chapel the stasis of their practice and belief is evidence they are attuned to timeless and universal truths. They therefore pride themselves as being unaffected by the changes in modern culture which shapes the practices of Christians beyond their walls - if indeed they even think of them as Christians! 

Sermons in Stone II: Just when you thought it was safe to go back to your pew.

Dereham Road Baptist Church, Norwich: 

The subject of my monograph, "Sermons in Stone". 

 I recently published on my FB page a link to my monograph "Sermons in Stone".  As I read through it again, I realized that there was more I would have liked to have remarked on and didn't. So, something like the following will probably appear as a short postscript in a future edition. It may be a bit obscure without a knowledge of history, but it is, I believe, relevant to contemporary church life. 

***

May be in reaction to the ostentatious and austere spirituality of the puritans, the English Restoration of 1660 ushered in an architectural period when the rational and secular feel of classical styles was the preferred church architecture. This persisted until the end of the Regency, by which time the gothic revival (from 1740s onward) was making itself felt among church builders. This revival was part of the romantic movement: The romantics were a reaction to the intellectualism of the enlightenment and the machine society of industrialization. This reaction involved a reaffirmation of the mysticism of the infinite and the emergence of an idealized and nostalgic conception of the mediaeval world. (Consider for example Strawberry Hill) The romantics were trying to reconnect reality with the world of human feeling and mood.

When after 1688 the English nonconformists were free to build their own worship spaces they initially opted for clean & neat classical styles to distinguish themselves from the "semi-reformed" State Church. However, an innate human diffidence toward the outcomes of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution appears to have led to a complex reactional interplay between the rational & the romantic and the mechanical & the mystical, leaving many puzzled about where life's meaning is to be found, if indeed they believed there was such a thing as meaning and purpose. Even for non-conformists gothic styles became a way of reaffirming the overarching mystery of life.

Dereham Road Baptist Church is a left over from the late gothic revival built by protestants who in their early days would probably have reacted against such romantic architecture, perceiving it as too popish. In fact the Berean tradition from which these protestants came would likely have laid claim to the rational high ground in that they saw themselves as reading scripture unsullied by Catholic prejudices & mysticism.  But in later years, especially toward the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st, Protestant evangelicals appeared to be the very opposite; that is, none other than a last bastion of mystery and irrationality. By the late 20th century Protestant mysticism had moved on from the external expressions seen in gothic architecture like DRBC to the mystical internal experiences of the chaotic Charismatic revival.

Today we still see the existential tensions caused by the unsettled contentions between mystery & mechanism, between rational secularism & religious fideism, between the sense of the romantic & the stark functionality of a machine culture, between modernism & postmodernism and between the cosmic perspective and the intimacy of the inner life. These unresolved issues are endemic to the culture of the industrialized West. They are also relevant to church life because they can result in existential crises and sharp fundamental disagreements. See here for example.

As Sir Kenneth Clarke said:

We've a long rough voyage ahead of us, and I can't say how it will end because it isn't over yet. We're still the offspring of the romantic movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope. 

 

   

Return of the Killer Pews

 

These pews were made for sitting and not the Charismatic Dub Step!

In 1995 I wrote a short essay entitled "Killer Pews". It was a response to a pattern of behaviour I had seen frequently in church life (and continue to see), a pattern where we find some Christians agitating for a spiritual revolution that supercharges what they regard as the rather humdrum, mediocre & unempowered work of a target church. The proposed remedy is that individuals must proactively seek an experience of "the Baptism of the Spirit". Given that many people in the church may already lay claim to having had the Baptism of the Spirit, sometimes more generic and vague terms such as the touch of God, an encounter with God or an infilling may be used. However, when one analyses what is actually being promoted one finds that it has less to do with spiritual experience per se than it has in trying to cast spiritual renewal into a quasi-gnostic philosophical mold by asserting a sharp distinction between the initiates and non-initiates of  some kind of inner spiritual light. As is so often the case when the target church fails to respond to the revivalist challenge it is then put down to "resisting the Spirit".

I must caution at this point that I am in no way presuming to put an unqualified denial on anyone's personal Christian experience or any epiphany they may have which takes them to a new level (which they may rightly or wrongly call the Baptism of the Spirit), anymore than I would expect them to cast doubt on my own very proprietary experience; rather my criticisms are about how such experiences are being interpreted and used to promote a philosophy which perceives Christian life in dualisms: "head vs heart", "intellect vs intuition",  "reason vs faith", initiates vs non-initiates and the like.  

***

I'm currently following an online service where the challenge of moving onto a whole different plane of super-spirituality & blessing is being promulgated by the speakers of the latest sermon series. At the time of writing Killer Pews in 1995 I was seeing, and had seen, Christian experience being cast into a very similar dualist mold of initiates vs non-initiates. This philosophy can lead to a lot of hard feeling not least because the logic of its aficionados has maneuvered them into such a position that they can only see criticism as a form of resistance to the very Spirit of God. They therefore can do little but consider any challenge to their views as a very grave matter indeed. 

I have of course written a lot more on this subject since 1995, some of which can be found in the links below. Possibly at the end of this latest episode I may say something about this particular foray into "gnostic" renewal. But let me hazard what I think will be the likely outcome of this latest sermon series: By and large the preachers will hear positive noises from the people they are preaching too, but because these preachers find difficulty taking onboard the variety, broadness and depths of the human personalities they are dealing with and moreover, the variety, broadness and depths of God's work, the outcome will fall short of the new dawn they are looking for. We might end up with some very disappointed promoters who will feel as though they have been punching at very soft foam rubber. It's happened before.

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/search/label/Dualism

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/search/label/Fideism

http://viewsnewsandpews.blogspot.com/search/label/Mythos%20vs%20Logos

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/search/label/Logos%20vs%20Pneuma

http://norwichcentralbaptistchurch.blogspot.com/search/label/mythos%20vs%20logos

ADDENDUM 13/02/21

More details about the underlying philosophy of the sermon series commented on above can be found here:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2021/02/head-vs-heart-intellect-vs-feeling.html

ADDENDUM 

20/04/21: I post here my detailed comments on the online sermon series I refer to above: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OWIjP8FdaVrRYbhBJL0M9bVR3gM2kOGd/view

ANOTHER MANIFESTATION OF THE LOGOS/MYTHOS TENSION

An African Indigenous Church meeting for Worship

Here is a link to the notes I compiled for my talk at NCBC on Vulnerable Mission. Vulnerable Mission is an approach to mission developed by Jim Harries in Africa. Roughly speaking the Vulnerable Missionary avoids being a channel of Western culture, language and wealth and instead seeks to work beside his native colleagues using the language and resources they already have. This circumvents some of the problems that arise when Western backed mission becomes bound up with crude attempts to graft the methods and resources of the industrialized world upon African culture, a grafting that often comes to grief in rural Africa because it fails to cater for vast differences in culture and industrial infrastructure. In this video Jim explains in detail what his work involves.

Jim Harries mission is of particular interest to me because it picks up on a recurrent theme in my thinking; namely, the polarisation between the Logos and Mythos world views. The Logos world view builds models of the world using linguistic tokens and in particular exploits the mechanistic “law and disorder” ontology that seems to be the dominant dynamic of the cosmos. This dynamic facilitates the techno-scientific exploitation we are familiar with. The Mythos world view, on the other hand, is far more intuitive and far less easy to articulate. It resorts to mystical connections with reality via feelings, sensings, epiphanies, revelations, rituals, mysticism, mythology, instincts etc. In contrast to the Logos paradigm which seeks explanation using the elemental and the impersonal, Mythos thinking has a propensity to personify the cosmic dynamic by imputing spiritual significance to the events around us. In its world spirits are pervasive; in other words it is inclined toward animism.

If the “Out of Africa” theory is valid then African culture is far older than the cultures of the northern hemisphere. Migration to northern latitudes was probably inhibited by the ice age and thus it is only relatively recently that the north hosted modern humans. It is in Africa then (and perhaps Australia as well) that human culture finds its roots, in particular, its roots in animism. But the experience of finding roots grates and highlights the existential dissonance present in Western thought. In the industrialized hemisphere there is an instinctual alienation from the anonymous social systems and technology required to administrate huge communities: Firstly, the sheer size of these communities means that it is beyond human cognitive ability to know and identify with everyone in a community; tribal identifications are difficult to foster. Secondly, the paradigm of mechanistic elementalism that facilitates industrialization cuts across preliterate animism, an animism that is so natural to the thinking of many aboriginal people, including, it must be said, the religious sensibilities of many Westerners.

The biggest intellectual feat of homo sapiens is not so much the discovery of the laws of physics as it is the ability to comprehend other human psyches – objects which are far more intricate than the relatively elementary models normally dealt with in physics and chemistry. However, humanity doesn’t piece together an understanding of other minds from first principles; when it comes to inter-human relations human beings have a large amount of “hard wired” faculties (like the “language instinct”) dedicated to enabling those relations. These built in social cognitive abilities do such an effective job in facilitating human-human relations that we are unconscious of the underlying complexity of the mental resources they muster, and in most cases this background mental processing only surfaces in our minds as instinctual perceptions. But these instinctual intuitions are extremely important for they make our human relations possible; without them we are autistic. It is no surprise that given this awesome instinctual package of dedicated mental resources for handling the understandding of personality it is very natural to turn the power of this package beyond human society to the cosmos as a whole; very naturally, then, the human mind populates the world with spirits and imputes to it intentional forces. It is second nature for human beings to humanize their environment in this way. In contrast the instrumentalism of science tends to exorcise the animistic dynamic and expels the magical enchantment of religious meanings.

Jim Harries Vulnerable Mission brings him into close contact with an ancient strain of animistic and magical thinking about the cosmos that is often at odds with the successful working of industrial society. Jim’s work with African Indigenous Churches reveals what to Western minds are bizarre practices. But there is no cause for Westerners to feel superior. Animism is not far under the surface of Western society; less than three hundred years ago, well into the Newtonian revolution and the enlightenment, witch hunts were still being conducted in Europe. Moreover, today, many Western Indigenous Churches have a version of Christianity that is weird & wonderful; for example, they may eschew intellectual engagement in favour of a shamanistic relationship with God and Angels mediated through trance like modes of consciousness. (See the video below). They effectively supplement the basic Gospel message of God’s love and sacrificial grace with Gnostic elaborations. In general there is an underlying dissonance in Christian fundamentalist philosophy that manifests itself in a dualistic outlook that sets the material against the spiritual. In contrast the culture of rural Africa harks back to a time when humanity’s world view was less dualistic and more holistic. But the thoroughgoing animism of Africa sits uneasily with techno-scientific mechanism and so it is not surprising that the vestigial animism of the industrial north has resulted in a gnosto-dualist discontinuity in Western religious thinking.

Like gravity and quantum mechanics, science and animism remain as an incommensurable and disunited duality in the West. But the simple mathematical objects of science are too simple to be self-explaining. Science, then, is therefore destined to leave an irreducible logical hiatus in our thought. Self explanation, I submit, is more likely to be found in the a priori complex rather than the simple objects of a law and disorder ontology. The fundamental and necessary incompleteness in scientific explanation leaves a vacuum that those very human abilities for dealing with complexity will rush in to fill; in short Humanity’s personality processing package will readily step into this space with an argument from intentionality. The fundamental incompleteness of scientific explanation will help ensure religion is here to stay; even in the West.

“Angels! Angels! Angels! Angels…” screams Todd Bentley. Weird vestigial animism manifests itself in Western indigenous churches

ONCE MORE UNTO THE BREACH DEAR FRIENDS, ONCE MORE: MYTHOS VS LOGOS

This post on Uncommon Descent by Young Earth Creationist (?) Paul Nelson tells the interesting story of Martin Gardiner, a man who started life as a Christian fundamentalist. I set this story against this post where I published a church magazine article by the prewar Minister to St Mary’s Baptist Church, Gilbert Laws. This article was evidence that Laws respected the results of science; he believed that those results should be coped with rather than rejected. The fundamentalist ethos that the findings of science are automatically suspect because they are to be identified with an anti-Christ scientific conspiracy probably never entered Laws head; but then those were was the days of the civic church, a church that identified itself with the establishment.




Paul Nelson takes up the story of Martin Gardner:

It is not generally known that Gardner grew up as a Christian fundamentalist in Oklahoma, and indeed entered the University of Chicago as an undergraduate zealous to defend his faith, and to return America to its Christian heritage:

"In his adolescent fantasies he saw himself as chosen by the Lord to lead this new awakening. And to carry out this stupendous undertaking he conceived a brazen plan….He would enter the very citadel of the enemy. He would master all the science and modern learning that a great secular university had to offer. Every false and infernal argument would be examined and exposed. He would probe the diseased heart of twentieth century theology, dissect it nerve by nerve, artery by artery."

The passage comes from Gardner’s autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm (1973), which Bill Dembski has used as a textbook in seminary courses he’s taught. While Gardner’s fundamentalist Christianity died a long and painful death, his theism never did.

And according to Gardner’s Wiki page:


His semi-autobiographical novel The Flight of Peter Fromm depicts a traditionally Protestant Christian man struggling with his faith, examining 20th century scholarship and intellectual movements and ultimately rejecting Christianity while remaining a theist

The candid fundamentalist mind, when exposed to honest science, finds no elaborate conspiracy to deceive but instead genuine challenges to his faith. I don’t believe there is any necessary conflict between science and theism or between science and Christianity for that matter, but there is a conflict between science and fundamentalism.

The tradition of NCBC is not one of opposing science. However, the potential to oppose science and reason are present: The tensions and paradoxes found in the logos versus mythos dichotomy have a tendency to resolve themselves by resort to extremes of legalistic rigidity and/or gnostic irrationality. When faced with the challenges of science both of these religious extremes are apt to barricade themselves into the epistemological play pen of an assertive fideism.

HAVING SEX WITH GOD

Sometimes life delivers unreservedly classic film set scenarios and clichés. For example, an owl hooting just as I arrive on a dark starry night at the door of the Old ‘Haunted’ Castle where I work. Or the red cloud streaked sunset of December behind the Castle's East Wing as a gentle warm yellow glow filters out through leaded lights – so Kincaid that if it wasn’t real it would be considered naively kitsch. Well, today at church I had one of those unreal moments, too perfect, too stereotypical, and so textbook and clichéd that you’d think I had invented it.

Shortly after I walked late into the foyer on security duty the congregation struck up with one of my favourite carols ‘O Come Emmanuel’. This carol is packed with allusions and imagery taken from the texts of Old Testament history: ‘Ransom captive Israel’, ‘Lonely exile’, ‘Thou rod of Jesse’, ‘Thine advent’, ‘Key of David’, ‘Sinai’s height’, ‘In ancient times did’st give the Law’. As I listened I wondered how many of the congregation connected with a language that to be understood requires a modicum of OT scholarship. After all, this was the church where I had heard on more than one occasion a negative response to having ‘Yet another Bible study’. Anyway, as I had barely finished mulling all this over the next song started, and it turned out to be a quantum leap from the ridiculous to the sublime – no, make that ‘from the sublime to the ridiculous’.

The mind often filters, generalises and then forgets the data on which its generalisation have been made, and one is then left in doubt about the validity of the mind’s abstractions because the original protocols aren’t there to check against. Thus, my generalisation that parts of the contemporary church has abandoned erudition (whether Biblical scholarship or science) in favour of the much exalted and sought after ‘there and now’ quasi-sensual God experience or ‘God orgasm’ has sometimes felt a little off the wall. But as this new song struck up I felt vindicated. As if to emphasise the polarity of scholarship versus the ‘God orgasm’, starkly contrasting against the obscure Old Testament lyrics of ‘O come Emmanuel’ still sounding in my mind, steamy allusions to the ‘God experience’ now assaulted my ears: ‘Fill us’, ‘Passion!’, ‘Breathe within’, ‘abandoned to you’ ‘Lord have your way with us’, ‘God fall on us’ ‘More than this!’ all packed into a single song. (Note: More! More! Is an ecstatic cry one hears in some churches – I wonder if one also sometimes hears Yes! Yes! Yes!…?)

In spite of all the pretensions of prophetic insight that Charismatic Christianity has brought to churches nowadays, those churches seem so utterly unconscious of themselves!

So there you go, yet another minor adventure so pregnant with freudian meaning and insight that I'm sure I'm dreaming!

COMPLIMENTARITY
I was interested to hear Sweet Pete, during his leading of worship on Sunday evening (06/05/2007), quote from a book by Gary Thomas, a friend of Rick Warren. This is what Warren, in his book “The Purpose Driven Life”, says about Gary Thomas’ view (see page 103):

In his book Sacred Pathways, Gary identifies nine of the ways people draw near to God. Naturalists are most inspired to love God out-of-doors, in natural settings. Sensates love God with their senses and appreciate beautiful worship services that involve their sight, taste, smell and touch, not just their ears. Traditionalists draw closer to God through rituals, liturgies, symbols and unchanging structures. Ascetics prefer to love God in solitude and simplicity. Activists love God through confronting evil, battling injustice, and working to make the world a better place. Caregivers love God by loving others and meeting their needs. Enthusiasts love God through celebration. Contemplatives love God through adoration. Intellectuals love God by studying with their minds.
Warren concludes:

There is no “one-size-fits-all” approach to worship and friendship with God. One thing is certain: You don’t bring glory to God by trying to be someone he never intended you to be. God wants you to be yourself. That’s the kind of people the Father is out looking for: those who are simply and honestly themselves before him in worship.What can I say other than, “I’m extremely relieved to hear this”? I think it is the first time I have ever seen the complimentary role played by personality types amongst the ecclesia not only being acknowledged by prominent Christian leaders but also so clearly expressed. This is certainly not the message that has so often been thrust down my throat by a miscellany of Christian leaders who are apt to define authentic Christianity exclusively in terms of what is accessible to their own personality type. Very well said Gary, Rick and Pete.