Garden of Gethsemane if you were to visit it today. One of my lifelong dreams is to go over and visit the Holy Land.While at the Christian Academy of Knoxville, one of my positions was that of scheduling chapel speakers and heading up our Tuesday chapel time. A few times in this past year I had student-led chapels, and after two of these chapels I was approached by a small band of students. Both times they chastised me for not allowing the chapel to go beyond the scheduled hour that our school has allotted.
Although both chapels were very powerful, I found that this clutch of students were agitated about the length of the service.
"It must be longer - at least an hour more than you've allotted," insisted one boy.
When I asked him why, he responded, "because we need time to get into the Spirit, and the song time is what we need to do this. It's got to be much longer. We've got to get into the Spirit."
Now, I find this curious. I have encountered people who have told me this before, and I fail to see where the Bible gives directions on how Christians need a massive amount of time to "warm up" to the Holy Spirit's movement. To be sure, singing prepares a heart for the Word of God's instruction, but I was told by this group that there must be gobs of songs and lengths of time in order to get ready, and I find this lacking in Scriptural authority. We are to spend two, three hours in singing before we can allow God's Word to be brought forth?
It leads me to see a danger that I will talk about in coming blogs: the danger of over-emotionalism in today's Christian generalization. Many, many times I see the abstract thinkers of Christianity push away the concrete thinkers with an insistence that the service be flowery and mood-sensitive.
Hey, I want to have time with Jesus and praise Him, but I don't want a Woodstock experience to have to achieve it.
