"GOD OUR MOTHER"
MICHAEL & LISA GUNGOR
God Our Mother (Feat. Nichole Nordeman and Lisa Gungor) -
The Liturgists
SEE VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IfGxQQQPqMM
EXCERPT:
GOD OUR MOTHER
by The Liturgists
Created in honor of Mother's Day, God our Mother is a liturgy that explores both the scriptures that speak of God in a maternal context and the limits of human language in describing an infinite God.
God Our Mother includes an apophatic contemplative meditation. Apophatic disciplines seek to push beyond language and rational thinking in the context of God's Holiness, and can be very powerful. For this reason, we recommend that spiritual practices like apophaticism are best moderated through scripture, tradition, and some form of spiritual community.
Words and lyrics from God Our Mother are available here.
______________________________________________________
God Our Mother includes an apophatic contemplative meditation. Apophatic disciplines seek to push beyond language and rational thinking in the context of God's Holiness, and can be very powerful. For this reason, we recommend that spiritual practices like apophaticism are best moderated through scripture, tradition, and some form of spiritual community.
Words and lyrics from God Our Mother are available here.
______________________________________________________
Gungor Controversy Continues
as Singer States Jesus
Could Have Been Wrong
About Adam, Noah
EXCERPTS:
GUNGOR QUOTES:
“I have no more ability to believe, for example, that the first people on earth were a couple named Adam and Eve that lived 6,000 years ago,” he wrote. “I have no ability to believe that there was a flood that covered all the highest mountains of the world only 4,000 years ago and that all of the animal species that exist today are here because they were carried on an ark and then somehow walked or flew all around the world from a mountain in the middle east after the water dried up.”
“To just see a few words that somebody said—that Jesus said—about Noah, and to assume that you can get into Jesus’s mind and know exactly how he thought about the whole situation, and how He considered history versus myth versus whatever—how do you know?” Gungor stated on the Liturgists Podcast with co-host Mike McHargue.
“And even if He was wrong, even if He did believe that Noah was a historical person, or Adam was a historical person, and ended up being wrong, I don’t understand how that even would deny the divinity of Christ,” he continued. “The point is it wouldn’t freak me out if He was wrong about it, in His human side.”
“If Noah and Adam were mythical ideas, the point of what Jesus was saying still applies to me,” Gungor added. “It has very little do, in my perspective, with Jesus trying to lay out a history of world to a historical-minded people. . . . Even if Jesus knew that Noah and Adam were mythical, but knew He was talking to people who thought they were real, that’s another possibility.”
___________________________________________________________
Baptist Church Cancels Gungor Concert
for Rejecting Genesis as Literal
SEE ALSO LIGHTHOUSE TRAILS RESEARCH ARTICLES:
From Way of Life:
http://www.wayoflife.org/friday_church_news/15_32.php
CCM MUSICIANS CALL GOD “OUR MOTHER” (Friday Church News Notes, August 8, 2014, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143) - CCM musicians Michael Gungor and Nichole Nordeman are members of The Liturgists, “a collective of creators working together to make thoughtful liturgical work.” Both names were listed on The Liturgists web site under “Who” when I did this research on June 7, 2014. One of The Liturgies is “God Our Mother,” which includes the following words: “To know only the Father God would be like seeing the bright, dazzling sun, but never the stars spreading across the sky like so much fairy dust. God our Mother, reaching out to us with those hands--mother hands, strong and coursing with love, binding up wounds and soothing scrapes, holding us together, holding us safe. God our Mother, feeding us, nourishing us, giving us what we need to grow and thrive, taking care of us in big and small ways, seeing us, knitting us back together with love and grace when we’ve been broken. God our Mother, believing in us” (See Website). The goal of The Liturgies is to create an “apophatic meditation” that enables the practitioner to “experience a connection with God.” The lyrics are accompanied by New Age-style music that is potentially trance inducing. The Liturgies are associated with contemplative prayer practices that come from Roman Catholic monasticism. The objective is to find God “beyond human language.” This is blind mysticism and is a recipe for spiritual disaster. The “god” that is encountered beyond the language of Scripture is an idol.
THE LITURGISTS
MANIFESTO
The great mystics, sages and theologians of history have always espoused that all of life is sacred. While the power-hungry and money-lovers within religious power systems may find incentive to parse life into clear-cut categories like “sacred” and “secular”, we, the Liturgists, firmly reject this sort of categorization, insofar as it leads to a destructive domestication or heirarchal dissolution of the exquisite oneness and wonder of existence. We reject the notion that singing about “God”, for instance, is somehow more inherently “sacred" or “spiritual" than singing about romance, money, or any other aspect of human life.
Still, there is something to be said for the specifically termed “religious”, “sacred”, or “liturgical” practices that human beings have consistently experimented with and bonded themselves to over millennia for the purpose of more fully experiencing and making sense of the incomprehensibility of our existence. “Spiritual" disciplines (practices like silence, meditation, prayer, fasting, feasting, alms-giving, Eucharist, study, corporate worship…etc) have been found to be invaluable for countless people in enriching life to be more fully enjoyed and experienced. The use of the word 'spiritual' here is not meant to imply that only certain parts of life are spiritual. On the contrary, a healthy practiced spiritual discipline leads one to seeing the spirituality and sacredness within the mundane. In spiritual disciplines or sacrament, mere silence becomes the voice of God, and a dry piece of bread becomes the very Body of Christ.
It is in this line of thinking that the Liturgists begin our work.
There have been a long line of musical composers through history who have composed musical works intended for specifically “sacred” or “religious” purposes. From the plain-song and Gregorian chant of the medieval times to the grand masses composed by the master composers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods to the hymns written in the centuries following the Protestant Reformation, there has been music written for the specific purpose of church ritual and worship.
While the art form of composition for the specific function of worship and ritual has largely fallen out of fashion in mainstream Western Culture for the last couple of centuries, the Liturgists exist to explore new artistic possibilities within liturgical space.
There is a challenge to this since the most popular and common music in our day and age generally falls into a modernized version of the ancient Greek ideal of self-expression. This is, of course, a valid and potentially beautiful function of art. Still, there are billions of people in the world that gather weekly for the purpose of religious ritual and worship. Every Sunday, millions of people across the globe sing songs together for the purpose of prayer, spiritual discipline and encountering the Divine.
Unfortunately, it is arguable that much of the artistic material incorporated into these gatherings is not thoughtfully created or executed. Rather, like corporate jingles, hotel room paintings, Disney cartoon songs or any number of musical expressions designed primarily to carry a “message”, there is often a temptation to resort to what is safely vanilla and imitative of what has already been successful in popular culture. We, the Liturgists, seek to overcome this temptation and become a community of progressive musical composers, poets, preachers, filmmakers and other artists who work together to create 'good' (thoughtful, creative, hopeful and evocative) liturgical work.
These four pillars, thoughtfulness, creativity, hopefulness and evocativeness, are what shall guide us as we create liturgical art and space.
OUR VALUES
BEAUTY:
We believe that beauty is the heart and perhaps primary truth of the Gospel. If it's not beautiful, it's not worth speaking of or working on.
JUSTICE:
We agree with the sentiment that good religion is helping widows and orphans in need. Our work needs to be mindful of those in society and worldwide who are on the underside of power. For that reason the Liturgists will always strive to both remember the poor and weak in our work and also to seek specific ways of giving time and resources directly to those who need it most.
UNITY:
The Liturgists is made up of people with varying thoughts, philosophies and theologies, and we seek to integrate our diversity into a healthy unity. While we have no desire to cater or pander to worldviews that are destructive, we do seek the good in every perspective and believe that all human beings are connected to each other and the Cosmos at large, and that a deep sense of unity ought to trump any differences that we create with one another.
CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY:
Although we value people of all beliefs, the Liturgists is decidedly Christian in practice. We see exceptional value in the life and teachings of Jesus, and while we may experiment with influences and ideas from multiple traditions, we find it useful to utilize specifically Christian language and sacrament for the purpose of creating good liturgical experiences.
TWO WELL KNOWN PARTICIPANTS IN THE LITURGISTS ARE:
ROB BELL (SEE OUR PREVIOUS POSTS):
ROB BELL THINKS THE CULTURE VIEWS GOD LIKE AN OUTDATED "OLDSMOBILE"
ROB BELL'S OLD OBSOLETE SILVER OLDSMOBILE DELTA 88
LIKENED TO "THE OLD WAY OF PRESENTING GOD" TO A MUCH MORE SOPHISTICATED AND EDUCATED CULTURE
LIKENED TO "THE OLD WAY OF PRESENTING GOD" TO A MUCH MORE SOPHISTICATED AND EDUCATED CULTURE
ROB BELL COMES OUT FOR GAY MARRIAGE EQUALITY
ROB BELL'S HERETICAL NEW POSITION ON HOMOSEXUALITY & THE CHURCH, CHALLENGED AND EXPOSED
RACHEL HELD EVANS (SEE OUR PREVIOUS POST):
JUSTIN LEE OF GAY CHRISTIAN.NET & RACHEL HELD EVANS
"NO THIRD WAY QUEERSTIANITY" SOARS AT YOUR "LOVING" EMERGING CHURCH~NO DOCTRINES, JUST "CONVERSATIONS"
__________________________________________________________________
Michael Gungor: (From Way of Life www.wayoflife.org)
Michael Gungor (b. 1980) is the founder of the Gungor
contemporary worship band. His first album was published
in 2002 by Integrity Music. His song “Beautiful Tings” was
nominated for Best Gospel Song at the Grammy awards in
2011. He contributed to the songs “Friend of God” and “Say
So” with Israel Houghton.
He is the founder of Bloom Church in Denver, which is a
fellowship of house churches that meet together for joint
worship on Sunday nights. Their objective is to build the
kingdom of God on earth toward “the healing of the world.”
Their statement of faith is very brief for the sake of
ecumenical unity.
Gungor is a big proponent of contemplative spirituality,
and as with many others, it has led him to a pantheistic
concept of God, which is clear evidence that the practitioners
are communing with demons masquerading as angels of
light.
[Pantheism is the doctrine that God is everything, whereas
panentheism is the doctrine that God is in all things.
“With panentheism you still have a personal God (theism)
coupled with God’s pervasive presence in all creation
(pantheism). ... At the mystical level, they experience this
God-force that seems to fow through everything and
everybody. All creation has God in it as a living, vital
presence” (Ray Yungen, A Time of Departing, pp. 29, 30).]
This is exactly what happened to Michael Gungor on a
contemplative retreat in Italy in 2010. First, visiting Rome
and hearing the pope speak, he showed his spiritual blindness
by saying that this “was not a bad way to start a spiritual
journey” and that it made him “want to be a
Catholic” (“Pilgrimage: Meditation,” gungormusic.com, cited
from “Tens of Thousands Introduced to Contemplative
Advocates,” Lighthouse Trails, Aug. 28, 2012).
Gungor then spent time at an interfaith retreat center in
Assisi which had statues of Mary, Buddha, and Hindu idols.
In that pagan atmosphere during “non-judgmental”
contemplative meditation he learned that “God is something
to be experienced, not to believe in” and that “God is the
basic Reality of the universe,” that “whatever is, that is God.”
He said that he felt so close to God through meditation “that
‘You’ almost seems funny.” In other words, he came to believe
that God is not something “out there” but the essence of
everything. He said, “I was going to say some sort of
defensive, fearful statement clarifying that I’m not talking
about pantheism. But I don’t need to be afraid [because God
is] “light and essence and love of the purest kind.” This is a
foolish statement in light of the Bible’s many warnings about
the danger of false gods and false christs and false spirits.
Gungor came to this understanding through “just being
with God,” through “not judging yourself or your thoughts,”
through imagining that “you are breathing the very presence
of God in and out of your lungs,” through imagining that
“you are inhaling light into any darkness inside, and then
breathing out ever more light into the world.” He says, “there
are no rules ... you can try anything.” What a perfect recipe
for spiritual disaster!
Nowhere does the Bible say that God is all things or that
God is in all things. He created all things; He is aware of all
things; He is in ultimate control of all things; He cares and
provides for all things; all things consist by him (Col. 1:17);
there is nowhere we can fee from His Spirit (Psalm 139:7). But
He is not IN all things after the fashion indicated in the
previous statements. The believer sees the glory of God in the
creation (Rom. 1:20), but God does not flow into us from the
creation nor is God in the creation itself. That is heresy and
the essence of idolatry.
When God appeared to Elijah He brought a great wind and
an earthquake and a fire, but the Bible plainly says that the
Lord was not in these things (1 Kings 19:11-12).
