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We pleased to announce the launch of our websites! View this email in your browser "This book is a timely reminder of what worship is all about and how we are to walk it out in our lives." Brian Doerksen Join our Social Media channels! Facebook Twitter Google Plus YouTube Email We pleased to announce the launch of our websites! Make Us Holy is pleased to announce the launch of our websites! Yes, that’s right—plural! We have two new websites! One in English and uno en Español. Designed and programmed by the excellent staff at BluCielO2, we are pleased to invite you to take a tour of the site. It contains excellent upgrades that help organize all our social media stream into one location. Complete with new integrated Blog and Newsletter pages and interlinked widgets to Twitter, Facebook and other social media streams—we have firmly committed to this decade of interconnectivity! A newly designed page for the book Worship Walk with testimonials and videos help better engage each visitor with what we believe is a much needed message in the worship conversation of the contemporary church. Check it out and then let us know how we can help minister to the needs of your faith community. Call us, email us, facebook or tweet us and let’s start the conversation!    English - http://www.makeusholy.org/ Español - http://www.santificanos.org/ Blessings! Gareth Join me at the Nation Worship Leaders Conference in San Juan Capistrano, California - October 7-19 http://nationalworshipleaderconference.com/ca/ Copyright © 2013 Make Us Holy Ministries, All rights reserved. unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences

The Semiotic and the Symbolic

My wife studied literature for her undergraduate and masters degrees. One of the concepts she studied in feminist literature was the transference of language from semiotic to symbolic. I’m sure I didn’t understand all of it but what I picked up I will loosely describe here.

Semiotic language is that which has not yet achieved symbolic associations. Or put more organically, semiotic language speaks from a “gut” level and doesn’t always communicate well with those who are used to only communicating from a symbolic level.

Let me try and explain this with an illustration. If we hear someone with a sore throat use the term, “I have a frog in my throat” to explain their ailment, none of us hears or in any way understands that there is a green amphibious creature stuck in their throat! It is absurd! Why? Because that expression (and who knows where or when that term actually came about) – at one time expressed as a semiotic statement – has now achieved symbolic representation. We “know” that the person using the term is expressing the fact that they have a scratchy, sore throat.

I have come to believe that many of our spiritual experiences first begin in a semiotic state and eventually attain the symbolic.

So what?

Well, I think it helps to explain why spiritual movements first catch on and grow and then burn out.

There are many spiritual movements we could examine but, for the moment, let me look at my own journey from semiotic to symbolic in contemporary worship. 

I was born in 1955 and grew up in the 60’s and early 70’s. I enjoyed music but my exposure music was largely religious music, classical music and folk, pop/rock music. As I went through my high school years my musical influences were, Gordon Lightfoot, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Bruce Cockburn, Elton John, David Gates and Bread, Beatles. I leaned towards more easy-listening, folk/soft rock sounds.

But church music was always piano and organ playing hymns with a song conductor and/or a choir. When I was in church I understood the music because it was symbolic of what I understood church to be about. And it leaned more towards the classical – seldom, if ever, the contemporary.

I remember being interviewed by CBC Televsion (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) in 1980. Myself and two friends, Don Wilkinson and Derek Shettler had begun a radio program called “Fresh Rain” on the University of Manitoba FM Radio Station back in January of 1977. We played Contemporary Christian Music – mainly folk/pop/soft rock tunes that expressed a Christian themed message. I loved the music and it resonated with me. It was the kind of music I loved coupled with a message that I also loved.

Well, we began to have a significant following in Winnipeg, MB (where there were no Christian music stations at the time) and because I had worked as an on-air technician at CBC Radio, I was contacted about doing a TV interview with me and my collaborators at the radio station. I will never forget one of the questions the interviewer asked me. “Do you see a time when this kind of music will be used during Sunday morning worship services?” And I answered, quite confidently, that church worship music was something completely different and that I couldn’t ever envision seeing the two styles combining.

Less than a decade later my world-view was set upside down when contemporary soft rock based worship music began to be used in the church. In my experience, it had a way of bypassing my symbolic references of how I connected with God on a Sunday morning and went straight for the jugular! It was, in every sense of the word, a semiotic convergence of my Monday to Saturday preferences with my heart’s desire to worship God on a Sunday morning.

The music wasn’t yet tied up with the symbolic references I had grown up with and come to expect. It was the music of “the street” that I loved and listened to but never thought to utilize in extending praise to Jesus in the context of the gathered community. All my presuppositions were stripped aside. And the result was that it engaged my heart with the power and the fury of a hurricane. I was, in every sense of the word, caught up with it and blown away into an impassioned expression of praise to my Saviour. Heart and head – both together – expressing awe, wonder, and praise heavenward.

And I wasn’t the only one. In the ensuing decade, everywhere our worship band played, a similar response was experienced my many people – encountering God outside the symbolic norm – a semiotic encounter of worship.

By and large, that’s no longer true today. Contemporary worship songs are the norm in a significant majority of churches around North America. And people obviously enjoy it because it keeps growing and the worship music keeps getting written, recorded, performed and sold. Seldom is there a semiotic response to the music. Why? Because it has achieved the lofted place of symbol. People aren’t caught by surprise by the “from the gut” vocabulary and expressions – because we now expect that. We symbolically associate church worship music with those things. And because they are expected we tend toward acknowledgment rather than passion.

So, do we invent new forms and formats to get back to the semiotic?

That would be great if we could do that. But that’s the mystery of the semiotic. Once it has become accepted language (become symbol) it can never be returned to what it first was. And we can’t create the semiotic. It just happens – and when it does, it always seems out of place, wrong, too different to be taken seriously. 

Yet it is something I believe God continues to do around us. He has done it throughout history and he will do it again and again. What we need to do is not protect nor destroy the symbolic. We need to recognize that the symbol is only meant to point to something else. Our worship symbols should always point us beyond themselves to God. And sometimes, in looking past the symbol, into the heart of God we will find him responding in a unique – perhaps even a peculiar – way, inviting us further on our journey with Jesus that we cannot arrive at without the untried, the uninitiated, the unexplored – the semiotic.