Shabbat for Protestants
Maggie Phillips
As part of a growing trend among American churches, an evangelical congregation in Dallas weaves elements of Jewish ritual and liturgy into its Christian service
A congregant blesses two loaves of challah during the Friday night service at Gateway Christian Church Jeff Wilson
Just outside Dallas, kippot outnumbered cowboy hats on the evening of Oct. 4 at Gateway Christian Church in Southlake, Texas. At the main entrance of the enormous campus, greeters smiled and said, “Shabbat shalom.” Inside and all throughout the church’s spacious wraparound foyer, diners of various ages and races were gathered around large circular tables, engaged in lively candlelit discussions. Others clustered at a table selling menorahs, “I Stand With Israel” bumper stickers, and Star of David jewelry; it appeared to be doing brisk business. In the clamor of voices, I heard a Southern accent try out a “Shana tovah!” At the buffet, a constant stream of waitstaff returned empty serving trays from the buffet tables to the bustling kitchen and emerged seconds later with replacements. A busy indoor playground was reminiscent of nothing so much as a McDonald’s PlayPlace. In a place of honor, with an Israeli flag posted behind it, a table had been set with empty seats, and pictures of Oct. 7 hostages stationed at each plate.
This was dinner before Gateway Southlake’s monthly Shabbat service, presided over by Pastor Greg Stone, who spearheads Gateway’s Jewish Ministry. The son of a Jewish couple who told me he was bar mitzvahed by the president of the American Jewish Congress, Stone grew up in a Conservative synagogue but became a Christian in his early 20s while serving in the U.S. Air Force, 40 years ago. Despite his own journey, Stone insists that Gateway’s Jewish Ministry is not out to convert Jews, nor does it represent an attempt to erase the distinctiveness of Jews or Judaism. “We do not ever do anything that is blatantly evangelistic,” he said. “I don’t want to offend people.”
So if a Jewish ministry isn’t a ministry for Jews, what is it?
Primarily, it’s a ministry about Judaism for gentiles, specifically nondenominational Protestant Christians. Through Gateway’s Jewish Ministry, those attending the October gathering were invited to participate in a “Jesus’ Jewish Roots” Havdalah on Saturday, to take shofar lessons, and to build sukkahs for a “Camping with the King” event scheduled to coincide with Sukkot.
Southlake Shabbat represents an increasingly visible movement within U.S. Christianity that is discovering Jewish practices, and familiarizing Christians with Jewish belief. Its origins are difficult to pinpoint. By some reckonings, it began in the late 1960s; by others, the late 1990s.
The contemporary evangelical Christian interest in Judaism (and usually, but not always, Israel) doesn’t quite have a name. Like many trends, it lacks a coherent thesis or genesis, and can take on different characteristics depending on who is adapting it. Many evangelical churches, organizations, and groups engaged in studying (and even in some cases observing) Jewish law will use the same terminology, but inflected with different meaning. Evangelical Christianity is popularly associated with support for Israel based on the belief that Jews must return to Israel and convert, so that Jesus can come back. But at Gateway, which by some metrics is measured to be the ninth-largest evangelical Protestant church in the U.S., the October Shabbat service contained no mention of Armageddon. This seems to reflect a larger shift in U.S. evangelical Christianity away from end times theology explicitly linked with Israel. The loose confederation of Christians who are interested in Judaism today goes beyond the simple “Christian Zionist” label that has been a feature of American political life for half a century. In some instances, it touches the Messianic Jewish movement that came out of the charismatic Christianity of the 1970s (Jews for Jesus being perhaps the best-known example). Other groups’ preoccupation with Judaism is something much different.
Protestant Christianity was interested in Jews and the concept of Israel almost from its very beginning. Starting with the Reformation, many Christians were reading the Old Testament in their own language for the first time. These early Protestants were thinking about the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people’s role in history in a new way. Some Reformation theological figures began to espouse the belief that biblical prophecy required the return of the Jews to the land of Israel (a theology known as “restorationism”), and that the conversion of the Jews was another precondition for Christ’s triumphant return. Others, notably Martin Luther, came to a much darker conclusion about Jewish-Christian relations that many would say set the stage for Hitler five centuries later.
British evangelical Christianity may represent the true beginnings of what we think of as Christian Zionism today. Lord Shaftesbury, the 19th-century British social reformer and politician, is frequently pointed to as first to translate a religious belief in a biblical home for the Jewish people into tangible foreign policy goals, advocating for the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
In America, as biblical fundamentalism took hold in the first half of the 20th century, this notion would become married to a theology called dispensationalism, which says God relates to humanity in different ways in different eras known as “dispensations.” British evangelical clergyman John Nelson Darby developed this theology from existing Protestant traditions around God’s role in history, and propagated it throughout the Anglosphere in the mid-19th century. Darby’s dispensationalism dealt with the futures of both Jews and Christians, but it is perhaps best-known for popularizing the idea of the “rapture,” or a sudden disappearance of God’s faithful before a time of tribulation that would prefigure the return of Jesus Christ. Dispensationalism grew in prominence in the United States in the first part of the 20th century, and developed its own distinct character.
In his book Walking on the Pages of the Word of God, author Aron Engberg provides a thumbnail sketch of evangelical Zionism’s history. While there was certainly a dispensationalist movement that grew up alongside biblical fundamentalism in the U.S., Engberg is careful to distinguish between the way the twin movements influenced American churches (they were not formally that theologically dominant, he writes), and how they prevailed culturally among lay Christians (quite a bit). A popular, loose association between dispensationalists and Bible-focused evangelicals developed.
Engberg outlines the way that a particular idea—the restoration of Israel to the Jewish people as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy—took hold in fundamentalist evangelical circles as the 20th century progressed. Two events in the late 1960s form a useful starting point for when evangelical Protestants began adopting Jewish religious practices into their worship and worldview: Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, and the Jesus movement coming out of the West Coast.
Staff lay hands on Pastor Greg Stone during a pre-service huddle
Jeff Wilson
In the second half of the 20th century, after what many evangelical Christians saw as the miracle of Israel’s victory in 1967, two novels supercharged the cultural prevalence of a particular form of restorationism that presaged the end of days. These works of fiction were Hal Lindsey and Carol C. Carlson’s The Late Great Planet Earth, and the Left Behind series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. Together, Engberg said, these novels “did much to establish the identifications between Zionism, Bible prophecy, and biblical literalism.”
Lindsey gained a following at UCLA as a Campus Crusade for Christ minister in the late 1960s, where he blended apocalypticism with an au courant aesthetic that attracted young spiritual seekers of all backgrounds. A dispensationalist, Lindsey taught that Christianity was itself a dispensation, a temporary “church age” that God brought about in response to the Jews’ rejection of Jesus as the Messiah. The final dispensation—Jesus’ triumphant return, ushering in 1,000 years of peace—would be presaged by turbulence, as well as the Jews’ return to the Holy Land to take control of Jerusalem. Although Lindsey was not a member of the Jesus movement himself, his novel became its “textbook,” according to a 2017 article in the National Endowment for the Arts journal Humanities, noting that The Late Great Planet Earth appeared “next to the Bible in almost every movement commune, church, or coffeehouse, and was responsible for drawing in converts.”
It was also around this time that Nashville’s Belmont Church on Music Row shed its square Church of Christ reputation (buzz cuts, button-downs, no instrumental music) to become a nerve center for the Jesus movement. Christian pop star Amy Grant emerged out of the vibrant cultural scene that surrounded Belmont. By 1982, Grant was garnering praise for her recording of the Christian song “El Shaddai,” which featured a chorus in Hebrew, while lamenting “that the people could not see what Messiah ought to be.”
The first Left Behind book was published in 1995, and the series gained popularity throughout the late 1990s. “Basically everybody was talking about it,” said Luke Moon, executive director of the Philos Project, when I interviewed him for a Tablet article on his organization, a Christian group dedicated to fighting antisemitism. After the turn of the millennium and the aughts came to an end, the series’ popularity died down. Moon described a sort of collective apocalypse hangover among his fellow evangelicals. “The series ended,” he said, “and everybody was like, ‘yuck, I don’t want that, that’s not what I think.’”
Today, Engberg writes, “dispensationalism is no longer a particularly common self-identity among Evangelical Zionists and only a clear minority would be able to explain the dispensational system in any detail.”
If a Jewish ministry isn’t a ministry for Jews, what is it?
Moon said that now, even the “rock stars” of the Southern Baptist church do not preach from the Book of Revelation, an esoteric book of prophecy that many Christians believe to contain truths about Christ’s Second Coming and the events surrounding it. “They don’t want to be seen as being connected to the Left Behind stuff,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve heard a sermon from the Book of Revelation in a decade.”
To be sure, Christians were still garnering media attention as recently as last year for trying to breed an unblemished red heifer in Israel to fulfill an end times biblical prophecy. But sitting in Gateway’s stadium seating that first Friday night in October, I did not get the sense that end-of-the-world theology was at the forefront of its support for Israel. I didn’t hear any talk of the end times, even though Stone is unapologetically Zionist, and much of his congregation seems to be as well.
Although younger evangelicals are less likely to identify as Zionists, Gateway’s Shabbat service appeared to have a healthy intergenerational mix. As attendees entered the sanctuary, ushers handed them a list of prayer points for Israel and for the Jewish people. Appearing on this list of suggested prayers were the salvation of the Jewish people, and that “God would make Jew and Gentile ‘one new man’ through Yeshua (Jesus).” But there was nothing about hastening the apocalypse, and they recommended praying for the salvation of the Arabs, as well. At this particular service, just days before the one-year anniversary of Oct. 7, the ushers also handed out a list of the 101 remaining Israeli hostages still held by Hamas, with their names and pictures. The prayer points also invited the reader to pray “for Jewish believers in Israel to be supernaturally protected, strengthened and blessed,” and to “prosper spiritually, emotionally, and financially.”
The service started with 15 minutes of live praise and worship music in both Hebrew and English with mood lighting and excellent sound. Guys with easy rig cameras circled around the sanctuary to record. People in the congregation stood and sang along with the lyrics that appeared on two screens that flank the stage, and in supertitles over the stage. Many had their hands in the air; some had their eyes closed.
Things quieted down when people appeared on stage indicating that it was time to light the Shabbat candles, and to bless the challah and the wine. When Stone appeared onstage, he told the congregation that he was not going to talk much about Oct. 7, although he had originally intended to. Saturdays, he teaches a “Jewish Roots of Jesus” class and Havdalah service. Although the topic is usually some aspect of Jewish belief or worship (currently Stone is teaching a series on the Jewish perspective on the Book of Daniel), the Oct. 5 gathering would feature an eyewitness testimony from a Nova music festival survivor.
For Stone, Zionism, his Jewish background, and his Christian belief exist alongside each other. “Israel is a separate, distinct group,” he said in a phone interview, “whether they believe in Jesus or not. They have eternal status with God. That’s very clear from Jeremiah 31. Israel has an eternal, ongoing status relationship with God. And that’s true whether they believe in Jesus or not. They just—they have that. But I am a believer in Jesus. And so I have that. But I also have this.”
The gentile evangelicals who are adopting Jewish practice and learning more about the Jewish origins of their faith are doing so in myriad ways. Across the U.S., Christians are trying to understand Judaism more deeply, usually to recontextualize it within Christianity.
At Gateway, Shabbat Date (“Return to your roots” is the tagline) is a group that encourages Christians to engage in Sabbath rest from sundown to sundown one day a week. “I was in a dark place in my past and need the Sabbath to stay grounded and away from the influences that come against me,” reads a testimonial on their website. “I take the day to seek Adonai with all my heart.”
A video played during the October Gateway Shabbat service invited members to Sukkot 2024, an event led by Shabbat Date called “Camping with the King.” The video showed Shabbat Date members Matthew and Shannon Kneisler outdoors admiring a large tent, and talking about the meaning of Sukkot for Christians. A tent is a temporary dwelling, Matthew explained, or tabernacle, and Sukkot is one of the appointed times when God has arranged to meet us. “We know that Jesus tabernacled with us,” he said, quoting John 1:14: “And the word became flesh, and tabernacled (dwelt) among us.”
“Giving up your time in your wonderful home,” said Shannon Kneisler, “allows us to spend moments in the quiet place of that sukkah that we can hear [God’s] voice, and then he is still dwelling, he does show up. It knits us in a way to him that’s unlike any other experience.”
The Kneislers then invited viewers to join Shabbat Date for three days and two nights at Twin Coves Park in Flower Mount, Texas. The camp would include activities for families, as well as a shofar class led by trumpeter James Knabe. Knabe has a “Sound the Shofar“ ministry, where he travels around the country sounding the shofar at churches and Christian events, and giving classes. The Shabbat service on Oct. 4 kicked off with a shofar blast, which was met with enthusiastic applause.
The shofar has been a popular feature at many evangelical events for a while, gaining some notoriety in 2020 when some Christian supporters of Donald Trump began bringing them to rallies. Shofars have become associated with conservative, Trump-aligned politics through the New Apostolic Revival (NAR); because of the shofar’s association with the victory at Jericho in the Bible, they see it as a symbol of spiritual warfare.
Matthew Taylor is a senior scholar at the Institute for Islamic, Christian, and Jewish Studies in Baltimore, and the author of The Violent Take It by Force, a book about the Christian leaders involved in the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He was present this Oct. 12 at “A Million Women,” a Christian Yom Kippur event on the National Mall, at which he estimated in a thread about it on X that there were around 250,000 attendees. Calling it “one of the most multi-ethnic crowds I have ever seen,” Taylor said that “the elements of NAR spiritual-warfare iconography [were] on display: shofars, tallits (Jewish prayer shawls), Israel flags, Appeal to Heaven flags.” Two Messianic rabbis were among the speakers. One of them, Jonathan Cahn, wore his tallit as a cape and, during what Taylor described as “the apex of the spectacle” carried out “w/ WWF-style hype,” smashed “a reconstructed altar to Ashtoreth, an ancient Canaanite goddess they claimed was a demonic principality dominating modern America.” Referring to it as a biblical act, Cahn said the destruction of the altar, on which the name Ashtoreth was inscribed in Hebrew, was to be “a mass-exorcism” of various societal ills, such as sexual immorality, pornography, transitioning children, “the confusion of sexuality,” Pride Month, divorce, and the disintegration of the family. He invited the crowd to sound their shofars while he attempted the demolition.
“I don’t even know if they know (that the shofar) is a distinctly Jewish symbol or a Judaic-Christian symbol,” Dan Hummel, an expert in evangelical-Jewish relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a 2021 Religion News article. The article traces the rise of the shofar’s popularity among evangelicals to an evangelical ministry in Israel, the International Christian Embassy in Jerusalem (ICEJ), which organizes charismatic evangelicals to march around Jerusalem blowing shofars on Sukkot. Hummel describes their Zionism as a transactional philosemitism based on Genesis 12:3, in which God promises to bless those who bless Israel.
The presence of the ICEJ dates back to 1980. But today, Engberg writes, even the ICEJ distances itself from dispensationalism in its official communications. It is, Engberg said, a shift “from flamboyant apocalypticism and high-profile political radicalism toward lower-key considerations of God’s covenantal promises to the Jews and a more solid and respectable role in Israeli society.” Indeed, the ICEJ website explicitly states that their support for Israel “is not rooted in ‘End Time’ prophecies, but in God’s faithful character to always keep His covenant promises to Israel.”
Stone takes exception to Christians who have adopted Jewish practice to the point that it has subsumed their Christian identity—and sidelined the Jewish people.
Earlier in 2024, The Christian Century published a magisterial account of one such movement, often referred to as Hebrew Roots, which it described as “decentralized, widely variegated communities” of Christians who consider themselves Torah-observant. According to Christian Century, its origins are difficult to trace, although the term first appears to have been used in 1992. Today, this loose network may number over 100,000 people nationwide.
Due to its informal, grassroots nature, Hebrew Roots beliefs are not monolithic. Broadly speaking, members practice the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (restricting religious practice and belief only to what is in the Christian Bible) taken to its extreme conclusion.
Christian Century identifies a few common characteristics within Hebrew Roots: Sabbath rest beginning on Friday evening, eschewing the unbiblical holidays of Christmas and Easter in favor of those appearing in Leviticus 23, “biblically clean” eating (although not keeping kosher), and both women and men donning tzitzit. Such actions could be interpreted as philosemitic, but a visit to the website for 119 Ministries, a Hebrew Roots organization, contains little mention either of Zionism or of modern-day Israel and Jews.
Stone sees Hebrew Roots as a theology that equates Christianity with its Jewish origins, placing gentile Christians under the obligations placed on the Jewish people in the first five books of the Hebrew Bible; members often refer to themselves as “Torah keepers.” Stone says it is a form of theology that says that Christians have replaced Israel. “When you have replacement theology,” he said, “you have a theology that says that Israel is no longer a distinct people group.”
Reconstructionist Rabbi Carol Harris-Shapiro is quoted in Christian Century calling Hebrew Roots “the ultimate supersessionism,” another name for replacement theology: “Some of them believe the Talmud is a distortion and that they’re the only ones who are doing it right,” Harris-Shapiro said, “and the Jews who have been doing it for 2,000 and some years were really just wasting their time.”
While the large majority of Gateway’s congregants studying or adapting certain Jewish rituals are Protestant Christians, not all of them are. Some of them identify as Jews.
Stone, for one, said he “never stopped” being Jewish and does not consider himself a “convert” to Christianity. “I have pursued [Jesus] and pursued my Jewish roots, pursued my Jewish heritage, pursued my Jewish faith,” he said. He is aware that this is not a position that most Tablet readers will readily accept, but said he wanted to make something clear: “We love, deeply love and support Israel,” he said. “And I don’t care if they accept my Jewish faith—my faith in Jesus—or not. We deeply love and support Israel and the Jewish people.”
Although Stone is careful to explain his congregation is “not a messianic synagogue or messianic ministry within a church,” he estimates that around 15%-21% of his congregation—which numbers between 700 and 800—self-identify as Jewish, meaning they have at least one Jewish grandparent.
Protestant Christianity was interested in Jews and the concept of Israel almost from its very beginning.
Part of this is indicative of a shift in how Jews with Christian beliefs identify. “In my opinion, there’s a long-term trend from Messianic Judaism (seeing oneself as part of Judaism the religion) toward Jewish Christianity, (seeing oneself as a Christian practicing Christianity in a Jewish cultural context),” said Lily Dayton, a spokesperson for advocacy organization VOICE of Israeli Christians. According to the 2020 U.S. Religious Census, the number of Messianic Jewish congregations in America is on the decline, even as Christian congregations like Gateway attract Jewish attendees.
Even if, as Stone suggests, Gateway isn’t out to convert Jews, the church does operate a sort of theological clearing house for pastors and Christians interested in Jewish ministry. Founded in 2020, the Gateway Center for Israel aims “to be a guiding hub of resources and relationships that can inspire a new model of relating to the Jewish people.” As evangelicals, the people who lead the Gateway Center for Israel are not shy about their desire to share their belief in Jesus with Jews—and indeed, with everybody. Their statement on “What We Believe About Israel” notes that Jesus commissioned his followers to “make disciples of all nations,” and that in Romans 1:16, the Apostle Paul (“a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees,” as he describes himself in the Book of Acts) said that the Gospel is “the power of God,” of salvation “for the Jew first.”
But Gateway also acknowledges that the “persecution of the Jewish people was frequently church-sponsored and fueled by supersessionism—the view that the Church is the new Israel and replaces the Jewish people as the people of God.” They state that they “support in word and deed the right of all Jewish people to exist as Jews with complete self-determination—free from any form of political, economic, social, or religious intimidation, coercion, or persecution.”
The Jewish organization Beneynu (Hebrew for “between us”) exists to counter Christian missionary activity targeting Jews in Israel. A former Christian missionary, Shannon Nuszen, founded Beneynu to address what she sees as an alarming uptick in Jewish conversions to Christianity. Nuszen believes that fundamentalist evangelical Christians are talking out of both sides of their mouth, on the hand, sincerely supporting the State of Israel, but on the other, deploying carefully crafted messaging intended to proselytize Jews with the goal to bring about the Second Coming.
Gateway insists that Jews who come to Christianity must not subordinate their Jewish identity and practices to exclusively Christian ones. “While many in the Jewish world regard Messianic Judaism to be deceptive under the reasoning that a Jew cannot believe in Jesus and remain a Jew, a perspective that emerged out of the legacy of hatred between Christians and Jews over the past 2,000 years with its consequent parting of the ways, we affirm the apostolic witness that Jews who follow the Messiah of Israel remain Jews,” their website states. “We believe that the commitment of Jewish followers of Jesus to remain faithful to their people and heritage, and to raise their children as Jews, contributes to Jewish continuity.”
Rabbi Tovia Singer’s ministry, Outreach Judaism, aims to push back against fundamentalist, evangelical Christian missionary attempts to convert Jews to Christianity. In an article titled “Preying on the Jews,” he takes exception to a claim Messianic Jews make, which Stone also makes, that Christianity is a fulfillment or completion of Jewishness. It is, Singer writes, “a new sales pitch” on the part of evangelicals to get around many Jews’ resistance to Christianity as antithetical to their beliefs, or a denial of their distinct peoplehood. Singer uses the example of wallet-sized cards that he said Messianic Jewish evangelists carry, with tips for evangelizing Jews (say Yeshua instead of Jesus; don’t say you’re a convert from Judaism, but a “completed” or “fulfilled” Jew).
Stone understands the mistrust with which some Jews view Christianity. He said even some Jewish Christians he knows will not openly identify as Jews in a Christian context, because they do not feel they can entirely trust the church. “For a variety of reasons,” said Stone. “What might be expected of them? You know, ‘am I really safe?’”
Not everyone feels that way. “Gateway’s Shabbat service is life to my soul,” said Gateway Jewish Ministry member Greg Rosenberg in an email. He became Christian in 1995, but never encountered Jewish worship service in a Christian church until he moved to Texas in 2015 and attended his first Shabbat service at Gateway. “To worship in the presence of so many gentiles and Jews together in a church is just life, like a refreshing oasis in a parched land. It’s encouraging for me to see so many gentiles caring to worship in a Jewish context and learn the roots of their faith. I see that they see their Messiah as Jewish, and they cultivate a burden for Israel and Jewish people. For me to see this is so encouraging, it is life. The service also brings me back to my childhood of celebrating the Shabbat every Friday with my family, and often going to synagogue.”
Other groups within American evangelicalism are trying to approach Judaism with respect and sensitivity. Destiny Albritton is the senior director of Next Gen CUFI, the youth outreach arm of Christians United For Israel. She regularly posts educational videos for Christians on social media. In one recent post, titled “3 Ways Christians Can Honor Jewish Holidays,” Albritton explains how Christians can honor the High Holidays “without being awkward or offensive.” “For me, I know Jewish holidays are on a calendar corresponding with the seasons in the land of Israel. Honoring these holidays deepens my own love for Israel and acknowledges the Jewish connection to the land,” she says in the video. “I find that connection so beautiful.”
Albritton said she consults the Bible and Chabad.org to learn about the significance and origin of the holidays, and sometimes attends Chabad services with Jewish friends. “The observance of Jewish tradition for generations and generations despite all their challenges is so amazing and so powerful to see,” said Albritton, who encourages Christians to send appropriate holiday greetings to her Jewish friends, wishing them either a happy holiday or a meaningful fast.
There are those in the Jewish community who appreciate the Christians who are adopting aspects of Jewish tradition, viewing the phenomenon within the context of increased antisemitism in the United States.
Laura Kessler is the Ohio-based founder of BIPACT (Bipartisan Action Against Antisemitism). She grew up in the Midwest in a mixed family with Catholic relatives. “I have a lot of experience with evangelicals,” Kessler said, “so this is normal to me.” She welcomes the practice, as long as the Christians aren’t there to proselytize or convert. “We need a bigger coalition. The more we normalize that Judaism is open, it’s cool, the better.”
Avavit Pyle, 55, is a Hebrew language and Jewish studies teacher at a small Miami Beach Orthodox preschool. Originally from Israel, she has lived in the United States for 30 years. One of her closest friends is an evangelical Christian. “She’s been a source of light with all the hate,” said Pyle. “I think it’s very positive,” she said of the Christians who are incorporating Jewish rituals and traditions into their lives. “They are identifying with us, rather than distancing from us. That love [of] Israel is the number one priority for both of us.”
“My friend says that when Yeshua comes, we will all be one,” Pyle said, and laughed. “I just hug her.”
Although Gateway’s Statement of Faith decrees that the Bible “is the source of all doctrine, instruction, correction, and reproof,” containing “all that is needed for guidance in godliness and practical Christian conduct,” no one seems to object that the Shabbat service includes a few Jewish liturgical prayers that are not found in the Bible: the prayer recited when lighting Shabbat candles, or the blessings over the bread and the wine.
Mining Judaism for ritual and tradition may also represent a broader trend among evangelical and nondenominational Christians of looking to history to enrich their faith. Some evangelical churches are returning to physical hymnals, instead of displaying lyrics on a screen in the front of the sanctuary. Others are adopting liturgical observances like Lent and Advent, or even departing nondenominational churches altogether for more liturgical Protestant denominations.
During his sermon on the meaning of Yom Kippur, Stone explained the Kol Nidre prayer to the congregation, that it was a confession of vows broken and yet-to-be-broken. When he was done speaking, two singers, a cellist, and a pianist emerged from backstage and began the Kol Nidre in Hebrew. It was a marked departure from the slick production and high-octane drums that characterized the opening worship music.
The congregation sat quietly as a clear, unadorned soprano voice went out over them, supported by reverent, plaintive acoustic accompaniment. The singers, a father and daughter, harmonized in Hebrew. Some people closed their eyes, others watched them with focused intensity. When the music was over, Gateway Southlake gave them a standing ovation. Still, the applause was decidedly muted compared to the cheering and shouting that punctuated the earlier, more energetic prayers and songs. The prayer was not the typical Gateway worship fare. It was far older.
This story is part of a series Tablet is publishing to promote religious literacy across different religious communities, supported by a grant from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations.
Maggie Phillips is a freelance writer and former Tablet Journalism Fellow.
Zawartość publikowanych artykułów i materiałów nie reprezentuje poglądów ani opinii Reunion’68,
ani też webmastera Blogu Reunion’68, chyba ze jest to wyraźnie zaznaczone.
Twoje uwagi, linki, własne artykuły lub wiadomości prześlij na adres:
webmaster@reunion68.com