All My Springs
Are in Zion!
by Randall Bane

Ifirst set foot on the soil of Israel in 1983. At the time I had no sense of calling to the land nor of connection to its people, but I had been invited to the Christian celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles as a dancer. Although my ministry since 1976 had been to perform solo concerts using a blend of mime, dance, and drama, I was asked to join a twelve- member team that would dance to the live praise and worship music led by Merv and Merla Watson. This began my discovery of the truth in Psalm 87. With all God’s dancers and singers I say, "All our fresh springs are in Zion."

For the next fourteen years I returned again and again. For the first twelve I was an integral part of the Feast, moving from dancer to dance/drama director and promoted eventually to Artistic Director. With each return I explored more deeply the call of God to the full expression of worship.

Starting With the Finish

I went in 1996 for what would be the last of God’s assignments in Israel for this fourteen-year season. April’s project was to direct the world premier of David Loden’s brilliant opera, "David and Batsheva." Then, staying on through May, I was joined by dear friends Yvonne Peters, Dean and Helena Thomas, and about thirty other worshippers in all media. Together we reconstructed the Tabernacle of David for the World Prayer Congress. We were able to secure a Catholic-owned Prayer Garden on the Mount of Olives, where we built a seventy-pole rectangular enclosure open to the sky. In this awesome setting we worshipped God continuously (day and night in three-hour Levitical courses) for five days.

It was a Shavuot/Pentecost never to be forgotten. The week not only bridged these Feast Days, but included the World Day of Prayer and the international March for Jesus which we did on top of the walls of the Old City. From the Tabernacle’s position directly East of the Golden Gate we marvelled at the prophetic act of which we were part: the ark of God’s Presence was situated where the victorious returning Messiah will soon place his feet!

My life and ministry were transformed by those years of service in the Holy City. God made me a new man when I met Jesus, but only in physical Zion could I find the source of the water He has called me to carry.

The Source of the Water

Over the nearly twenty-five years of my ministry through movement and visual means, I have often sought understanding (for myself and others who are similarly called) of this clearly God-breathed anointing to worship with my body. Nothing in the church of my upbringing prepared me–or any of the other pioneer worship dancers of the present age–for what God has done and will do through our bodies. However, the misuse and abuse of the physical bodies of God’s children did not begin in our generation. I think the problem began with the Roman sacking of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. when the corruption of Israel met God’s hand of judgment. Those Early Church believers who had remained in Jerusalem escaped before the final calamity but were now effectively expelled from Israel along with the rest of the Jews. The Jewishness of the Church began to dissipate and Rome became the exile home of the "new" faith.

The first major slip from the path of God’s intent for the use of our bodies was the decline of the Hebrew view of spirit/body unity and the ascendancy of the Greco-Roman world view that divides the two "natures" into a physical/material world and a mental/spiritual world. We were off! By the end of the Middle Ages the intellectual/rational approach that developed among legitimate reformers was necessary to bring correction to the sensual, moral, and material decadence of the Church. However, this "mind supremacy" developed a church culture in which beauty is suspect, emotions and feelings are denied or repressed, and the body itself is the enemy of the spirit. Revival movements of the last two centuries have brought some balance to that culture, but frequently have led to shameful overcorrection or to new rational strongholds.

Then suddenly, God, in the middle of the twentieth century brought His covenant people, Israel, back to the land from which He had expelled them. And we, the Church, began to turn our eyes again toward a Jerusalem that was not the dusty city of mythical tales fleshed out by uninformed imagination and the questionable renderings of Sunday School artists. Jerusalem was a place on the world’s map where one could actually go–to see, touch, smell, and feel. Our sense of the land of Israel and its people the Jews has undergone a revolutionary reworking in the last fifty years. Yet much of what God has done and is doing to restore Israel (both natural and grafted) to Himself remains veiled to our awareness.

Learning to Drink the Water

On the night of my first arrival in Jerusalem (September 1983) I stepped out of my airport taxi under a fluorescent light in front of Jerusalem’s old Jaffa Road bus station. In the next ten minutes I suffered a huge culture shock. The process of trying to find a telephone forced me to encounter the squalid side of the city that I thought was going to feel like the holy streets where Jesus walked. This place didn’t feel "holy" at all; it felt like a dirty Middle-Eastern bus station.

Then in 1987 my role in the Feast changed, giving me longer stays in Jerusalem, a vehicle to drive, and responsibilities that took me all over the city. I began to shop in the open-air market, listen to local radio, walk in the back streets and live much as Israelis do. I slowly began to get a sense of who they–as the people of God–are. They are a people who have known and still know terrible suffering and yet still love life. This love is not a sentimental, self-indulgent attachment, but a passionate and physical involvement with the city, with each other, and with the world.

One day I went to the Western Wall alone. I put on a kappa and moved close to the Wall among the men. As I watched and prayed I realized that all the bodies around me were moving. I alone stood still. Some were coming and going from the huge courtyard in front of the massive Wall. Others were moving through the courtyard and into the attached Torah school. There was a small group near me quietly talking, but with heads and hands in full involvement, probably "midrashing," everyone offering his interpretation of the Torah scroll on a table before them. Further away half a dozen men were linked arm to shoulder, singing and dancing in a circle. Other men were alone standing or sitting at the Wall, davening as they prayed quietly but aloud, davening as their hands rested on the ancient stones of the Temple’s foundation. Davening: the head or the whole upper body rhythmically bowing toward the Wall. I moved in among those who were praying. Then I laid my hand on the Wall itself.

Carrying the Water

As I stood there facing the holiest site on Earth, the Lord said to me, "Let go." Something hard and rigid inside me broke. I stood weeping before the ancient and immanent God of Israel, tangibly represented by the wall of His House, and I bowed . . . again . . . and again . . . and again . . . Holy . . . Holy . . . Holy.

We are created to worship God. Worship is the expression of our love to Him. Worship is not our thoughts about Him, our faith in Him, nor our good deeds for Him. These are all necessary elements of our relationship with Him, but worship is our love for him expressed in some way toward Him. What I saw in the Jews of Israel was the unity God meant for each of His children to have–and for all of His children to have together in community. Our outer physical, audible, and visible expression should be organically linked to our inner thinking, feeling, discerning, and knowing. Our community life as a body is meant to have the same integrated character. Communion is a good word for it.

As a performer (actor/dancer in New York during the sixties) I had learned that body actions, vocal intonations, gestures, and facial expressions were necessary tools for portraying the inner life of my stage character. I began now to see that Godly character was not simply a matter of what I believed, or of what I said, but of what I do, how I act in my life. Within days John 1:14 leaped from the page to my heart, "The Word became flesh." The invisible becomes visible in the body. Our Jewish Messiah shows us who we are created to be: laughing, crying, joyful, angry, loving, hating and all in appropriate response to what is really happening in life around us. Romans 12:1 is no longer an inscrutable paradox: ". . . present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual service [worship]."

Finishing With the Start

There is a powerful significance in the recon-nection of the Church to Israel and to our Heavenly King’s capital city, Jerusalem. For those of us called to the movement and visual ministries there is, I believe, a special significance in becoming connected to our Jewish roots. Perhaps the most obvious door to the restoration of bodily movement among New Covenant believers has been the introduction of Israeli folk dance in churches all over the world. It is such a wholesome form of physical expression and so easily adapted to many Christian songs and choruses that even churches which have been wary of dance find this form acceptable. In some circles it has become fashionable to use the term Davidic Worship to refer to Hebrew-style circle dancing. The term is also used to describe events that use banners, flags, processionals, and other elements of lavish production. This is not "wrong," but I think God is doing far more than providing us a new form of "worship package." I believe He is restoring Davidic Worship as a part of preparing His bride.

King David was indeed the quintessential worshipper of our Judeo-Christian heritage. However, the real significance of David’s dance in that most significant procession of all history (bringing the Ark up to Zion) is that it was the fullest and deepest way of expressing through outer means David’s invisible inner heart of worship. I assure you that he was not performing a step-dance in the style of that or any culture as he worshipped God before the Ark of the Covenant. David was a fully integrated man, a Jew in whom the whole of Godly Hebrew character flourished. Just as his sorrow and anxiety on other occasions was fully expressed in groanings and wailings, his unspeakable joy on this occasion was expressed through God’s most natural and liberally given gift for the expression of extreme celebration: dance.

Before the unveiled presence of our Holy God, a human being’s appropriate bodily expression must be perfectly married to the inner awareness of the mind and heart. That expression will need to cover the range from absolute prostrate silence to total ecstasy, the state in which everything that can move moves.

I define Davidic Worship as the full expression of love for God through means that are appropriate to the way God is moving. It is this awareness–and capacity–that I believe God is restoring to His children.

The move of the Church toward the fuller expression of worship is not–and must not become–the use of the church building as a theatrical venue. Let us, however, use all the tools and techniques of the performing arts that were given by God to man for one purpose: that He–our Savior, our Head, our Bridegroom–might be glorified. Let us re-create our gathering places so that the buildings themselves proclaim the beauty and order of our God. Let us design and outfit these facilities for the expression of worship with all of our capacities fully engaged. Let us seek to be whole, healed, and fully alive so we can express our heart’s love for God audibly, physically, visibly, passionately, and humbly as David did.

For complete information on Randall Bane’s extensive worship ministry and to schedule teaching and performances, contact him at (816) 421-1060 or visit the David’s House Website: www.david’shouse.org . E-mail: Come.n.worship@David’s House.org Randall Bane, founder and director of David’s House, a worship ministry based in Kansas City, Missouri, has served the body of Christ for some 25 years as a restorer of motion and visual arts to the Christian worship experience. As an international performer and teacher, he has been on the cutting edge of the Holy Spirit’s move to restore Hebraic worship experiences parallel with the Levitical order of Bible days. David and his wife Share live in Kansas City.

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