Matt Stone posted at Glocal Christianity today on the question, “Is incense ok for Christians?” He reports on being asked by a friend about incense, and says, “If Jesus was ok with receiving frankincense and myrrh as a birthday gift then I am ok with it too”. It’s a few years since I came across Christians who regarded incense as being off limits but I’m guessing they’re still out there.

Image from havesomescents.com

I was involved in a heated debate on incense late last century when I was working for the Presbyterian Church of Aotearoa New Zealand. Soul Outpost, an alternative worship community in Dunedin, had been invited to run an alternative worship experience in the big tent at the Faith Festival in Cromwell, attended by something like 900 young people and adults. The word got out that Mike Riddell and Jen Long and their team were planning to use incense. A number of leaders informed me that they were boycotting the service because of their concern about “non-Christian” pagan ritual. One or two claimed it was demonic. I explained that incense had been used by mainstream churches for hundreds of years, and had been used in the Jewish temple rites as well. They replied by saying that they’d been to mainstream churches all their lives and never seen it. I discovered that they understood mainstream to mean Baptist and Salvation Army. They’d never been to Catholic or Anglican services and didn’t know anything about Orthodox churches. When they said that the incense was tainted by Hinduism or Buddhism because it was from India I explained that Jen and her team had made their own “Biblical incense”, using the recipe from Exodus 30:34-37. The boycott went ahead and only 800 people got to enjoy some smells and bells.

So why do some people get so uptight about the use of incense? Perhaps it due to people’s association of incense with Indian religions and New Age spirituality. Some of the incense brands have Indian names and images. Some Protestants have an instinctive feeling that if Catholics do it, they shouldn’t.

So why would we use incense? Some people just like the smell. It can change the mood of a room, and cover a multitude of smells associated with cooking, damp or smoking. Some people find incense helps them focus on the presence of God. I’ve used incense for both reasons.

What do you think?