:: In.a.Mirror.Dimly ::

I used to hide my theology books and guitar upstairs. I didn’t want people I met to know I’d been to seminary or lead worship.

Writing that now sounds a bit strange. It made so much sense at the time. I’d connected serving in the church with being over-worked and exploited. For years belonging in church had been associated with “getting involved.” Sometimes “getting involved” became a higher priority for some than simply learning my name.

“Did you say your name is Fred? Hey Fred, you should join our men’s group. They’re going to set up a huge church event next Saturday. You should serve with them!”

I know many have had conversations like this. If these people had learned I had a seminary degree, they would have handcuffed me to the pulpit.

“You can preach and lead worship and we don’t have to pay you???”

I’d grown so weary of those types of conversations where desperate volunteers just tried to plug another body into a struggling church ministry. There were so many things that needed to be discussed, but I wasn’t the guy to bring it all up. When I started to return to church, I just wanted to be left alone for a season. I wanted to maintain a happy anonymity while I sorted out my place.

Since those days of hiding books and musical instruments, I’ve stopped defining myself and my place in the church by what I do in my community. I belong based on my relationships, and I serve because those relationships define my place in my church communities.

I used to feel a lot of pressure to get involved in church. If I didn’t serve, I was just a lazy drain on the church. I didn’t want to be a “consumer Christian.”

My pastor often speaks of seasons in life. We go through seasons in our communities, in our families, and in our personal lives. I passed through a season of healing and reorienting to church community. During that season, it would have been foolish for me to serve. I didn’t need to just get involved. I needed to be healed and to learn how to thrive in the church again without becoming a critical voice.

Now that I have that perspective, I feel better able to get involved and to manage my church involvement. I don’t need to serve just like everyone else. We may be in different seasons.

In two months we’ll have a baby. That’s going to change a lot of stuff for a season. My wife being in graduate school has already changed how we think of our time for this season. My helter skelter writing life imposes limits on us for a season as well.

I want to always give something to my community, but sometimes the push to get involved in a bunch of stuff just wears us out. The guilt can be crushing. And that’s the hard part about belonging to a community. We’re sometimes trapped in between two overcorrections.

We’re either consumer Christians or we base our sense of community on how much we serve.

Sometimes we need to stop all of the work just to get the basics right. If a church can’t accept us as a family, then there’s something terribly wrong. If our church doesn’t treat us like a family, they’ll fail us at one time or in one way or another. That’s not a pleasant thing to write, but it’s true.

If your family is only based on whether you pitch in and help, you’re going to have a lot of hurt former family members. Think of teenagers who just want to slump and play video games or text or whatever teenagers do these days. They may check out from family activities for a season, but they are still members of the family.

When you can belong to a church family without conditions or strings, then you can serve with that family free from guilt or obligation. You will be free to serve others with a joy that can weather the bleakest of storms. Joyfully serving others happens when you know you belong.

My wife was watching a British film called The Servant as part of some research. The movie was made in 1963, and when I walked by I had to laugh. The beautiful young woman who was a main character in the story had hair that was the short but puffy and curled style that you may find among senior citizens but no where else today.

She was also listening to the big band music that I associate with a by-gone era.

All of the cool, hip things from 1963 did not connect with how we define cool and hip today.

Humor works the same way. Have you ever tried to watch an older comedy? Some comedians are timeless, but at a friend’s suggestion I watched a classic comedy that was made in 1938 and didn’t laugh once. It was described as hilarious and screwball by critics, but I was bored.

Fashion, music, comedy, and who knows what else shift and change so radically from one generation to another.  Each generation has its own way of expressing its values—anything from reverence to humor will shift from one generation to another.

Last week a lot of folks were sharing a stat from the new book called The Millennials which tries to give a picture of this generation’s relationship with the church. The big money statistic was this: 70% of millennial think the church is irrelevant.

I suppose I didn’t find that shocking. In light of how radically our culture shifts with merely our movies, how we relate to God is also bound to change. The church has a relevance problem today, but I don’t think it’s quite as bad as we think.

In fact, we don’t have to let it continue to be a huge problem.

Read the rest of this entry »

While in seminary, a small conservative church hired me to teach their Wednesday evening Bible study. It was the perfect opportunity to get some practical ministry experience, even though I never saw myself leading that kind of church one day. I was also planning to get married in the near future, so the extra money didn’t hurt.

The group was rarely larger than ten people, but I took it very seriously. I dug through commentaries and prepared some pretty substantial sermons each week. I didn’t know how to lead a discussion, but I think they wanted a teacher, not a discussion leader.

They were very nice people, but as I drove home each week, I’d think to myself, “Phew! That was hard work. I’m glad that’s over for this week.”

Around the same time I was visiting my bride-to-be up in Vermont, and while there I’d go into the local prison with her parents for a church service. They had a very different approach to ministry that led to a rather different kind of car ride home from the meeting.

I’ve learned a lot from them about how to prepare for ministry. While there still may be occasions when I need to consult a commentary or prepare something, the most important preparation comes when I pray and worship the Lord each morning.

I don’t need perfect planning to minister. I don’t need to be perfect. I just need to be present with God.

While praying before going into the prison yesterday, the Lord put Luke 11 on my mind, which is Jesus’ teaching on prayer. I read it for a little while and thought of some stories I could share.

As I drove to the prison that evening, John 16 also came to mind, which is Jesus’ teaching on the Holy Spirit leading us into all truth. I thought that I could teach on John 16 in order to encourage the men to share some testimonies at the beginning, and that Luke 11 would serve as my main text before we moved on to the Alpha lesson about the church.

God wanted to teach us from those passages, but he didn’t need me to do it.

I sat down, introduced myself, and then the Holy Spirit taught us how the church works as one person after another shared what God was teaching him. One guy taught us for about 30 minutes what he’d been learning about prayer, faith, and pleasing God.

I kept my eye on the clock and nodded my head as each guy raised his hand to speak, but otherwise I did nothing. The Holy Spirit taught us our lesson. I saw John 16 unfold right before my eyes.

As if God wanted to drive home the point that he had things under control, the second hour of the meeting focused on how to dialogue with other faiths in the prison and how to respond to insults and anger. I’ve studied a lot about the mission of the church, but it seems that when the Holy Spirit is given room to work, the mission takes care of itself.

The men sang as they stacked the chairs and walked back to their dorms for the evening, smiling and encouraging one another. A lot of ministry happened last night, and I did very little of it. I did one thing: I got out of God’s way and followed his lead.

I drove home last night joyful and encouraged, thankful that ministry does not have to be hard, draining work bearing unknown fruit that we may never see. Perfect preparation doesn’t take place through studies but through God’s Spirit.

Today’s post on perfection is part of Bonnie Gray’s Thursday series. For more posts on perfection, visit Bonnie’s blog and begin with her post: The Top 5 Lies of Perfectionism.

A Realistic Vision for Worship Today

The hardest thing about discussing worship is that, on one hand, it’s all about focusing on God, but we have personal preferences for how we focus on God. In other words, we need to figure out how we can effectively worship God, which calls for this weird introspection that determines how we best focus outward.

It gives me a headache.

However, God doesn’t seem phased by this. He has met his people in a variety of ways over the years.

I’m glad we don’t have to slaughter lambs, bulls, and doves in order to worship God anymore. I’m also glad the days of Gregorian chants are largely confined to monasteries and obscure sections of music stores (do we even have music stores anymore?).

And have I mentioned how glad I am that I don’t have to dress up in a tie in order to worship God?

After looking at what the Bible has to say about worship this week, I’d like to wrap this short series up with a few observations that will hopefully help us worship God today:

We Ignore the Past at Our Peril

Just because we don’t worship God in the same way as the Christians before, I think it’s beneficial to understand how we moved from slaughtering sheep to wearing ties and wielding hymn books. When we realize how crazy it is that we can worship the same deity  along such a wide spectrum of practice, we are better prepared to evaluate our approaches to worship today.

We Bring Something to Worship

Just as worship has evolved and changed over the years as people have redefined what is sacred and respectful for a deity, we too bring something to our worship. Yesterday I mentioned that worshipping God in a former shopping mall or movie theater with a particular kind of service that emphasizes music and a sermon says a lot about our culture’s influence on our worship of God.

We can delude ourselves by asserting that we’re doing something purely biblical. In reality we’re just worshipping God in one of many culturally adapted forms.

We Need Sacred Space and Time

I’m not trying to bash anyone’s particular form of worship. There are merits to anything from the liturgy to a rocking nondenominational service. However, I hope we can step back from the ways we worship God for a moment and see that in the process of worshipping God we need some kind of sacred space. That should remind us not to get fixated on the forms.

Forms are Just Ways to Express Love and Devotion

We can learn a lot about how to worship God from the various forms, but at the end of the day the liturgy or an informal service with songs and a sermon are really just ways for us to express love and devotion to God. Our task is to figure out whether our forms blind us to any other ways we could worship God.

Are our services too busy with songs, prayers, and sermons? Are our services lacking in encouragement and instruction? Are our services closed off to the work of the Spirit? Do we need more quiet time? Do we need more communal meals? Each form has strengths and weaknesses.

As I read the book of Deuteronomy, I’m struck that after God spent so much time in the book of Leviticus specifying the particulars of worship practice, simple love and obedience are emphasized above everything else. The worship forms help us connect with God in the midst of daily life, but it’s most important that we obey God, love him, and act out the justice he desires for our world.

Before we address whether our worship practices are effective or relevant, we have bigger questions to consider. Are we expressing our love to God? Are we obedient? Are we working toward justice?

If we can figure out those questions, then our worship will be a pure and pleasing offering to God.

Is the New Testament the Last Word on Worship?

Like many evangelicals, I’m a former Catholic. When the priests told me during my high school years that I shouldn’t read the Bible on my own, I had something to rebel over. All it took was a priest to warn me that reading the Bible on my own was dangerous.

It’s ironic. If he’d just encouraged me to read the Bible with a Catholic commentary or answered my questions, there’s a chance I could have remained Catholic. However, as I rebelled against the suffocating hand of the Roman Catholic Church, which is something of a sport here in New England, I found that many Catholic beliefs and practices didn’t originate from the Bible.

It was like shooting fish in a barrel.

Mary’s assumption? Gone. Purgatory? Out! The Pope? Fabrication! A celibate priesthood? Oh, please! The mass? Not in there.

As I embraced the Protestant branch of the faith as an evangelical, I continued to play this Bible-based game. Growing dissatisfied with the typical church service, I searched the scriptures along with many others and found that many of our worship practices have no biblical basis.

I had this chip on my shoulder for a while because the only NT command regarding church is a flimsy statement by the author of Hebrews about not forsaking the gathering of fellow Christians. That’s not quite the same as going to a large building, singing four peppy songs, dropping a check in a dish, listening to a 45-minute sermon, and then singing a weepy closing song.

For a period of time I honestly believed that we needed to recover a biblical model for worshipping God, which amounted to using the New Testament as a blue print.

Did the early Christians meet in homes? Yes, so that settles it! Did they preach, sing, or pray? Well, sometimes, so that’s flexible. Did they share a meal together? Absolutely. It’s not a worship service without that!

If you come from an evangelical or conservative background, this game of being the most “biblical” can be quite fun for participants and rather tiring for everyone else in the general vicinity. It’s like we’re all picking out certain parts of the Bible, trying to follow them to the hilt, and completely missing a huge, gaping problem.

Worship has changed and evolved throughout the Bible and since the founding of the early church. Even the various early churches had different kinds of meetings in their homes. One of my seminary professors said, “If you want to model the early church, which one are you going to choose? The church in Corinth?”

As we look for guidance in the scriptures on how to worship God today, Catholics can get wrapped up in preserving their traditional means of worship while Protestants can drive themselves batty trying to be the most biblical and authentic. In reality, as Protestants such as myself strip away our traditions, we actually merge contemporary ways of worship with the Bible and mistake it for somehow being pure and biblically authentic.

While Catholics defend their worship services that are in some ways culturally out of touch because they preserve the worship forms of one particular time in history, Protestants have cut themselves off from the supposed barriers created by tradition in favor of the barriers we have with today’s culture.

Think about this, it has to mean something that many Christians worship in megachurches today, especially churches that used to be former movie theaters and shopping malls. When we incorporate these cultural spaces into our worship, we are not pursuing a pure form of New Testament worship. We are adapting the New Testament to worship practices associated with the entertainment and consumer worship of our time, just as the Catholic Church preserves the worship values of another cultural period.

I hope this disturbs you a little. It disturbs me. I’m not trying to say that worshipping God is a hopeless enterprise. Far from it. However, we need to realize that our forms of worship today are not as pure and biblical as we lead ourselves to believe.

When we can see the forces at work and what is at stake, we’ll be ready to talk about the possibilities for worshipping God today.

Tomorrow’s Post: A Realistic Vision for Worshipping God Today

Over the past two days we’ve established that Jesus defines faithfulness according to the ways we demonstrate our love for others, particularly how we serve the least of these by our words and deeds. This raises the matter of what we should do with our beliefs and theology.

If God wants us to love him and one another, basing our faithfulness on whether or not we have imitated his service to those who are most vulnerable, isn’t theology a waste of time?

For me, this creates a sort of chicken and the egg dilemma. We are making a deeply theological statement when we say that serving others is most important to God. We can’t escape the implications of Matthew 25, but we also understand Matthew 25 by putting theology to work for us.

In putting this another way, if we want to dismiss theology in order to only serve others, we are essentially destroying the foundation that gave us the perspective we needed to see the priorities of God clearly. If we decide to move into service without a foundation of theology, we’ll end up serving without God’s leading and power, eventually losing the perspective and insight that theology provides.

Service without theology is every bit as problematic as theology without service. The two are linked.  

Our problem isn’t theology. Our problem is theology that leans in close to God, but keeps him and others at arm’s length. In addition, theology can be used to build glass walls between ourselves and God so that we can look at him but remain untouched by him and his heart for others.

Good theology connects us with the heart of God and enables us to read Matthew 25 and James 1 with the result that we take these messages seriously and put them into action.

We can try a shortcut to the action that God calls us to without theology, but in a brief period of time we’ll lose our way if we aren’t grounded in the leading of God’s Spirit and the message of scripture.

May we remain immersed in the scriptures and Spirit of God.

May we discover ways we can put our theology into practice.

And may we be refreshed with the new things God teaches us and calls us to do for him.

Sending an angry e-mail to a close friend about my disappointment with both serving and attending church marked the low point of my own struggles with church burn out. At my most pessimistic, I saw the church as this monstrous machine that consumed people as its fuel, and I blasted off a series of stinging bullet points to make my case.

When anyone rants about the church or questions the wisdom of the current Sunday system, the typical defensive response from those in the church is a paraphrase of something from an epistle about not forsaking the gathering of believers. That completely misses the point of most critiques of the church, but it’s sufficient to ensure we’ll have two opposing sides using scripture to hammer away at each other.

I had scripture for my anti-church system attacks.

Others had scripture for their pro-church defensive measures and counterattacks.

Lost in this is any kind of redemptive movement or conversation. Those hurt by the church are not addressing their hurts, concerns, and legitimate critiques, while those in the church feel attacked and only add to the problems felt by those who are burned out by church.

When You Are Hurt or Disappointed…

The worst thing to do when hurt or disappointed by church, whether it’s the overall church system or specific issues in ministry, is to lash out. I have wearied of the angry church posts, of which I myself have been guilty at times. I have repented and continue to repent.

By denouncing, criticizing, or speaking out of our unresolved hurt we’re only creating an atmosphere where those heavily invested in the church will feel threatened and may attack us more. This creates an ugly, non-redemptive circle where those who are wounded hurt others and are consequently wounded more by counterattacks.

We need individuals and groups who can help us process what has happened, but private attacks and public renunciations of the church aren’t helping anyone. That kind of “authenticity” isn’t helping anyone. Perhaps there will come a day when we can speak openly and honestly about our questions, doubts, and concerns about the church and ministry, but we won’t help anyone, especially ourselves, by striking out against the perceived sources of our pain and frustration.

Waiting and Processing

I know it’s natural to take proactive steps against anything or anyone causing us pain, and that’s why the processing of this stage is so critical. There was one pastor who set aside all of his own investments in the church to hear me out.

I mean, to really hear me, and to honestly tell me what he heard without injecting his own opinions or pushing me toward the pat answers that good Christians are supposed to spout. He said, “You’ve really been hurt by the church.”

At first I thought, “No, I’m not hurting. I’m just ditching a broken system that chews people up.”

The more I processed his compassionate, but confident assessment, I realized that he’d nailed me. I’d been hurt. It was hard to admit that.

I’d been hurt by the secret schemes and machinations some leaders took to replace me from a ministry where I was struggling to lead effectively, without sufficient support as a new leader in my opinion, instead of plainly explaining the situation to me. I’d watched it happen slowly, and yet no one spoke to me directly about it while in the process. In addition, I’d attended services dutifully and served in just about every area, and yet I was still struggling to live a faithful Christian life.

I was attending seminary for crying out loud. If knowing the Bible was the game, then I needed to know why I was failing so regularly at Christianity. Something about church wasn’t cutting it, and showing up each morning to get happy and sing only punctuated the hollow disappointment in my soul.

In my eyes, the church had failed me. It was something that no program or book could fix. I didn’t want to hear one other person tell me to get to church and not forsake the body of believers. THEY were not helping things, and in fact, they were sometimes the cause of my problems.

Thankfully I didn’t forsake the body of believers completely, but more importantly, several believers didn’t forsake me. That pastor and several friends walked with me in that time of hurting. Some of them were hurting for the same reasons.

Over time the more I shut up and learned from mature Christians and minimized my criticism, I began to heal, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves with thoughts on how to heal from church burn out and move on…

Tomorrow’s Post: Seeking the Rest You Need After Burning Out

I used to spend a lot of time in the church. I served with the set up crew, the clean up crew, the small group team, the worship team, and number of seasonal ministries that ranged from Christmas events to inner city missions trips. The majority of my service was to other Christians, especially the Christians in my church.

Sometimes it was great. Other times it was immensely frustrating, especially worship leading. At the time of my Christianity crash around 2002, I couldn’t quite figure out the reasons for my problems.

Was I burned out from serving too much?

Did I need to rethink the church system that bottles up the majority of Christians inside the church building?

Did I feel unappreciated and on a never-ending track of expending myself to make a huge worship event happen every week?

Was I sick of those who complained and demanded something different for their Sunday morning experiences without lifting a finger to help?

I was in the midst of a “service shift” in my Christian walk, and there were many friends struggling in the exact same place.

What is Wrong?

Those listed above are all reasons I could have shared at one time or another for my crash, but the bigger rumble that sent my conception of Christian service—service that is bottled up in the church—tumbling down was this notion of the church as a sent people who go out into their communities and world. In other words, our primary reason for being here isn’t necessarily to hold worship services, though they have an important place.

Our mandate is to spread the worship and glory of God throughout our communities, making for what some have termed a “missional” understanding of church (I’m borrowing from Lesslie Newbigin here). However, some would argue that even this term has become trendy and exploited by those who are either naive or self-serving, hungry for larger attendance numbers.

All the same, there is a renewed search among Christians to figure out what service looks like, how we can follow teachings such as John the Baptist’s plea in Luke 3 to give clothes and food to those who have none. I don’t see this as the abandonment of sharing the words of the Gospel with others, but rather a really dramatic rethinking of how service can actively proclaim the present reality of the Gospel.

There is a world of a difference between saying that God’s Kingdom has come and praying for someone’s healing or clothing someone because God’s Kingdom has come. One is academic, while the latter is literally living in the reality of God’s message.

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of reading about Christianity in books.

What Should We Do Now?

While we can dig up news stories about mega-churches building huge facilities that only serve their own needs and all kinds of campaigns that Christians are putting together to achieve goals that have nothing to do with the goals of God’s Kingdom, I am actually quite hopeful.

I have been challenged by pastors who are focusing on ways they can serve in their communities. There are rank and file Christians who are serving locally and globally in small and large ways. We are reading books such as James and figuring out that Jesus has quite a lot to say about how live day to day.

If we aren’t actively serving in our communities, there is at the very least a hunger to extend our service beyond the local church. And if you aren’t sure where to begin, here are a few thoughts:

Love Those You Already Know

While Jesus talked about clothing, feeding, and visiting the poor, start with those you know around you. Who has God put in your life right now that you can serve and show the love of God? Are there colleagues at work who need the radical love of God? Is there a family on your block who needs a prayer warrior? Is there someone struggling financially that you can support.

We don’t have to travel to third world countries or seek out the poor necessarily. Sometimes there are very real needs that we can meet among people we already know.

Ask God to Change Your Heart and Open Your Eyes

It’s been hard for me to figure out the next step after my service crash in the local church. While I still serve in my church, I’m much more aware of how I use my volunteer time, saving some of it for service to those in my community. I don’t want to burn up my service time in my church.

Getting to the place where I served in my community has been an ongoing process in which I’ve had to ask God to change my heart so that I’m not consumed with what I want. I also need God to open my eyes to the needs around me and the ways that I can meet them. I don’t want to rush into a service project only to find that it’s a dead end.

Don’t Forget Your Local Church

The challenge among Christians, especially evangelicals, is that we swing from one extreme to another. So while we can try to correct our service deficiencies outside of the church, we still need to invest in the corporate worship of God. It just doesn’t need to consume all of our volunteer time.

It’s my hope that we’ll one day see many churches from a variety of backgrounds who sincerely worship God together on Sundays, while remaining actively engaged in serving their local communities as well as elsewhere in the world.

Instead of fighting over the number of programs to offer or the style of our worship music, we’ll be committed to serving others as part of God’s mission. This just may pull us out of our own world enough to reveal that we not only have much in common, but we all need one another so badly that it’s not worth arguing over trivial matters.

Next Week’s Series

Following Jesus: Am I All In?

I used to lead worship. Hymns were my enemy. I always lost my place in the verses. The chord changes were insane. And they usually ended with some wondrous transport to the gleaming starry hosts of heaven while the earth boiled and flamed below under God’s judgment.

Not exactly the “Kingdom of God coming to earth” theology I prefer…

And then I attended a wedding where everyone in the wedding party sang professionally in a church choir.

Hymns made sense in that context. Hymns are a different kind of animal from my preferred poppy, classic rock songs. They reflected the theology, music, and culture of a different time and/or style. They weren’t irrelevant. They were just different.

I could sing hymns by way of honoring another tradition and learning from it.

As we  look at the shifts in American Christianity of late, I’d like to start with worship. Worship is the low-hanging fruit that will give us a pretty clear picture of what has happened among American Protestants of late and what we should do now since it is often influenced dramatically by culture.

What Has Happened

One of the themes I’m going to hammer on this week is the ignorance of evangelicals regarding their past. When it comes to forms of worship, we have always mingled biblical worship with our culture. It’s inevitable.

We could (like some authors) call many of the influences on our worship “pagan,” but in reality there is no one biblical model for worshipping God. We are always adapting biblical worship with forms that are familiar to us. Therefore it shouldn’t surprise us that each new generation is looking for ways to worship God that feel familiar.

Even if we tried to worship in stripped down house churches along the most strictly biblical lines we can figure out, I’m certain that future generations will one day critique us for allowing the hyper-individuality of postmodernism to fragment our worship into small, independent (not interdependent) meetings that function very little like the “body” of Christ.

Robert Webber has written about our recent worship shifts as liturgy has become popular among many who were raised in lower church traditions. Dan Kimball’s Emerging Church book focused on this as well, where he, in many ways, wrote about retooling typical evangelical worship services to incorporate a broader range of ancient prayer practices.

Whether we call it culture or we call it a generational shift, many Christians are seeking different forms of worship than what they knew 15-20 years ago. Many of these forms incorporate older elements such as weekly communion, scripture readings, and liturgical prayer.

As I’ve watched my own shifts from hymns to contemporary to a more liturgical form of worship, it’s tempting to say that one is more authentic or relevant than another. We can make value judgments about which one is the most authentic way to worship God, never mind the other formats of worship we don’t even consider from around the world.

In the past 15 years I’ve seen many Christians react against either a dry form of liturgy or a shallow form of contemporary worship. They are seeking a deeper experience with God, and oftentimes that search takes them to other forms of worship in various denominations.

What Should We Do Now?

As we try to hear God today, the forms of worship that take shape in various cultures, time periods, and regions will have different strengths and weaknesses, and we should expect them to change with time.

Perhaps in twenty years Christian worship music will have a more driving beat and a greater emphasis on a simple chorus—think Lady Gaga meets David Crowder. Perhaps worship services will place a greater emphasis on silence and holy space as our work and entertainment follow us wherever we go.

I can’t predict what the future will look like, but I can say that after glimpsing our past, we can expect more shifts. Liturgies will be modified. Some will seek a high church expression, while others will be drawn to a decentralized, simple meeting.

In a sense, we should critique the past. Our forms of worship need to change as we encounter God afresh in the present. However, we should not cut ourselves off from the past. More times than not, a people cut off from their past are at the mercy of the present culture and thereby more vulnerable to its influence.

In our worship we live in an “ancient-future” tension that Webber speaks of, though we recognize that we are all making different kinds of shifts. Some are leaving the ancient forms for the contemporary, while others are leaving the contemporary for the ancient forms. 

It should not surprise us that we’re passionate about our forms of worship. It’s important. And yet, we should not let our worship, that will be predictably diverse, cause more divisions than necessary.

Worship has always boiled down to meeting with the Lord, and a good worship service will create space and provide tools to accomplish that. Hymns are no holier than the latest pop worship song, since the real goal is leading us into God’s presence so that he can meet with his people and lead us.

Some days I see all of the incredible ways Christians serve others, and I feel terrible about not doing enough. One volunteers in the inner city, another travels the world helping the poor, and still others do significant ministry on a regular basis.

It’s easy to become discouraged and to wonder if I’m doing enough. When comparing myself to others, I can lose my grip and begin despairing.

While it’s good to appreciate the service that others do and to let their work inspire us, using others as our measure for our own calling is generally unhelpful. If we want to figure out some ways we can serve others, here are some ways we can take some practical steps forward:

Ask God for Guidance

God gives wisdom to those who ask and hears the voice of his own children, but sometimes I act like God is playing charades with me. I try to interpret all of these signs around me, as if God is unable to speak and to guide me. My problem, more often than not, is that I’m not asking for guidance and am therefore not listening.

What Has God Given You?

Sometimes it doesn’t help us to compare ourselves to those in a different context because each region has different needs. We all have different skills and abilities given to us by God. Christians are part of a body that is comprised of different parts with a variety of roles.

Identify Barriers

Time, money, fear, bureaucracy, and a host of other factors can hold us back from serving others. Can we rearrange our finances or schedule in order to serve more effectively? In addition, a barrier may well arise from spiritual opposition that we need to prayerfully overcome through God’s power.

Pray about Steps Forward

Sometimes we’ll make mistakes as we serve. Sometimes the opportunities will dry up. Other times all of the details will fall into place. Whatever your situation, remember that God intends to use us to serve others, which means we need to serve out of what he has given us. Unless God fills us, we’ll have nothing much to share with others.

Tomorrow’s Post: This series is wrapped up, so I’ll lay out my plan for a 5-minute retreat for next week. I’ve never tried anything like this before, so we’ll see what happens.

Next Week: A series of 5-minute retreats designed to create space for God to speak to you.