Remember the DJ at junior high and high school dances? He was usually some middle-aged guy dressed in black who struggled to provide a musical mix that combined popular songs with classic hits with slow dances with dances that have steps with anything else that eager teenagers requested. I never envied DJ’s. I thought someone would have to be crazy to take on a job like that.

Then I took on a job like that. I became a worship leader.

OK, I know you’re thinking, “But Ed, you’re a Baptist who attended Taylor University where there’s still a no-dancing policy! Surely worship leaders of your ilk didn’t have dances.”

This is true, but the challenges facing worship leaders are far greater than those faced by DJ’s, especially DJ’s at multi-generational parties. I’ve served in many positions in the church and witnessed all of them up close—from teacher to janitor. I am firmly convinced that being a worship leader is the worst job of them all. By worst, I mean it’s the most difficult, most draining, and least understood. Before you jump to the comment form to chew me out, let me explain.

Worship leaders are paid to stand on stage in front of hundreds, if not thousands of people and lead them into the worship of God. This is a holy, awesome, wonderful calling, but it also means that worship leaders are exposed in a very, very vulnerable position. Their worship is on stage for all to see, and you better believe someone is going to judge them.

I know a lot of people love their worship leaders, and there are some people who feel extremely fulfilled in their callings. In some churches worship leaders are quite happy. Great. My hands are lifted high in thanksgiving (or in my pockets if you’re a Baptist).

However, if there’s someone who is going to get dumped on, there are plenty of times when the worship leader comes into the line of fire for choosing the wrong songs, making people stand too long, or asking people to clap, raise their hands, or do something terribly unspeakable like… closing… their… eyes.

I know there are worship leaders who sometimes cross the line. I’ve done that myself, telling people to worship God in ways that weren’t authentic. I’m not making excuses for the times worship leaders get it wrong.

I’ve stood up there in front of hundreds of people, and I know what it feels like to lose my place in a song because I got so caught up in the glory of God. I’ve committed to long rehearsals and worked hard to get my team on the same page, only to hear that people are complaining about the drummer who is a bit too loud. I’ve tried to put together a meaningful worship service that reflects both a common theme and the musical diversity of a congregation, only to get my ears pinned back by folks who don’t like my song choices.

It’s moments like those where I felt like an embattled DJ, just trying to do my level best.

The hardest thing about criticism for worship leaders is that all of the critique centers around the worship of God. What a personal, intimate topic to attack each other over. I’d much rather scrub the toilets at church and hear from someone that I missed a spot than spend two rehearsals working on a worship set and spill my heart out on stage only to learn that a bunch of people aren’t happy with me.

If worship leaders are doing it right, they are completely consumed with God, lost in the presence of God rather than the hundreds of eyes focused on them. Anything could happen, and they need to somehow keep the service on course, stay focused on God, and then absorb criticism when it’s done.

I can handle criticism of my sermon. I don’t mind if someone thinks a program needs to change. However, when we start critiquing the way someone publicly worships for the benefit of others, we’re stepping onto slippery territory here.

Words like patience, gentleness, and humility come to mind when we speak of confronting a worship leader. In the past, I’ve been none of those things to worship leaders. I’ve seen people fail to extend those qualities to me as well.

Perhaps it all goes back to considering our desired results.

All too often, I’ve focused on the results, the shape of the church service or the songs I want the people to sing. When I griped to a worship leader about our song choices, I just wanted “better” songs. I didn’t give any thought to the challenges he faced. I soon experienced them for myself.

Perhaps we can extend more grace to one another in our Christian communities if we can picture something like this…

A young worship leader has just finished the second service on Sunday morning. He’s been through two rehearsals over the past week in addition to school, work, and a tense situation at home. He’s been up since 6 am, and all he wants now is a hoagie (think of a sub sandwich, only more Philadelphian and better).

As he lugs his guitar, amp, and song book out of the church, no one thanks him. No one tells him he did a good job.

Five feet away from the front door and the freedom of the outdoors, a couple pulls him aside. They are upset, worried that he’s not playing the right kinds of songs, and they want him to organize a special service dedicated to the songs they prefer—songs he doesn’t know, songs he’s sure he’ll mess up.

It would take him too long to explain all of this: the weariness of his week, his insecurities, or his annoyance at their pestering. He loses his temper. He won’t hear them out. He can’t do it. That’s the end of it.

He stomps off to his car, wondering what just happened, who he’d just become, and what it means to lead people in worship anyway. Deep down he knows it’s not about him, but when you’re a worship leader in front of everyone, it’s hard to know when it’s about the people in the pews, when it’s about yourself, and when you’ve finally found that magnificent sweet spot where all of the anger, bickering, and doubt fade away in the presence of a loving, majestic God.

I used to fight for contemporary worship songs at the various churches I attended.

It was a stupid fight because it was also an unnecessary fight.

Incorporating new worship songs was a no-brainer. There were plenty of people who supported a mix of old and new songs in church.

But I encountered some resistance, and therefore I resolved to fight against the traditionalists. We needed fresh expressions of God alongside the tried and true hymns of yesterday, and I carried my guitar off to war.

I believed the church should look a certain way. I had allies affirming me, patting me on the back as I retreated each Sunday after launching a rhythmic salvo. Some even told me I needed to start a new service that left the hymn crooners with their dusty, yellowing hymnals.

Others believed the service looked just fine as is. They had their supporters too.

One side wanted to preserve the church’s worship style. The other wanted to change it.

Both were fighting for a personal preference rooted in culture. The 1800’s and the late 1900’s were engaged in a church-rocking struggle.

Once, I met a young pastor in the midst of a particularly intense worship war. Suddenly, when I saw a worship war from the outside, the black and white lines of my own struggle evaporated. As he talked about the combat his worship leader waged against certain members of the congregation, the futility of it all struck me.

I’d been wrong to fight, even if the church really did need to freshen up its song selection.

At the climax of his story, the young pastor recounted a conversation with his worship leader. He told the worship leader, “You are the leader, you’re in charge, you need to make them follow you.”

I said very little in reply. My heart broke. Who are we fighting against?

The irony of worship music and worship in general is that we all bring personal preference and past experience into a mix that is tough to join together each Sunday morning so that we can all sing to God with one voice. We are members of the same body, worshipping the same Lord, and yet it’s so easy to become defensive, fighting for what we want the church to look like.

In the midst of fighting for a certain feel in the church, we lose sight of one another. I know I certainly painted some people with broad brush strokes, writing off their perspectives, and they did the same to me.

One thing a lot of people didn’t realize about me back in the days of the worship wars is that I actually really like hymns. My problem as a worship leader was my lack of musical ability. I couldn’t play them. When I did try to play them, I often messed up or lost my way around the third or fourth verse.

Why didn’t we have that conversation?

I knew I was one of the only people pushing to bring in the new worship songs at that time. If I admitted that I’m not quite cut out for leading worship, which I wasn’t, who would carry the flag for my side?

Mixed up in the worship wars, we all faced a far deadlier enemy, our selfish desires for control. As I witnessed one side holding tightly to its way of doing church, I chose to wage a frontal assault. In the end, we ended up fighting one another instead of our perceptions about what church needs to look like.

So far as I can tell, there is a truce in many of the worship wars. A treaty has been brokered. However, there were casualties. I know I caused a few of them.

Whenever I feel tempted to exert an opinion about the way a church handles worship music these days, I stop myself. Such things are not worthy of my breath or brain waves. My guitar has long since been disarmed, hidden in the peace and quiet of my bedroom.

Whatever we end up singing, I’m done fighting worship wars. I’m a worship pacifist. I can just say thank you for the people around me. I need the people around me far more than I need my favorite songs, and that has been one of the greatest lessons I could have ever learned about belonging to a community.

I played guitar for years. Many of my friends from college knew me as a guy who leads worship all over the place, in small and large groups. Though everybody seemed to have a guitar, worship leading opportunities always sniffed me out.

The more I pitched in, the more responsibilities I received. Soon I was in charge of a worship team at a church with 300 to 400 people in each service (at least it felt like that many people).

Once I was put in charge, things seemed to fall apart in a matter of months. Ironically, that’s a long story…

Being perfectly honest, I didn’t really care all that much about music or mastering the guitar. I felt called to create in a different way. As I stuffed my guitar away in the closet, I began to discover writing. The more I invested in writing, the more it fit everything God seemed to be doing in my life.

I began to realize that I was that same kid who filled his copy book in sixth grade with zany stories.

I was the same kid in seventh and eighth grade who sat at a primitive computer with his friend each day after school rewriting fairy tales from the perspectives of the villains who believed they had received a bum wrap.

As I honed my craft as a writer, I began to notice lame church websites. People in church said they were writing a “blog” when they meant “blog post.” The elitist professional in me cringed.

Maybe I could help?

At one church in particular, I offered to help with some writing projects right when a huge need emerged for someone to handle communications. I threw myself into it and developed a newsletter and kept the basic day to day operations going. I really loved it.

After a few months of this, we began to talk about creating a team, and then one day I had a group of four or five people sitting across from me, waiting for me to lead the communications team. At that moment, something within me clicked, “I am not a leader. I do not want to do this.”

God had been warning me over the past year or so at this particular church to not become a leader. Things were just ducky so long as I could throw myself into my work, create stuff, communicate, and do all of that. However, once I started to lead people, it all stopped being fun.

Thankfully, I didn’t languish in a leadership role for long. Circumstances provided an easy way to pass off leadership to someone with those gifts. She’s doing an amazing job because she knows how to work with a team and get the most out of each person. I, on the other hand, work great on a team, but I’m not the person to lead it.

God has made it abundantly clear to me over the past year: Do not lead.

I create stuff. I don’t lead people.

I’ve been trying to unlearn that since I was 15 years old.

What Are You Passionate About?

There’s an old trick that pastors learn. When someone comes to a pastor and says, “We should have a ministry like _____,” pastors know to respond: “You’re passionate about that idea. How about you lead it.”

I can certainly relate to pastors who get everything dumped on them. They need to hand off responsibilities to capable people or they’ll lose their minds. However, passion does not make a leader. Passion just means you care about something.

Over and over again, I stepped up to help with ministries that I cared about. I was passionate about worship and creative work, but I always ended up in charge and completely miserable.

I’ve worked in the nonprofit world long enough to know that passion does not lead to competent leadership.

After so many false starts and dead ends, I’ve learned two things about belonging in a Christian community.

1. If you do what you think you should do, you’ll burn out.

2. If you serve within your God-given limits, you’ll find a lot of joy.

When I think about serving others through my writing, I honestly sort of write it off in unguarded moments. It’s like, “Nah, it’s just fun. It’s not a big deal.”

When I think about leading a team of creative people, I want to buy the most expensive MacBook Air on the market and beat myself over the head with it.

God has called me to write. I’m not a leader of writers. I’m just a writer. There may be writers out there with leadership gifts. I’m not one of them.

There is freedom and peace in knowing our boundaries. When we know who are and what we’re called to be, we can just settle into our spot in the body of Christ. The more we realize what we can’t do, the more essential the fellow Christians around us become. Before we know it, we’ll become a living, breathing, interdependent, nurturing community.

Best yet, I’m not standing up there on Sunday mornings to botch the opening lines of the songs. Everybody wins with that one.

The final straw arrived last night—the one that breaks the camel’s back. Like an angry camel I flopped onto the ground flailing and spitting. Proverbially spitting that is.

Or are llamas the ones who spit?

Regardless of the spitting involved, I hit my limit last night. Enough things had gone wrong, enough projects had piled up, enough incidental circumstances had mounted to the point that I snapped.

The crazy thing is that under normal circumstances, the final straw was actually a pretty good thing tinged with a few problems. It was something that I would normally thank God for. But oh last night, I didn’t need one more thing to do. One more urgent deadline was too much after pushing to meet more deadlines than I could count. The constant urgency of one thing after another got to me.

I stomped out of the house because I needed to break my little pity party. I needed… Mediterranean food. I could try to tie this back to my camel metaphor (I mean, where else would a camel in Columbus go?), but I’ll just stop things there since I ate a lamb wrap.

A few hours later I had some perspective.

I hadn’t prayed about things. I’d just reacted. It was alright that I recognized a need for a change of scenery, but it took me far too long to realize that some of the things that had pushed me over the edge were essentially answers to my prayers.

I just didn’t expect those answers to my prayers to arrive along with all of this other junk.

So now I just feel like an ungrateful jerk who asks God for stuff and then doesn’t even recognize it when it arrives. In fact, I had the audacity to see his blessings as a problem.

I feel like I need to channel my inner Ann Voskamp and work on this gratitude thing. My spirit runs dry for want of gratitude and worship.

My mother-in-law once said that we overcome sin and the schemes of the enemy with worship. And if I was honest with myself, something that is not a guarantee, I’d have to say my “woe is me” attitude is a pretty good sign that I’ve been a tad self-absorbed lately.

I need to redirect my worship to where it belongs.

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.

The Relevance Problem

I attended a graduation ceremony for a Ukranian Catholic high school this summer, and the administration gave us a two for one: mass and a ceremony. The Ukranian Catholic Church has their own unique liturgy, and to be honest, I felt like Dr. Who had just taken me back in time.

I’m going to toss in a caveat at the end of this post about the value of our traditions and the importance of the liturgy, but we also should not be surprised that the liturgy developed at a particular time and place feels strange today. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I know that myself and many others today have a tough time meeting with God in that format.

We have similar problems with our other church formats today among Protestants. The only difference is that we’re removed by a few less generations. Honestly, even the rock music worship service that took hold among baby boomers doesn’t really connect with me.

Should we be surprised that the worship cultures of previous generations don’t work for Millennials today?

The Culture Problem with Worship

Our trouble is that we have a hard time sifting through our culturally determined forms and the timeless aspects of worship that should always remain. We should sing and make music to God as one form of worship, but how and when? What style of music should we pick?

We should teach scripture, but should we rely more on testimonies and sharing or formal sermons?

We should pray together, but should we recite prayers, rely on specific leaders to pray, or sit in silence listening for God?

We all want to worship God, but there are real generational differences that come into play when we gather together. The older generations have been at this longer and certainly have more wisdom in many ways, but who determines how the diverse body of Christ worships God?

God’s Flexibility with Culture

With a book like Coffeehouse Theology to my name, I’m certainly guilty of trying to figure out this business of theology, culture, and relevance. In today’s context, I like the idea of theology being paired with a conversation in a coffeehouse because it communicates to people today.

As I’ve studied scripture, I have a theory about God. I hold to it loosely, but here it is: God doesn’t care about culture all that much. He works with it and looks more on our hearts than the forms we choose. God’s preoccupation with the motives and actions of his people comes up over and over again in the prophets.

However, the trump card for me has been Solomon’s temple. God clearly showed up and inhabited that holy space, but when we compare Solomon’s temple to other religious structures from that time period, we find many striking similarities. In other words, God chose to reveal himself in a temple that was designed according to the culturally appropriate form of that day.

The people of Israel had an idea of how to worship a god, so the only God in the universe met them where they were because the cultural aspect isn’t too big a deal, provided they didn’t include practices that he opposed such as sacrificing infants or temple prostitution.

A Call for Simplicity?

If you fear that your church is either irrelevant or soon to be irrelevant—which is inevitable by the way—I’d like to suggest taking a deep breath. I’ve spent a lot of time stressing about this stuff too. I’ve tried to figure out what churches need to do in order to be relevant to this generation and the next.

Honestly, I think we just need to step back and relax.

As a veteran of the worship wars, I’ve seen how churches can get caught up in fighting over one worship form or another. Some days I wished that church just didn’t have music at all during the worship service. While I think we can still use music in our worship services, perhaps the solution is simplicity.

Whatever forms we invest in will one day pass. Whatever we hold onto, we’ll have to let go of in one form or another. We still need to pray, worship, teach, and share communion together. However, our forms will shift and change over time. The more we invest in making one form perfect and standard, the harder it will be connect with each new generation.

We spend all of this time trying to figure out how the next generation meets with God because they don’t want to come to our churches. So we go through a painful change process, codify whatever the “new” thing is, and then we freak out when the next generation after that one finds our hard-won innovations irrelevant.

“Culturally relevant worship” is a hamster wheel that will prevent us from focusing on the encouragement, mission, prayer, and teaching we could do a bit better if we kept our worship of God simple.

We will always incorporate values and practices from our particular culture. I mean, there are a lot of sanctuaries these days that look like coffee shops and that’s not an accident. However, perhaps the way forward isn’t to stress over preserving a form or finding a new form.

Perhaps the answer is to strip everything down to simple worship gatherings, whether you’re old school with 3 hymns and sermon or new and hip with a rock band. The less we invest in preserving or creating a culturally relevant form, the better prepared we will be to welcome the next generation. My guess is that in attempting to keep things simple, we’ll incorporate some things from our culture, but we’ll make our transition easier from one generation to the next rather than passing through some cataclysmic shift to another.

If we always have a time for teaching, but we don’t stress over the form it takes, perhaps we’ll be able to find more time for mission and reaching out to those who need to experience the freedom of God’s Kingdom.

Culture will always find us, but the less we invest in it, the less we have to lose.

We probably can’t be relevant, but we can be real.

One Last Caveat…

Having said all of this, I think there is a lot of value in learning from our traditions, especially the liturgies passed onto us. I’m glad we have churches who keep liturgies going because that form of worship seems very valuable even if I don’t participate in it every Sunday.

This past Sunday I realized that may be a problem.

The fact that I feel the need to somehow change myself into someone different is an indication that I’m not always living my day to day life in touch with God’s Spirit. While it’s good that I could at least realize it and take steps to tune back into God, am I only taking these measures when I’m on my way to worship God in a room full of fellow Christians?

The word hypocrite comes to mind.

Honestly, this whole process is one of the reasons why I go to church: I need reminders and accountability to stay connected with God. Worshipping in community reminds me to pursue God, even if I don’t find most church services today particularly helpful in actually, you know, meeting with God. They tend to be rather busy.

From what I can see, my struggles with hypocrisy have an up side. I at least get an indication of when I’m not on the same page with God. The trick is to only care about what God thinks about this.

We all need to be built up by time with God. We need to be strengthened by the Spirit’s power whether we’re alone all day or  interact with hundreds of people.

When I feel that tug to get my spiritual “act” together for church, I have a clue about my need for God. The trick is to confess my misguided motivations. I need more of God all of the time, not just when I’m around other Christians.

That’s the problem with hypocrisy. It usually leads us to do good things for the wrong reasons. In the case of Christianity, hypocrisy can be exhausting and terrifying. We worry about what others will think about us if they find out who we really are. I forget that I typically have no problem overlooking the flaws of others, but if someone really looked at me, it’s all over.

I’ll be honest with you, I feel that tug to sit with God right now. I’m just sitting in my living room on a Wednesday morning. No one will see the immediate impact of God on my life, but I hope that as God changes me and I live for him, those incremental steps will make me the kind of person who can drive to church at peace with God, not worrying about the way I’ll appear before others.

I’ll still take my mp3 player along just in case I’m in the mood for some music.

I was like a hockey player who arrives at the ice rink with his suit on and then slips into his pads and skates, ready to do battle. Entering the sanctuary with my mind running at high speed, I’d begin to criticize things quietly to myself.

For a few years I needed to disconnect from the familiar church culture I knew and seek out either home meetings or liturgical church services.

However, something began to change over time. I don’t quite know what it was or how it happened, which strikes me as a good sign. I hope that God was changing something in my heart.

Last Sunday I walked into church as our worship team launched into the first song, and I sensed myself relaxing as I took a seat next to a friend. Something in my spirit said, “This is where you need to be.”  That wasn’t because my friend’s an elder in our church, though I’m sure the seat next to him is always in high demand. Rather, it was because I was taking time to worship God.

As I read the Old Testament, I’m struck by the importance of two ideas. One is that God desires his people to love him, and the other is that he wants that love expressed through pure worship and obedience. I suppose our acts of obedience can fall under the broad category of worship, but the act of singing praises to God is one of those simple, holy acts that can open the floodgates of God’s presence.

Worshipping God is the result of living in relationship with him, and the pure worship he desires can only happen when we place our allegiance to him first.

That means he’s the first item on our to do lists.

That means our “success” in life is directly tied to whether or not we have invested in our relationship with him.

My in-laws always begin their church meetings at a prison with worship, which I sort of thought was just the thing to do. However, one night they explained that we enter God’s presence with worship and we win spiritual battles with worship.

Worship puts us in our proper place. It forces us to look at our priorities. It opens us to the possibilities that God can bring.

Sometimes I don’t know where to begin with God. I’m overwhelmed with my needs, to say nothing of my family, friends, and the world in general. There’s so much to do.

I can’t solve these problems on my own.

I won’t propose a solution that will impress God.

I won’t find anything in this world that can replace the peace and joy that comes with God’s Spirit. Worship opens us to him so he can begin to work in and through us.

The best thing we can do is this: begin with worship. It sounds like a Christian cliché to say, “We were made to worship God.” However, if we’re not worshipping God, we’ll find something else to worship that will let us down.

I’m a small groups first kind of guy.

Having said that, I still have my reasons for going to to a larger Christian meeting, even if some family matters call me away from church this Sunday and probably the one after that as well. My final reason for attending a church service: I’m Reminded It’s Not About Me.

It’s true that attending a small group meeting accomplishes this effect as well. Small groups may even accomplish this more effectively at times.

However, small groups can become insular and focused on their own needs as a group. We encounter a broader range of gifts, insights, and support in a larger community setting.

One of the best things at my church these days is a bi-monthly pot-luck where we share a meal in between the two services. It broke new relational ground for many of us as we reached beyond our typical social spheres. I’m now praying for people I never would have known otherwise.

When I visit prisons I’m also reminded of the needs that the men have. On the occasions that I pray for them, I’m reminded that God is working in their lives, and have even been given words of encouragement to share with some of the inmates.

As we gather in larger groups of Christians, we have an opportunity to connect with believers who may need our support, who may support us, and who will hopefully work with us as we reach out to others.

If you cornered me, I would admit that I’m not a big fan of the high-input Sunday service, but one of the reasons why I still go is rooted in my need to emerge from my own head, to connect with others, and to prayerfully consider how God wants to move among us.

For further discussion:

Why do you attend church?

How can we  ensure our church attendance is focused on God and on others, rather than only our own needs?

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.

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