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

Worship: From Slaughtering Lambs to Shirts and Ties

In college I used to dress up for church with a shirt and tie. Every Sunday I pulled out my tie rack and matched a tie with a shirt. I never had to match my pants to anything since eighty percent of my pants were khakis. That’s a long story.

Actually, it isn’t. I didn’t want to match my tie with my shirt AND my pants.

Somewhere in my conservative Christian brain, I knew I needed to dress up for church. However, I became a little wrapped up in my church dress code. I was dressing up to project a certain image of myself.

One time God convicted me to give my favorite tie away. It was a little awkward to explain over breakfast with my friend on Sunday morning as I handed the tie over, but I’ll bet you anything that he’s still wearing that tie to this day.

Dressing up for church is fine, especially if you feel that you’re honoring God in some way by it. As for me, I’ve “graduated” to sandals, cargo shorts, and a polo shirt. As I read the Bible, I’m convinced that worshipping God has a lot more to do with actually loving God at a heart level and the forms we use are interchangeable depending on our cultures.

God is really flexible. No tie? No problem! No ox to slaughter? How about a dove? No dove? Well, he’s just glad you came to offer your love to him.

When God began to shape the Israelites into his chosen people who would act as a light to the nations, he first addressed the particulars of how they should worship their Lord. I’ve been reading Deuteronomy lately, and it’s striking to see God basically starting over again with Israel after the first generation died off in the wilderness.

While Moses is walking the Israelites through the particulars of how to worship God and God alone, he regularly hammers home the same theme, “Love the Lord your God.” The word love comes up over and over again.

If we fast-forward to the prophets, we may recall that they often criticized the Israelites for honoring God with their lips, while their hearts remained far from God. They delighted in the forms of worship, but failed to actually love God.

On one occasion, God said through the prophet Isaiah that their burnt offerings were useless because they failed to love and obey the Lord (see Isaiah 1). He wanted their whole-hearted devotion.

It’s particularly telling that even though God made his requirements for worship known in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, the Psalmist picked up on the central goal of our worship when he wrote in Psalm 40:6-8:

Sacrifice and offering you did not desire—
   but my ears you have opened—
   burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.
Then I said, “Here I am, I have come—
   it is written about me in the scroll.
I desire to do your will, my God;
   your law is within my heart.”

It strikes me that God chose animal sacrifices and a temple because they were culturally significant at the time of the Israelites. They were vehicles or tools they could use to show their devotion to him.

They sacrificed animals because they were agrarian people who relied on animals to survive. They worshipped in a temple because that’s how people connected with deities then. God mercifully met them where they were and used familiar forms to teach them the importance of worshipping them with everything they had.

The basics of worshipping God remain the same—love the Lord your God. However, the particulars tend to be more flexible than we would imagine.

Tomorrow’s Post: Is the New Testament the Last Word on Worship?

The author typically says church services are overly produced, inauthentic, insular, and generally ineffective. In addition, greater attention to church services has led to Christians investing their time and money on themselves rather than the commission to go and make disciples.

These critiques are often legitimate. The spirit of them is not always (perhaps rarely) constructive, but regardless, the number of affirming comments and links to these posts prove that such views are wide spread. There are many Christians who are fed up with church services and who have stopped attending, even if they still cling to Jesus. Others attend church services, but only because they have no other option. Still others have started house churches.

I’m not interested in debating whether these folks are right or wrong. In fact, I identify with them in many ways. I didn’t attend a church service regularly from 2002-2009, though I still gathered with Christians for prayer and fellowship in addition to trying out a bunch of churches for various stretches of time.

Living in southern Vermont for four years didn’t help us find a church that matched our beliefs.

Starting next Friday, I’m going to post a series of reasons why I now go to church. In the midst of our debates, we run into a lot of critique that isn’t constructive and arguments for the church that run something like this—you’ve got to just settle.

We can do better. I hope to advance some good reasons why we should go to church, while remaining open to the possibility that sometimes attending a traditional church service isn’t what God has called some of us to do. In fact, if we’re going to attend a church service at all, then I think we should have some good reasons for doing so.

I hope to supply some good reasons.

Next Friday: In kicking off my series, my first reason why I go to church right now is because I have found a church where I can find sacred space to meet with God. I’ll discuss the difference between actually meeting with God in the midst of a worship service as opposed to only singing about and learning about God in a worship service. There is a world of difference between the two.

Next Week’s Series: As of Monday I’ll begin a new series I’ve entitled, “What to Do When the Bible Disturbs You.”

Is that too much to ask?

It’s not like joy is a nonrenewable resource. Don’t you think God could be a tad more generous in doling it out, making for happier people who enjoy their lives and aren’t moping about?

Sometimes I wonder if God is stingy with the joy he gives.

However, it’s far more likely that the problem is that I’m stingy with the joy he has given to me. And that gives us something a bit more constructive to talk about…

I’m not a big fan of pat solutions or those holy hand grenades that go something like, “Just read the Bible and Jesus will make it better! or “Pray to make it go away!” or “We have the Holy Spirit, so what else do we need?”

No human being can actually live in our complex world for long on those mantras without going insane. It feels insultingly elementary to suggest that joy is readily available for me from a God who gives it freely.

I mean, are all of the problems in the joy pipeline a result of me plugging it up?

I can’t speak for you and your situation, but from what I can tell, that may be the case. I can’t remember who told me this first, but I’m guessing it was my mother-in-law. She said that we find victory in worship.

It’s like we’re hardwired to worship God. When we worship God and experience him, we’re running on the right kind of fuel that brings us joy and puts us in the place God intends us to be.

Can you imagine trying to run a car on old motor oil or vegetable oil? It’s not like either will work just because they are a kind of oil. Cars will sputter and go kaput without the right kind of fuel.

And therefore, if joy is our destination, it’s not like we have a lot of different options in order to attain the true joy that God offers us. It’s not like we can pursue money, pride, or career advancement all week and then drop a complaint in the comment box at church when we don’t have the joy of God in our lives.

We reap what we sow. That’s the hard, but simple truth that Christianity pounds into us.

If we desire the joy of God and we don’t have it, then the chances are that we are either distracted by something else or not clearing a space to be with God for times of worship and devotion. I can’t speak for everyone on this, and Christianity rarely boils down to one-size-fits-all answers. However, if we want to experience the joy of the Lord, I think we at least know where to start.

Looking for more posts about joy? Drop by Bonnie Gray’s Faith Barrista blog now for more thoughts on joy and a blog post that actually manages to fully develop only ONE metaphor.