For most of my life I have really disliked worship. My wife tells me that if I weren't a pastor, I would never go to worship. Fifteen years ago she was right about that, although I have managed to change over time. I am a constant tinkerer when it comes to designing worship, always working with our staff and members to figure out how to tweak our worship in a way that will touch people and open them to what I think is paramount in a worship service: encountering and experiencing God in a way that transforms us, even if just a little bit.
The unfortunate reality is that in North American society, neither the surrounding culture nor the church culture embraces the transforming encounter with God. Many mainline churches quit asking long ago whether our worship leads people to an encounter with Christ and the Holy Spirit. Think about why we do what we do in worship. Do we worship the way we do because it is how we have always done it? Do we worship the way we do because it is what we are best at? Do we worship the way we do because it makes certain members of the church happy? These reasons reside at the center of what has caused so many people to walk away from the church. Many people have wanted a tangible, transforming encounter with God but have never found it in worship, because worship has been focused on everything but that transforming encounter. To foster an encounter with God means designing worship that is deliberately focused on making a spiritual and psychological impact on people. If people are to experience God in worship, it needs to resonate with where they are psychologically and spiritually. If we don’t offer people a venue through which they can access the spiritual, they will gladly find some other venue or ignore their spiritual yearnings and substitute the pursuits and pleasures of the world.
The church has to adapt its worship because our culture doesn’t recognize the value of worship when done as it was in generations past. Each generation is different in what it resonates with because over time the culture changes. The result is that worship rooted in previous generations loses its power to connect with each succeeding generation and leads us to address spiritual questions that are no longer being asked, or at least not being asked in a way that can be addressed in forms familiar to today's older generations.
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What do you think?
1 comment:
I think this guy has got it wrong. We don't tinker with the way we worship. That's what gets us into trouble. The problem with this guy's idea is that he is mixing up the idea of having an "experience of God" with having an "emotional experience". God moves when people assemble in his name, no matter whether you are attending a high mass, or a revivalist meeting with three songs, a sermon and an altar call. Just because our culture is centered around the television and the movie screen doesn't mean we have to transform the church into a Christian version of Hollywood. We come to church to worship God, not to get "warm fuzzies". We come to church to SUBMIT, not to have some experience of emotionalism that we define as "God moving". The answer to the question in the title of this article is simple. We don't change the way we worship, because it is the way God has established for us to worship him. He did this in the Old Testament, and followed through with it in the New Testament. As Christ said, nothing has been done away with, it has been fulfilled.
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