Lack of Concern for Worship Renewal
For many church leaders, the renewal of worship is simply not a priority. Many churches seem content to pursue “business as usual,” and pastors often yield to the tendency to elevate the sermon above corporate worship.
We who are identified with evangelical Christianity are hard put to demonstrate any serious concern for worship in this century. As scholars, we have failed to study worship or give attention to the theology of worship. Principles of biblical worship are not sought as the foundation of local church practice. Most of our evangelical seminaries have not even offered a full course in worship.
It follows that evangelical pastors have not been much concerned with worship either. In many of our circles the Sunday morning event is considered a “preaching service,” in spite of the fact that the official title in the bulletin reads “Morning Worship.” Viewing the preacher’s singular act of proclamation as significantly more important than the entire congregation’s acts of adoration, praise, confession, thanksgiving, and dedication, is espousing an expensive heresy which may well be robbing many a church of its spiritual assets. And we have been zealous to reach the world for Christ to build up the body of Christ, while at the same time being negligent in giving our first, best love to God himself—which is what worship is essentially about.
Contempt for Praise of God
The pluralism that characterizes modern Western culture threatens the activity of praising God. Those who engage in praise are made to feel as if they are out of date and out of touch with reality. However, a life of praise is the best counterattack to the pressures of a pluralistic society.
Praise of God is continually threatened at all points. There are head-on attacks which try to eliminate it physically or to shame it into silence. There are numerous subtle ways in which it is discredited, undermined, or made to seem unfashionable or childish or ridiculously unreal. Among the threats there are some that are especially dangerous to the roots of praise. Perhaps the chief among these is the atmosphere of suspicion in which we live. Just because we live in such an open society, with free spread of all sorts of beliefs, theories and world views, we tend to be more wary of wholeheartedly adopting any of them.
At present the “conventional” wisdom of our society is certainly not that one’s life should be based on the reality of God. The hypothesis that mostly operates in practice is that God is a human projection. This is omnicompetent to deal with all religious phenomena: it grants their reality but explains them in purely human terms. There is no strictly logical proof of this, but its practical acceptance has a host of important consequences. It leads to the living of a life that is in practice atheist. How can an alternative to this be posed? To argue that, on the contrary, God is Creator of man is not a very effective challenge. There is needed an alternative way of life in which this option is experienced. The activity in which this alternative is at its most drastic and explicit expression is praising God. If God is, then he is to be affirmed appropriately and appreciatively through the ecology of existence. Only then will the truth, goodness, and beauty of God have a chance of becoming clear. So our way is an attempt to evoke a life which can take many forms but whose essence is to let God be God for us, in thought, feeling and practice.
Substitutes for Worship
Because church leaders have, for the most part, lost the understanding of biblical and historic worship, they have created and imposed upon their congregations a variety of worship substitutes.
For the past decade I have made it my business to sample various services of worship and to ask pastors, students, and lay people to define worship for me. Occasionally I have come across some people with extraordinary insight into the subject. But more frequently the answers are groping, tenuous, and even muddled. Recently a student who knows of my interest in worship renewal caught the frustration many of us experience by saying, “We are working against four hundred years of neglect.”
Unfortunately, there is more truth than fiction in that statement. The fact is that we have not continued the interest in worship demonstrated by the Protestant Reformers. Rather, we have allowed worship to follow the curvature of culture.
I contend that there are at least four substitutes for worship in our contemporary culture, substitutes shaped more by the culture than by biblical teaching.
The first may be aptly called the lecture approach to worship. The cultural source that gave rise to the “classroom” church is the Enlightenment. The emphasis on the mind, learning, and education to the neglect of the senses and the inner spirit has resulted in a worship mentality that views the sermon as the be-all and end-all of worship. All else is lightly dismissed as “preliminaries.”
A second substitute for worship is evangelism. This approach to worship resulted when evangelistic field preaching replaced worship in some quarters. It turned the church into an evangelistic tent. In churches influenced by such preaching, Sunday morning is seen as the most propitious time to get the unconverted saved. All else is made subject to this overriding theme. The climactic point of the service is the altar call.
A third replacement for worship occurs when the overriding concerns are entertainment and numbers. Television has given this approach its powerful support. It speaks in terms of the stage, the performers, the package, and the audience. It is a three-ring circus by the roadside. It gets the crowds, but what it feeds them is frequently shallow, hollow, and tasteless.
Last, but equally important, is the self-help approach to Sunday morning. It is the “me generation” dressed up in church clothes. Those who attend learn how to affirm and fulfill the possibilities of personal greatness, wealth, health, and beauty. The ministers in churches with this emphasis play into the hands of such narcissistic indulgence. “Come to Jesus, and he will make you one of the beautiful people. An expensive home, a big car, popularity, and power are yours for the asking.”
Perhaps your reaction is that this analysis is too severe an indictment of church leaders. Worship, however, is one of the most important callings of the Christian church—along with evangelism, education, mission, fellowship, servanthood, and emotional healing. If some biblical, historical, and theological instruction could help us to do worship better, what have we lost?
And “do” is an appropriate word. Worship is not something that someone does for us or to us. Rather, it is done by us. It is a verb, not a noun. It requires action. It is not passive—it is not merely watching or observing.
The doing of worship is not a new problem. False approaches to worship perturbed the Reformers. The medieval church had taken worship away from the people and located it in the work of the celebrants and choir. Everyone else watched as if they were at a play. A monumental achievement of the Reformers was to give worship back to the people. Now we have come full circle. Worship no longer belongs to the people. Again, it has become something someone does for us. Ministers lecture at us, move us into decisions, entertain us, and tell us how great we are. And we put up with it. We pay our money, go home, complain, and come back for more.
But the Bible understands worship as God-centered. In worship, God’s people act out the Christ event and thereby praise, honor, and glorify God. God himself is present in the telling that occurs through Scripture and preaching. And the God who was in Christ reconciling the world to himself is savingly present as we act out his death and resurrection in the Lord’s Supper. In and through the telling and acting out of the Christ story we respond to God in prayer, praise, confession, and thanksgiving. Our purpose is to give, not to get. The giving of praise and the offering of thanks are the supreme calling of the church. In those actions we minister to God and do what we were created to do—give him—Creator, Redeemer, and Judge—the glory due to his matchless name.
It is time to turn our backs on substitutes for real worship and to learn what it means to be a people who truly worship God. We are working against centuries of neglect, so we must not expect instant success. Rather, in our local congregation we must commit ourselves to honest evaluation, to study and prayer, and to new directions for Sunday morning (and evening) that will bring greater glory to God.
Misplaced Priority in Worship
In many liturgical congregations, the church is viewed as an organization that exists for the liturgy. This author, writing from the perspective of the Orthodox tradition, offers a reminder that worship does not exist for its own sake, but as an expression of the reality of the church in relation to the world. His insights are useful to Christians of other traditions.
Today’s liturgical crisis consists, first of all, in the mistaken concept of the function and place of worship in the church, in the profound metamorphosis in the understanding of worship in the mind of the church. Let us emphasize the fact that we are speaking here about something much more important than the misunderstanding of the texts, ceremonies, and language of divine service. We are speaking here about the whole approach to worship and its “experience.”
Worship—its structure, form, and content—remain what they were before and essentially what they have always been. In this sense it is right to speak of Orthodoxy’s faithfulness to its liturgy. But to understand it and to use it are two different things. A discrepancy has appeared between the basic purpose of worship and the way it is understood. The membership of the church has simply not noticed this discrepancy, and worship actually excludes the possibility of this understanding. No matter how paradoxical it may sound, what obscures the meaning of worship is that it has become for the faithful an object of love, indeed almost the sole content of church life. Worship has ceased to be understood as a function of the church. On the contrary, the church herself has come to be understood as a function of worship.
Christian worship, by its nature, structure, and content, is the revelation and realization by the church of her own real nature. And this nature is the new life in Christ—union in Christ with God the Holy Spirit, knowledge of the Truth, unity, love, grace, peace, salvation. In this sense the church cannot be equated or merged with worship; it is not the church which exists for the liturgy, but the liturgy for the church, for her welfare, for her growth into the full measure of the “stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13, neb).
Christ did not establish a society for the observance of worship, but rather the church as the way of salvation, as the new life of re-created mankind. This does not mean that worship is secondary to the church. On the contrary, it is inseparable from the church and without it there is no church. But this is because its purpose is to express, form, or realize the church—to be the source of that grace which always makes the church the church, the people of God, the body of Christ, “a chosen race [and] a royal priesthood” (1 Pet. 2:9, rsv).
In fact, to the extent that the church exists not only as the living church today, but also the church handed down from the fathers, she embodies in worship her participation in God’s kingdom, gives us a glimpse of the mystery of the age to come, expresses her love to the Lord who dwells within her, and her communion with the Holy Spirit. In this sense worship is the purpose of the church, but the purpose precisely of the church, as the highest and fullest expression and fulfillment of her nature: of her unity and love; of her knowledge of communion with God.
But in the contemporary approach to worship there is the characteristic absence of an understanding of it as the expression of the church, as the creation of the church, and as the fulfillment of the church. The church has been merged with worship, has come to be understood as a sacramentally hierarchical institution existing for the performance of divine worship seen as sacred, supra-temporal, immutable mystery. The church is that which guarantees the objective character of this “sacred action,” its reality so to speak, and in this sense the church in her sacramentally hierarchical structure is the instrument of this mystery and is subordinated to it. The church cannot express, create, and fulfill herself in it, because outside the mystery itself there is no church.
There are separate believers, to a greater or lesser extent living individually by sacred contact with it, by the sanctification or nourishment received from it; there is also the “parish,” i.e., an essentially lay organization, bound together by concern for the presence of this “sacred something”—for the church building and for the provision of the priesthood that it needs. But the individual believer, entering the church, does not feel he or she is a participant and celebrant of worship, does not know that in this act of worship he or she, along with the others who are constituting the church, is called to express the church as new life and to be transformed again into a member of the church. He or she has become an “object” of worship, celebrated for his or her “nourishment,” so that the person may, as an individual, satisfy his or her “religious needs.”
In the same way the parish does not know that worship, as an expression of the parish, transforms it into the church, gives it those “dimensions” which it does not and cannot have naturally. It remains a limited human and only human community, living not as the church but by its own necessarily limited human interests.
Having been turned into something “sacred in itself,” worship has as it were “profaned” everything else in the church: her government becomes juridical and administrative in our eyes; her “material” life is strictly separated from spiritual content; and the hierarchy (having become the celebrants of the sacraments only, in which nobody sees the expression, creation, and fulfillment of the church) are naturally pushed out of the sphere of church administration, finances, and even teaching, since all these spheres have become profane and unsanctified. Now the sole content of the church’s life, worship has ceased to be understood in its own real content, which is to be the expression, creation and fulfillment of the church.
The overwhelming majority of Orthodox people have no interest in the meaning of worship. It is accepted and experienced in mystical and aesthetic but never “logical” categories. It moves the soul of the believer by its sacredness, by its mysteriousness, by its “other-worldliness.” And everything that happens to fall within its orbit becomes overgrown with complicated symbolic explanations. It is characteristic that in this symbolism there is no symbolism of the church.
Thus, people love to explain the divine liturgy as the depiction of the life of Christ. But who explains it as the expression of the life of the church, as the action by which she is eternally realized? Who ever sees that in this action she is not depicting the life of Christ before the congregation, but is manifesting, creating, and fulfilling herself as the body of Christ?
The believer loves the ceremonies, symbols, the whole atmosphere of the church building, this familiar and precious nourishment for the soul, but his or her love does not long for understanding, because the purpose of the liturgy is thought of precisely as the bestowal of a spiritual experience, spiritual food. For the membership of the church, worship has ceased to be the church’s self-evidencing.
And finally, having become a liturgical society, existing in and for the sake of the worship experience, the membership of the church has become unable to understand that worship—as the expression, creation and fulfillment of the church—places the church before the face of the world, manifests her purpose in the world, the purpose of the people of God, set in the world with a gospel and a mission.
Having ceased to be the expression of the church, worship has also ceased to be the expression of the church in relation to the world. It is no longer seen as the leaven which raises the loaf, as the love of God directed toward the world, as a witness to the kingdom of God, as the Good News of salvation, as new life. On the contrary, worship is experienced as a departure out of the world for a little while, as a “vent” or break in earthly existence, opened up for the inlet of grace.
Corruption of Worship by Manipulation and Utilitarianism
A common corruption of worship is one we may call a corruption of function: the authoritarian structuring of worship to fit preconceived ideas without primary fidelity to the nature of the God revealed in the gospel. Many pastors, for example, feel led to provide guidelines for the congregation by introducing categories into the printed order (e.g., “Hymn of Consecration”). Such structuring may not be out of place when conceived with theological integrity and a certain pastoral diffidence; but it easily becomes a mechanizing of worship in order to compel the worshipers’ devotion to conform to the leader’s plans. Indeed, the presumptuousness of theologians in laying down liturgical structures with heavy-handed authority can easily become an idolatrous imposing of man-made structures upon the sovereign nature of the Word and a violation of the integrity of the human soul to respond to the Word in a Spirit-directed way.
The psychological rigging of worship classically illustrates this type of corruption, in which attention to people and the dynamics of personal experience is made sovereign rather than the nature and action of the Word. Commonly this corruption is a compound of more or less religious humanism and shreds of theology embodied in such frank declarations that the primary purpose of worship is “to foster the religious experience”—that worship is “to break down inhibitions” and “expand perceptions.” The worshiper’s feelings in particular are played upon (as well as his tactile senses in certain experimental liturgies), and the experience thus aroused, together with discussion about it, are made the content of liturgy. Such devices as “cycles” or “sequences” are employed to execute this purpose. We find “theme worship” with all parts of the service chosen to reinforce “the motif of the morning.”
But clearly, to conceive worship primarily within the category of the psychology of human experience is not only to subvert its purpose as the worship of God. It is also to risk committing liturgical suicide in that an endless train of corruptions follow from this basic corruption; for worship as the contrived fostering of experience for the sake of experience opens the door to all kinds of manipulative devices, with only the leader of worship answerable for their legitimacy.
To a degree we have anticipated the next corruption to be identified—the using of worship primarily to achieve humanly chosen ends; we may call it the corruption of “utilitarianism.” Forms of this corruption are legion. On a crude level they include blasphemous invitations to worship which appeal to nothing more than self-interest and practices of worship which would be amusing were they not so pernicious. Worship as a means of “character building” and of producing “socially motivated personality,” worship as a means to “self-fulfillment” and “success,” invitations to worship in the vein of “come to church this week, you’ll feel better, do better, live better, it’s the American way”—such are the more noxious expressions. The alliance of worship with political nationalism and its degeneration into modern tribalism must also be noted. Occasionally this perversion is clear-cut and thoroughgoing, at other times subtle or naive, though no less demonic.
Utilitarianism is also evident in the propagandizing with which denominational bureaucracies utilize worship for “promotion” and “cultivation.” “Board of Pensions Sunday” is substituted for the First Sunday in Advent, or “Rural Church Sunday” for the feast of Pentecost; or the meaning of Worldwide Communion is measured by whether or not the amount of money collected surpasses last year’s record. Perhaps the humorless hand of bureaucracy was evident at its worst in a “Crusade for Morality” launched by one denomination, in which the Sundays of the year were divided into five “emphases” with “worship and sermon” tailored to fit. Sundays in the fall were preempted for “abstinence from beverage alcohol, and personal moral regeneration,” and “clean sex behavior” was laid down as the theme for Sundays in the spring!
Nevertheless, the center of gravity for liturgical reflection and decision must always remain God, the End beyond all other ends even as he is implicit in all other ends. To affirm this truth, to be sure, is not to subscribe to the theological cliché one often hears: that worship always and everywhere should be conducted soli Deo Gloria, to the glory of God alone. For the God encountered in worship is never alone, and his glory always has to do with man and his life. The God of Christian devotion is always a God in relation to man and man’s world, and his glory inheres in that grace which by definition has man and his moral life as its object. Indeed, in a sense God is glorified to the extent that man is ethicized. Nevertheless, worship is first to be conceived as encounter with God; its reference is secondarily to man.
McEucharist: The Allure of “Fast-Food” Worship
In their concern to reach as many people as possible with the gospel of Christ, church leaders often try to make the worship service as attractive as possible for the unchurched. When worship planning is “consumer-driven,” however, serious abuses of true worship may result. The author of this entry raises some thoughtful questions about the “fast-food” approach to worship.
This is a day in which church leaders are frequently admonished to be culturally sensitive to visitors and the unchurched in their preparation and execution of worship. In a sense this appears to be wise counsel. However, an inherent danger in striving to be culturally relevant is that the church will instead become culturally driven. Indeed, in observing the push toward becoming all things to all men one might wonder whether some promoters of cultural sensitivity have not become imprisoned by the need to reach their market, regardless of how much their efforts might compromise the message of Jesus Christ.
The popular view among those who see the church as a product to be marketed is that worship is a consumer-driven service. That is to say, those areas of worship which might not appeal to visitors or non-Christians should be minimized or even eliminated in order to allow time for maximizing more appealing portions of the service. One of these persons boasted to a seminar group that his church of 2200 has become so efficient that it can take the collection in 90 seconds. As if that were not impressive enough, he went on to affirm that it can serve communion to the same number of people in just two minutes. The secret is that the plates holding bread and juice are placed under every fourth pew. At the appropriate time a designated person at the end of each pew simply reaches down to retrieve the plates and send them speeding down each row. In exactly two minutes the entire church can be served. This is a somewhat shocking example of what we might call “fast-food worship.” It must be wondered to what extent this particular church might go to satisfy its customers. On the subject of McEucharist, therefore, some questions need to be asked.
Does God Like to Be Rushed? First of all we might ask if God enjoys being rushed or manipulated. While not every person enters a church service with pure motives, from a biblical perspective the purpose of this gathering is to recognize God and respond to him with appropriate joy and gratitude. This implies that the God who is greater than the humans who meet together in his name is the one who sets the agenda for worship, and not the reverse. Certainly God wants outsiders to be invited and made comfortable in order that they might also discover, experience, and embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The question is, how much is the church willing to sacrifice and compromise for the purpose of making worship exciting and inviting? Are there limits in the areas of theology and taste which must not be violated? Or do we feel we have the right and responsibility to alter the practice of worship to such an extent that we actually mar the reflection of the nature of God in the process?
The Scriptures remind us to slow down (Ps. 46:10) and to linger in and enjoy the presence of Jesus Christ (Luke 10:38–42). They call us to wait on the Lord, not to hurry the Almighty so that his appearance can fit into our overpacked schedules (cf. Ps. 27:14; Prov. 20:22; Isa. 8:17; Hos. 12:6; etc.). It is difficult to believe that rushing at breakneck speed through certain parts of the liturgy in order to arrive at others we might deem more “appealing” is a healthy or balanced way of viewing either worship or God himself.
Is Worship Entertainment? Second, we should ask whether we have changed worship from that which we offer and give to God into something we receive and get for ourselves. Liturgy is supposed to be the work of the people, but it is in danger of becoming the entertainment of the people instead. In some churches it becomes a reflection of our passive society in which we are only spectators, rather than an activity into which we enter and in which we participate with God and our fellow worshipers.
Some worship professionals have advanced the idea that the primary role of the pastor is to lead the congregation and not, himself, to worship. Another maxim of the culturally sensitive philosophy is that a congregation would rather listen to music sung to them than to actually sing music themselves. Inherent in these statements seems to be a conviction that the probability of God’s presence and blessing in the service increases exponentially with the professional quality of the entertainment.
Is “Canned” Music an Act of Worship? A third consideration, and one related to the idea of worship as entertainment, is the change that has been taking place in church music. In recent years the advancements of technology have interacted with the taste of consumers to produce a new style of electronic music. In the church this change has manifested itself in the proliferation of accompaniment tapes and music “tracks.” Initially these were used only for the purpose of guiding choirs or soloists. However, their use in providing dubbed-in voices to augment the background is becoming increasingly common. One can only wonder who is accompanying whom. While these technological advances may offer the small church a ready means of providing quality music, it can also have the result of marginalizing music. The message conveyed is that there is no need for members of a congregation to learn to play the piano, organ, or guitar. Indeed, even where there are those capable of providing live accompaniment, the difference in skill level between them and the professionals on the tape may lead the church to opt for electronic music. This minimizes participation in worship by those in the church who are gifted for this very purpose.
In addition, the use of canned music has fostered a dangerous and unhealthy concept known as “special music.” This usually translates into a soloist or small ensemble who travel from church to church to minister. Since very little, in any, relationship may exist between the “special music” and the specific congregation, the selection of songs will probably neither blend with nor enhance the worship style of that church. The result is a “time out” for entertainment instead of participation in worship.
The use of outside groups to lure non-members into the church sometimes fosters competition among churches, with each one feeling pressure to keep up with others in its area and bring in a better or more widely-known traveling group to satisfy its own members and attract potential new ones. This emphasis further discourages the members of a local church in developing and offering their own gifts and musical abilities. Yet a foundational biblical principle of worship is that it is participatory.
Is Worship a Means to Accomplishing Something Else? In the fourth place, the consumer philosophy suggests a dangerous inversion of means and ends. According to the Bible, God’s people engage in worship because it is what he enjoys. Worship is the way in which we honor and adore our covenant Lord. This implies that worship is of value in and of itself. In other words, worship is an end. It is not primarily a tool for evangelizing or attracting visitors or for recruiting teachers for Sunday school or advisors for the youth group. Neither is it intended to motivate or manipulate people into increasing contributions to the church. Nor is it a means to challenge people to become more involved in social justice or any other legitimate dimension of the church.
These approaches all view worship as a means to accomplishing something else. The problem with this distorted approach is that if worship is essentially designed to recruit, evangelize, inspire stewardship, or for any other purpose, it will rarely reach the ultimate goal of focusing on God. On the other hand, worship which begins with the assumption that God is the first priority, and which is developed in a biblical and balanced manner, will not only glorify and lead people into God’s presence, but will also fulfill the secondary purposes of inspiring them to acts of devotion and service. Writing in the early part of this century, Willard Sperry observed: “Things which are ends in themselves move us far more profoundly than things which are simply means to other ends” (Reality in Worship [New York: MacMillan, 1925], 249). Worship structured around gimmicks and glitter will neither glorify God nor provide people with anything of integrity. When this approach is used, it results in a desire for the gifts and blessings of God rather than a seeking after God himself. In other words, it creates another example of consumerism in which persons attending church assume that they are in charge and can “have it their way.”
This is not to say that the market-driven approach to worship might not please a church initially. The pastor and other church leaders might be happy because the revamped worship style is attracting large numbers of visitors. The visitors and congregation might also be relieved that this method of worship requires less involvement and participation from them and is entertaining and therefore enjoyable.
However, on a deeper level we must ask how this philosophy of worship will shape the worshipers’ image of God and their response to the needs of our broken world. Another consideration is the effect it will have on the foundation and depth of the individual’s faith. Eugene Peterson examines the problem with characteristic wisdom when he writes: “The initial consequence is that leaders substitute image for substance, satisfying the customer temporarily, but only temporarily” (Under the Unpredictable Plant: An Exploration in Vocational Holiness [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992], 3). Worship which is not solidly grounded in substance often leaves people with a spiritual void that they attempt to fill by seeking more exciting worship experiences, often without success. This dissatisfaction might be avoided if Christians learned from worship that God is the Creator and we are his creatures, and not the reverse.
Are Some Parts of Worship Less Appealing Than Others? In the fifth place, the church should examine the idea inherent in consumer-driven worship philosophy that certain parts of the liturgy are more or less appealing than others. It is common to hear the unchurched criticize the church for collecting funds, because this practice threatens or irritates them. Certainly, the solicitation of money has sometimes been abused by various religious groups. Some churches may place an excessive emphasis on money or be guilty of poor stewardship of those resources entrusted to them. However, it might also be observed that other churches might overemphasize music or preaching or some other aspect of worship.
It is well known that any portion of a worship service can be used to draw a person into the presence of God and thus transform him or her. It is not uncommon for parishioners to comment that the prayer of confession, offering, benediction, moments of silence, or the use of a banner or other symbol brought to them a fresh and enhanced experience of God’s presence. Each worshiper is touched by a different aspect of the service which becomes for him or her the most significant one on that particular day. An individual’s personality and background play a role in differential response to different parts of the church service. Indeed, many debates that ignite fireworks and divide congregations originate in issues of personality preferences rather than in theology.
The Spiritual Cost of McEucharist. An American desire for efficiency is deeply embedded in the church-marketing ideology. A church which can produce a better, more exciting, and more entertaining worship service will draw more people and thereby become a success. But the Christian community must determine the eventual cost of streamlining worship in an attempt to make it more attractive. Gerald May comments on this issue when he writes: “By worshiping efficiency, the human race has achieved the highest level of efficiency in history, but how much have we grown in love?” (The Awakened Heart: Living Beyond Addiction [San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991], 10). Worship is ultimately a relationship of love in which we focus on and respond to God.
Unfortunately, the strongly pragmatic emphasis of the proponents of consumer-driven churches often obscures this relational component to worship. In fact, the persistent influence of pragmatism narrows the focus to simply what works. This so-called cost-efficient means of conducting worship tends in time to erode any sense of mystery and wonder in the presence of God. It creates instead a simplistic perception of God that categorizes life and provides easily defined answers to the issues and challenges of life which are often very complex.
Rather than concentrating on being culturally sensitive, the church should become sensitive to the formative power worship exercises over people. It should re-evaluate its idea of who constitutes the object of worship—the worshiper or God. It should abandon the attempt to rush God by skipping over what might be considered less attractive parts of the service in order to create a better performance. Let the church dedicate itself to discover anew the presence of God and to recognize that he alone is worthy of our worship.
Corruption of Worship by Aestheticism
Because worship reveals both the terrifying power of God and his awesome mystery, it cannot always be aesthetically pleasing. Worship is a rehearsal of God’s saving acts in history. Art and beauty may serve it, but must never dominate.
The next false gospel to be identified as threatening worship today can be described as the corruption of “aestheticism.” By “aestheticism” we mean the autonomy with which art insinuates its vision of reality into liturgy and takes captive the Christian substance of liturgy—the conscious or unconscious affirmation art commonly makes that the reality which Christianity names “God” is most authentically experienced as Beauty rather than as the Holy.
To reject the corruption of aestheticism in worship is not to deny the liturgical function of art. The cleft between much Protestant worship and art which prevailed until recently (and to which many congregations are still heir) was due largely to the failure to make this distinction. Rightly afraid of aestheticism, free-church Protestantism wrongly feared art. Human nature was misread, our rationality was overestimated, and our imaginative and sensuous life was underestimated. The human mind was mainly seen as a continuously working “idol factory”—in Calvin’s famous phrase—and the inescapability of symbols was not understood. The relation of the divine to the natural was distorted, and spirit was opposed to matter in an unbiblical dualism. Because much Protestant worship preferred to see reality opaquely rather than honestly, the shock of the human predicament which art could teach liturgy was prudishly declined. And falsely supposing that art would corrupt rather than enhance our passion for life, much Protestant worship clung to its Puritanisms and its pieties.
Now, however, the situation has largely changed, and Protestantism has, as it were, grown up into an awkward kind of artistic age. Having learned at great cost how art when exiled from man’s life at one place will reappear at another, free-church Protestantism has determined that the cleft shall be overcome. From a posture of revulsion, free churches have now moved to clasp art in such vigorous embrace that while the affinities between art and liturgy are affirmed, tensions are ignored. Driven to self-criticism by the growing sophistication of people, aware of the impact which art in its numerous forms—especially film—exerts in our mass media culture, and eager to reassert affinities which never should have been lost, free-church Protestantism has resolved that the varnished oak pulpit and bare-walled “sanctuary,” the clerical sack suit and flyspecked candlesticks, the gospel hymn and the Akron architecture, must go. For good or for ill, free-church congregations have largely abandoned their Puritan legacy in a kind of cultural adolescence and, athletically overreacting as good Protestants tend to do, have undertaken to “enrich worship”—to use their favorite term—that it may be made “aesthetically exciting.”
In the worship of certain free churches the fear of the Puritans has been vindicated: the god of Beauty has displaced the God of Christian revelation. The attributes of deity which Christian thought must insist upon—the personal character of God, his holiness, his active righteousness, his moral will, his judgment and mercy—are displaced by a vision of God as Beauty. The terror of God’s deeds in history is made to give way to his harmony and joy. The eschatological event of Jesus Christ “shattering the backbone of history”—in Chesterton’s famous phrase—is rendered into a tale of poetry and charm. “The God who acts” gives way to the God who smiles. Similarly, the person to whom such aestheticized worship is made to appeal is not the one whose soul needs redemption and whose will needs rescue; rather, it is the aesthetic individual whose sensibilities are to be titillated and whose imagination is to be intrigued. In this respect aestheticism has learned only too well from errors of the past. Persuaded that people are primarily symbolic animals, it addresses them as essentially creatures of feeling and imagination. It would engage our senses and shrive us with God’s beauty rather than confront our will and search with God’s holiness.
Predictably, the action of worship at its very core in turn becomes corrupted. Appreciation and impression become the proper response rather than decision. Contemplation is more fitting than commitment—“the aesthetic posture projected to cosmic ends.” In a metaphor of Gerhard van der Leeuw, the right liturgical response to the thunder and lightning of Sinai is to enjoy the glow of the landscape. Further, the moral character of worship often is bleached out. Because the worshiper’s aesthetic sensibilities are appealed to more than his or her conscience and will, we are not addressed in our moral predicament by a moral God. Our contrition is not evoked; our intercession on behalf of others is not claimed; and the ethical implications of worship for our life in the world are left unpronounced. Still further, the salvational nature of worship is corrupted into a kind of liturgical hedonism. The holy agony which Christian worship authentically is becomes narcotized with aesthetic pleasure. And not seldom the song of Pan is more prominent than the Kyrie eleison.
To be sure, when art authentically serves liturgy instead of taking liturgy captive for its own purposes, this need not happen; let us be clear on this point. If art will subordinate its vision of reality as Beauty to the Christian vision of God as the Holy; if art will address the worshiper not with pleasure but with that judgment and mercy that beget salvation; if art will let its love of the vitalities of existence be chastened with the paschal Life of the gospel, then aestheticism is no problem. But to ask of art these renunciations is probably to ask it to yield up that autonomy which is definitive for its existence. The bald truth is that art in a sense always threatens liturgy; and liturgy rightly looks on art with an incorrigible suspicion simply because the polar enemy of liturgy is idolatry.
Given the possibilities of aesthetic corruption, therefore, it is always dangerous to think and speak of worship as an “art,” of the planning and conduct of worship as the “art of worship,” and of forms of worship as “works of art.” Liturgical integrity is easily undermined by using the vocabulary of the aesthetic so substantively. One may perhaps speak in this fashion colloquially, but always at the risk of sacrificing theological to aesthetic canons. We do best to think and speak of art in relation to worship as an adjective, not as a noun. Let it always be remembered in this connection that historically the church has not undertaken to formulate liturgy primarily as a work of art. Its concern for liturgy has abundantly mothered artistic creation, yes; but from the primitive church to the present, the kērygma, the gospel, has exerted the controlling influence in the shaping of liturgy. Even in its eras of greatest artistic flowering, the church could be quite indifferent to the artistic propriety of its liturgical forms, and the outstanding contributions to the church’s liturgical life were made by men and women who were not first artists but people of faith, of theological concern and pastoral integrity who placed whatever talents they possessed at the service of the gospel.
Now let it be said that the God of the gauche may be nearer the true God than the God who smiles, and the one who gnashes his teeth may be nearer the kingdom of heaven than the one who only enjoys the biblical landscape. Further, liturgy on occasion will prefer the ugly to the beautiful as a less untruthful way of rendering the encounter between God and man, in order to declare both the terrifying power and fascinating mystery of that Holy One with whom human destiny is bound up. One mark of the Holy, it must always be remembered, is that it repels as well as attracts: it daunts as well as fascinates. And worship whose forms offend may more authentically enable us to meet God than worship which only gives pleasure.
The Problem of Form and Language
If worship is to impact the entire person, its forms and language must transcend words, engaging not only the worshiper’s body but also his or her emotions and imagination. These forms should be appropriate to the majesty of God, not so familiar as to be mundane nor so unfamiliar as to be irrelevant to the worshiper.
Worship needs to go beyond the verbal and engage the whole person in the praise of God. It is not commonly understood that we function as a multisensory and multiphasic creature, and that worship must therefore be multisensory and multiphasic—that its forms must engage the body, the imagination, and the emotions as well as the reason, and at the same time take into account something of the dynamics of the human subconscious as well as conscious life. The grip on our being which liturgical forms are entitled to exert, the evocative power they should convey, and the intensity of meaning they should embody—although always within the limits of theological purpose—are often missing. Hence the boredom has been called the curse of free-church worship. Too often liturgical language is only prose, one-dimensional, lame, unable to get at the depths of human nature.
Secondly, the language of worship is often inartistic and downright ugly. While we must be always wary against the seduction of liturgy into art for art’s sake, it must be recognized that people engage more readily in the dialogue of worship when its forms please their sensibilities while the same time remaining appropriate to the majesty of God.
A graver objection to forms employed in much Protestant worship today is not so much that they are weak or ugly as that they are unreal, and in a number of ways. For one thing, they are too strange or irrelevant to the actual life of the congregation to be real, or they are too familiar and too contemporary. Traditional forms inherited from the past, such as prayers offered in the sixteenth century language of the Tudors and Stuarts, for example, seem unreal simply because they are obsolete. We are unable to surmount their unreality simply because we do not talk or think today as the Stuarts did. Or hymn tunes cast in the semi-morbid nineteenth-century harmonies of a Lowell Mason seem inane to ears toughened to twentieth century atonality. On the other hand, forms too familiar and too modern can also fail to possess reality. Because little effort is required to grasp or be grasped by them, the worshiper is let off too cheaply and remains unengaged with any meanings other than those he or she already brings. We shall have to argue that forms which at first sight seem to offend by archaism often possess the power of the prototype to engage our deepest nature which familiar forms do not.
Areas of Challenge in Free-Church Worship
Worship renewalists of the free-church tradition face the difficult task of changing their congregations’ understanding of worship in a number of key areas. Unhealthy practices present a challenge for those who would restore a more biblical and historic perspective to the worship of these churches.
An unreasoned and faulty understanding of the nature and purpose of worship, combined with the influence of the culture in which we live, have produced a variety of unhealthy worship practices which are found most often in churches of the free-church tradition. These forms are often result in weak, dry, or boring worship services and fail to produce a vital encounter between the worshiper and God. This discussion deals with some of the problems to be found in the worship of many such churches.
Sermon-centeredness. The sermon has become the most important part of the worship service. Preaching and worship are not synonymous. A worship service is much more than believers gathering to listen to the pastor preach. Unfortunately, however, in many churches the focal point of the worship service is the proclamation event. When that is so, corporate worship suffers. Anything done before the sermon becomes only a preliminary. More than a few pastors, knowingly or unknowingly, promote this by ordering their service so that the sermon is center stage—the focal point of everyone’s attention.
Pastor Domination. Pastors do too much in the worship service. I see several reasons why this is so. First, it is the primary model that most pastors have seen. Many have grown up in small churches where the minister did everything. Second, some churches expect pastors to do all the ministry. Having little appreciation for the pastor’s call to equip servants for ministry, lay people often conclude: “That’s why we hired you—to minister.” Third, many pastors are insecure about releasing lay people for significant ministry. In some way it is perceived as a threat to their sense of worth or importance in the church.
We must go beyond pastor-centered ministry to body ministry. Nowhere is this more important than in the worship service. Lay involvement in worship can open the door to new power and excitement. And there are countless ways to mobilize people in the worship service.
Spectator Mentality. Attending a worship service is similar to attending the theater or a concert—it is a spectator event. This trend grows directly from domination by the pastor. The fewer people called on to participate, the more passive worship becomes. Those in the pews sit and watch as the person up front performs. They evaluate the service based on what they receive rather than on what they put into the experience.
Watching is commonplace in our society and comes easily to most of us. We are a generation of spectators who watch television, sports events—most everything. And this has affected our understanding of the worship service. It has become another place where we watch and where we expect to be entertained.
Predictability. Worship services have become overly predictable. There is little question but that we need both order and consistency in the worship service. Order helps the worshiper make sense of the experience. It keeps the service balanced and holistic. Consistency enables worshipers to feel comfortable in the service. They are familiar with what is happening; anxiety is eliminated. Nothing is worse than not knowing what comes next or what to do at a certain time.
But there is a negative side to order and consistency. When the order of worship is too predictable, worshipers can quickly lose interest. The service becomes more of the same old thing. When song, Scripture, sermon, and style are identical week after week, worship loses its excitement. There is little sense of expectation. People no longer wonder what new way God will lead them to experience His presence and power. Soon, worship becomes boring.
Traditionalism. Form and order in worship are often dictated purely by tradition. I am not advocating change for the sake of change. What I am encouraging is flexibility and mobility in form and order. Our worship services should certainly be sensitive to tradition but not completely determined by tradition. Forms of worship should not be institutionalized. Instead, they should be carefully designed, consistent with the moving of the Spirit in this day—at this time and place in history.
Irrelevance. What happens in worship is not always relevant to daily living. People will not embrace Christianity simply because our message is true. They want to see that our message is relevant. Does faith work in real life? Does Christianity affect daily living in contemporary society? Is what we express and confess on Sunday relevant to life on Monday? This principle is equally true of the Christian worship service. Not only should we seek to embrace the transcendent in worship, we should also relate to the temporal. Form, order, and message in worship should be relevant to the culture, language, and experience of daily living. Otherwise, people will not easily integrate the experience of worship with day-to-day life.
Lack of Encounter with God. People often do not encounter God in worship. This problem is by far the most devastating. Sunday after Sunday, people leave church without sensing the presence of God in worship. The entire experience becomes an exercise in human effort. Where and when this is true, people leave the service much as they entered. They are unchanged, uninspired, and unprepared to serve Christ in the marketplace of daily living.
Why do people not encounter God in worship? Many of the reasons we have already discussed. A dryness has settled over the corporate worship service. Instead of experiencing life-giving power, churches are suffering. Form and order are there, but services lack spiritual vitality and the dynamic presence of God. They are poorly planned, lacking serious preparation and prayer. Congregations have not been taught to worship nor instructed about the power of praise. Forms are often outdated, characterized by a dead traditionalism. Worst of all, many believers have accepted the power of God in theory but have rejected it in practice. Fearing wild fire, congregations have opted for no fire at all. As a result, worship lacks its most important and powerful element, God’s presence.
Areas of Challenge in Liturgical Worship
Renewal needs in liturgical churches include increased attention to planning and integrating all parts of the worship service, an understanding of the importance of music ministry, and greater participation by the congregation.
If worship in the liturgical church is to be a living encounter with God that changes the hearts and lives of the congregation, it will require more prayerful, creative planning than is usually assigned to it. Specifically, the three areas which need strengthening in most liturgical worship services merit our attention.
More Effective Preaching. Preaching should facilitate people’s prayer as a group. The use of the imagination, stories, and images are ways of bringing this about. The whole liturgy should preach or proclaim. After the environment, the music, and the other gestures of the liturgy have been planned, then the homily can be prepared. In that way it can fill in where the rest of the liturgy may fail. But how often is liturgical planning made equivalent to preparing the sermon?
Greater Integration of Word and Music. We must continue to look for styles of congregational singing that move the congregation away from books. The music of Taizé from France, highly repetitious but still very beautiful, is becoming increasingly popular because it can be employed with one’s hands free. Fuller use of responsorial singing should grow. The integration of liturgy and music, where the parts of the liturgy are not only sung but where the liturgy becomes a musical experience, will not succeed without music being accepted as an important ministry in the church. The restoration of the minister called cantor is, I believe, the single most necessary item for achieving a musical liturgy. A cantor is more than a song leader, a choir director, or the head of the folk group. The cantor performs a diaconal role, singing parts of the liturgy as well as leading the congregation. The cantor should be trained, commissioned, and vested. He or she should function publicly and be paid.
Enlargement of Sacramental Experience. The general principle that the priest should not do anything that others can do is a good working principle if it is properly understood. The priest should see himself or herself primarily as the one who motivates the others in ministry, not someone who has a special power others do not have.
In bringing about a more comprehensive sacramental life in the church, it is important to find out who is actually praying in the parish and then enlist them in forming communities. God saves people as individuals outside the church. In the church our salvation comes through community, a community which proclaims, however weakly, the value of the gospel.
The Need for Redefining Worship in Charismatic Churches
The charismatic movement has brought about a change in the worship in many traditional churches. Charismatics, in turn, are being influenced by traditional liturgical forms. Together, Christians of charismatic and liturgical traditions are discovering that biblical worship provides an answer to the epidemic of emptiness that plagues our generation.
Worship is being redefined in terms of its form and focus. It isn’t that valid traditions must be scorned or discarded, but that newness must refill them with meaning. It isn’t that the objective adoration of God is being traded off for a shallow subjectivism on the part of the worshiper. Rather, a simple, fulfilling intimacy is being discovered by more people as they praise the Lord.
Worship is being unwrapped in the removal of sectarian prejudices which have preempted interdenominational participation in biblical practices of worship heretofore labeled and shelved by feuding parties in the body of Christ. Upraised hands are less and less a badge of the charismatic and are becoming a simple sign of Christian praise. A learned appreciation for the dignity of liturgical life is increasingly finding a place among people who otherwise would have deemed it lifeless.
Worship is being unsealed as well. A theology of worship is coming into perspective that lends a biblical dimension to the whole reformation process. The lid of traditional theology is being lifted: worship is being proposed as a dignifying, empowering act for mankind.
An awakening to the power of worship to reinstate God’s divine intent for humanity can answer contemporary questions as to the human purpose. A drug-drunk, suicide-prone, binge-oriented generation lives on the ragged edge because it has become dissipated by its empty affluence of information, experience, and pleasure. In the midst of everything, so few have anything, and the questions recur again and again—“What are we here for? Why are things as they are?”
This is not an exaggeration of the problem with people today, and neither is it an exaggeration to say that worship holds the solution of their dilemma.