worship

Since my upcoming thoughts are rooted entirely in my theology of worship, I should start by providing some background on what I believe is going on in worship. Trying to keep it brief, when we gather as a community, we gather so God can act graciously and we can respond.

So, God acts by showing up, we respond. God acts by announcing forgiveness, we respond. God acts by speaking to us in his Word, we respond. God acts by giving us the body and blood, we respond. God acts by blessing us in the benediction (and hopefully we respond in our lives when we leave the church building).

Now, as I've planned various alternative worship of services with this general understanding of worship, I've always leaned towards having a single narrative that was aimed at telling this story of God's action and our response ... although, most of the time, that also demands a pre-story to point out why God has to act. So, when I plan, the music, the Scripture readings, the preaching, and everything else all weave together into a single story, so, when I saw this approach, I freaked a bit, because there is no way for the music to faithfully point into our out of the preaching portion of the worship narrative because they've been divided and the story is now broken up.

However, then I began to think about the traditional Lutheran liturgical setting where this pattern of acting and responding happens repeatedly, or, in the case of this unconventional idea, it could happen twice, once in preaching and once in music. What do you think, given my theology of worship, could that be a functional approach to something like this?

Special thanks to Paul McCain and Gene Veith for linking me to this fantastic article on evangelistic worship by Sally Morgenthaler.

For those of you who don't know Morgenthaler, she literally wrote the book on evangelistic worship (it's titled, "Worship Evangelism"). However, she's now changed her tune, stopped teaching seminars, and disbanded her website on the topic. Why? Because she's discovered that it doesn't work. To quote her:

For all the money, time, and effort we've spent on cultural relevance - and that includes culturally relevant worship - it seems we came through the last 15 years with a significant net loss in churchgoers, proliferation of megachurches and all.

So, how do you have megachurches growing at dizzying rates and still witnessing a net loss of churchgoers? Most of those growing churches have perfected the art of giving Christians exactly what they're looking for and, as a result, Christians transfer their membership to whoever has the latest and greatest services (much like people who became AT&T customers because of the iPhone).

Now, most of these churches don't realize that this is what's happening, for example, Morgenthaler survey one congregation that believe 50% of their growth had come from the unchurched in their area. The actual number was 3%. These people already had a church, the one down the street just offered ________ (take your pick from better music, a hipper environment, more singles to meet, better childcare, etc.). In the end, their church growth methods grew their congregation, but not the Church.

What really saddens me is that many of these congregations have been dubbed "mission churches" and are seen as the model of how to successfully plant a church. I think "attraction churches" is a far better title, after all, the Latin root for attraction means "to draw" while the root for mission means "send".

So, where do we go from here? It seems the answer is to stop attracting our own and start sending those we do have. In other words, stop being attractional and start being missional. Or, as Morgenthaler put on the holder place to her closed website:

As culture has become incessantly more spiritual and adamantly less religious, we at Sacramentis have become convinced that the primary meeting place with our unchurched friends is now outside the church building.

A number of years ago I remember a comment made on the RE-YourLife discussion board by Bobby C in response to the movie, The Passion of the Christ. He made the observation that the deep emotional response that the came with watching the movie was as much a result of the extreme violence as it was the power of the story itself. To defend his point, he referenced the effect that watching a horror can have on the body.

So, why do I bring this up? I had a similar experience last night.

Anita was given tickets to the Rockies and Yankees game for Christmas. So last night Anita and I sat out in left field of Coors Field looking at the backs of Derek Jeter and A-Rod. Even as a non-baseball guy I can say that it was a great game and it was exciting to see the perpetually disappointing and rebuilding Rockies knock off the historic Yankees 3-1.

After the victory, the home crowd was ecstatic and the crowd around us chanted, "Let's go Rockies!" as we made our way out of the park. The joy of being on the side of the winning team even had me excited about the now two games over 500 Rockies and, had I not gone to the game with a Yankees fan, I very well could have joined in the taunting or just stepped to the side and basked in the glow of victory. It was a truly inspirational moment.

Then I thought, "That's interesting, the adrenaline rush and the general joy of this frenzy feels exactly the same as a powerful 'worship experience'." Maybe it's a really uplifting song or the emotion in a gifted singers voice or the need to respond to a particularly powerful message. What's more, I've met and talked with many worship band leaders who will work the flow of a service specifically for the purpose of generating this kind of emotional response.

The problem, beyond emotional manipulation in the name of Jesus, is that many people I've talked to over the years mistake this emotional feeling to be genuine faith and assume that, as long as the feeling is there, faith is there. However, when the feeling is gone, they assume that God has abandoned them. In the end they essentially become addicted to that feeling and pursue it like a drug, hopping from church to church whenever they don't "feel the Spirit" anymore. In the end, many of them are no different than an alcoholic or drug addict ... they've just got church language to talk about their idol.

In the end, it breaks my heart because I see people God loves suffering because they've been pointed towards something less than what God has in store for them. I pray that preachers, worship leaders, and fellow Christians would learn to point people not to a feeling, an intellectual ascent, or some other internal source, but to Jesus and his work and promises for them.