What I Write About

I write about the infinite number of intersections between every day life and the good news of the God who has come to get us.

Thursday, June 08, 2006

Corporate Worship is not FYE

There's a chain of stores that sells music, movies, and video games called FYE: For Your Entertainment.

For the record, corporate worship is emphatically not FYE.

Corporate worship as FYE conversations often sound something like this:

"I didn't get much out of church today."
"I hated the songs that they picked for worship."
"I'm not sure that I'm getting fed here any more."

I hereby ashamedly admit that I have been known to make such statements as
these. Let me invite you to repent along with me. Because nearly every
part of our culture treats us as consumers, we begin to imbibe this attitude
about ourselves--and about our involvement in our Christian communities. We
begin to consume worship experiences, churches, communities--we want plenty
of selection, excellent customer service, and always low prices. Always.

Corporate worship is not FYE. Corporate worship is a spiritual discipline. Like prayer. Like Scripture reading. Like fasting. Like giving money.

Like all of the spiritual disciplines, corporate worship is a part of
building our greenhouse. A greenhouse does not make anything grow, it
simply creates conditions that are favorable for growth. This is what we
are doing when we take on various spiritual disciplines: we are greenhousing
our souls. If we stop attending corporate worship, we put a significant
hole in our own greenhouse and stunt our own growth.

Like all of the spiritual disciplines there will times, seasons, and periods
of our lives where we feel as though we are getting something tangible and
clear out of it. And there will be other times, just like all of our
disciplines, that we feel we are not getting much out of it at all. Most of
the time when we are not getting anything out of the worship experience,
it's not any one's fault. It just is. The rest of the time it's usually
our fault for not entering into the worship experience. And very
occasionally something happens where those leading us into worship have
failed to serve faithfully as worship leaders.

One synonym for worship is liturgy. Liturgy is literally 'the work of the
people.' We are not the consumers, the people up-front are not the
performance. We have work to do. Worship is our work, not the work of
those who are leading us into that work.

Obviously within all of this there is room for those who are leading us into
worship to grow in their gifts, to lead us excellently and well. And
clearly there are also ways that those leading us could be unfaithful to
their task--preaching heresy, inviting us to pray to our inner-child,
whatever.

But barring inner-child prayer and assuming we are in a place that is
honestly and earnestly inviting us into the presence of the Again-Maker who
is Lord over all the cosmos, it is time for us to put away the consumer
attitude and learn the skills involved in genuinely doing the work of the
people, the work that God has invited us to enter into in worship.

2 comments:

Jason Murray said...

Thanks for calling us to repentance yet again, Alex. I, too, am guilty of said statements regarding worship and it's no easy thing to remember that worship is about God in our self-centered society, individualistic society.

The consumer mentality really takes they joy out of worship, too. We might feel good because we like the songs and the music, but we miss the big picture. We want to be passive and let God do all the work in worship (and everywhere esle in our lives) and we miss out on the joy that can be shared with God when we set our hearts and minds upon Him.

Alex said...

Thanks Jason and Jon...and Jon, you're asking some great questions! I'm not a worship-leader guy, but that certainly doesn't stop me from having lots of half-baked thoughts, here they are...

If I were writing this post for a group of worship leaders (rather than those who generally are being led) than I would take different spin on it, and it would be similar to what Joe talked about at camp. To put it in slightly different terms, we must be both incarnational and transformational in all that we do, including worship. Jesus was doing this all the time. He meets people right where they are and then calls them to something deeper, harder, greater, better.

This is the worship leaders' job as well. Meet people where they are, knowing that they're expectations are generally warped or off to some degree (this was certainly true of Jesus!) and then educate them, teach them, lead them, challenge them. If all we do is incarnate--that is, if all we do is give people what they want--we have done a disservice to the people God has called us to lead. On the other hand, if we try to just be transformational apart from building trust and meeting people where they are at, it generally gets us no where.

In a worship setting, I definitely agree with one of my mentors that "Excellence honors God and inspires people." Some of this can get consumer-ish, but it doesn't necessarily have to. So do worship well, do it excellently. This meets people in their desire to have a 'quality experience.' But then call them to work. Press them deeper: multi-ethnic worship styles, old liturgies, old hymns, experiment with different forms of prayer, etc.