Taking responsibility for our worship

What is worship? Why do we worship? How do we worship?

These are questions that we should ask and should attempt to answer. Worship is the work of the church, and we ought not give it less attention than it deserves. Worship of the Almighty God is a mystery, and though we’re afraid of spoiling the surprise, if we dare to discuss it we will discover that the mystery runs faster than we can chase it. It is impossible to catch, and as we get closer to it, we find that not only is it elusive, it is much bigger than us. The task of understanding worship looms over us, and perhaps because it is so daunting, we do our best to stay out of its shadow. We choose a few folks who are brave (or naïve) enough to engage worship on our behalf, and we tell them, “Go find worship. Search for it, but only search as we would, because we are the ones who have sent you. And if you happen to get a glimpse of worship, write us a description (less than fifty pages, please) that will make us feel like we have encountered it ourselves without leaving our sanctuary.”

I am one who has been sent, and though I have confronted it, I am no expert on worship. I have not studied enough to call myself a scholar; I don’t sing well enough to call myself a musician; I can’t rhyme well enough to be a poet; and I’m not old enough to really be a leader. What I can do, though, is ask the questions. And I’ve even grown brave enough to venture a few answers. My answers are punctuated by what look more like question marks than exclamation points. Nevertheless, here I am writing about worship or, rather, joining the conversation. I share my thoughts with the hope that others will share theirs.

The discussion of what worship is and how we do it is not a new one. We join in an ongoing discussion as old as the church itself. We could trace the conversation back hundreds of years, but for the sake of time, let’s just step back a bit into our own history.

Nineteenth-century Baptists in America found themselves in the midst of a revival movement. Prompted by the Holy Spirit, believers and non-believers came together to sing, and to hear passionate preaching about the powers of hell and the grace of God that saves us from it. Revival services came to a climax with an altar call and hymn of repentance or dedication, a habit that we continue today. We learned from Revivalism that worship is evangelism, and if we worship well, people will be converted. Even today we feel a twinge of shame if our services do not include new people who respond to our altar call.

Fast-forward a bit to the glory days of the Southern Baptist Sunday School Board and its Church Music Department. Many great people did remarkable work under the leadership of men such as B. B. McKinney, and the Department churned out numerous music publications. The Broadman Hymnal, edited under the supervision of McKinney, became one of the best-selling hymnals of all time. Music ministers attended the glorious Music Week conferences at Glorietta and Ridgecrest, implementing (sometimes with too much haste) what they experienced at the retreats. During this Golden Age of Baptist church music, church choirs flourished. With a little training and a healthy dose of enthusiasm, select members of the congregation could sing the musical parts the rest of the folks couldn’t. Composers began writing anthems to showcase the talent of the choir, and we learned that worship means to be still and listen to the talented group in the loft up front.

The choir sang their songs, and the silenced congregation learned to listen. Along about 1970 somebody noticed the young folks were having more fun outside of church, and decided music was the key. Put a guy with a guitar on the platform, giving the organist a break, and the teenagers would stay in the service. The older generations tolerated the longhaired guitarist’s ‘feel-good’ songs about Jesus and me in order to keep the front pews occupied. (We should note that themes of the late-1800s gospel songs were not so different from those of the late-1900s praise choruses, but we should also note that Fanny Crosby put the Jesus-and-me message in better poetic form.) As the youth joined in the longhaired guitarist’s ‘new’ music, we learned that worship is tolerating other people’s music as long as they will tolerate ours. The sound guy panicked, and the congregation watched as the guitarist shared the platform with the choir and waited for their turn to enjoy the music up front.

Sometime during the 1990s somebody noticed that the concert stage had expanded beyond the solo folk musician to include an entire band, complete with two guitars, a bass, a keyboard, five singers, and (gulp) a drum set. And once again, the young people were enjoying themselves more in the concert venue than in the sanctuary. Our guitarist (whose long hair had subtly turned from blonde to white) began to pale in comparison, so the church expanded its platform, calling it a ‘stage,’ and moved the solo guitarist to the back with the choir. He stayed there, featured occasionally so the hippie generation (now middle-aged) would still attend services. The real band (dubbed the Praise Team) took the stage and the sound guy finally got to crank up the music in order to drown out the congregation. Why would we want to hear each other anyway when the folks up front sound good enough to be on the radio? Besides, worship is a lifestyle that happens inwardly, so only I know if I’m really worshiping. (This is one of the most holy excuses I’ve heard for not participating.) The Praise Team became the outward expression of the church’s private individualism. With the church’s only ‘real’ musicians on the stage, we learned that as long as the people we hired take care of our worship, we can just sit back and listen (or at least turn down our hearing aids).

And so presently we find the church in a precarious position. If we ignore the world outside of North America and Europe, as we are adept at doing, we find that the church is losing its members almost as quickly as it is losing its reputation. As if in a nightmare, we are discovering that hiring a young music minister, along with his or her trendy new tunes, no longer keeps bodies in the pews. It seems there are two sides to the church music coin, and the divisive side now comes up as frequently as the unifying side. Rather than continuing to work on what’s been done and done again, we have moved worship to the back burner while we look for new ways to do discipleship and evangelism. Our culture is certainly not moving toward Christ, so if we make Christ look like the culture, maybe we can fool God and ourselves into thinking we are good and faithful servants.

Besides, it’s not really our responsibility anyway—the work of worship has been delegated to scholars, musicians, poets, and denominational leaders: Scholars because they read the books we don’t care to open; musicians because they can sing the songs we cannot sing (or the songs nobody should sing because they are such bad art); poets because they write the words we don’t want to get in trouble for saying; and denominational leaders because they are naïve enough to take the fall for our mistakes.

Just imagine what would happen if we took responsibility for our worship and asked the questions “what is worship” and “why and how do we do it”. The people we don’t want to be in charge would lose the power we don’t want them to have. Congregants would not only have something to do in worship; they would have everything to do in worship. Their offerings would no longer fit in those little envelopes, but would fill the entire sanctuary. And who knows, some of our worship may even go with us outside the church doors, making its way into the culture that Christ died to redeem. In short, by taking responsibility for its worship, the church would become the Church.

We ask you, Christ, who did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance, to be ever present in our discussion. Redeem our squabbles to fruitful conversations. Redeem our selfish thoughts to contemplations of you. Eliminate our divisions so that ‘theirs and mine’ becomes ‘ours’. Holy Spirit, guide us to boldly ask ‘what, why, and how,’ and lead us into humble courage as we attempt an answer. Amen.