Uncomfortable worship

Posted by admin on Nov 2, 2006 in Issues & Ideas | 0 comments

I watched my home church in Los Angeles go from a couple hundred attendees on a regular Sunday to a couple thousand because word got out that the praise band was rockin’. Then I watched the very well-attended, energy-filled youth group at the Malibu Vineyard Church fade after the praise band (who later became Lifehouse) moved on to bigger things.

After the band left, I watched a bumbling student-led worship project deteriorate as the organizers struggled to kill time. One of the outcomes of this project was the un-imaginative praise song, “Thank You for Hearing Me,” which is composed wholly of those five words, with a new word replacing “hearing” in each verse.

And here at Trinity Western University, I see Friday praise chapel fill up more than any other chapel during the week.

My understanding is that worship is a state of mind. Christians are called to worship at all times of the day. All our actions should be an act of worship. It seems too limiting and incomplete to place worship into a time slot before a sermon, or into it’s own special time off to the side where it can be enjoyed without the interference of a sermon.

But the most disappointing thing about worship today is that worship music has become an anti-intellectual cultural expression. I am not suggesting that there was a golden age of worship where everyone got it right; however, there was a time when one of the purposes of worship music was to convey theological truths. These truths were acknowledged by everyone, whereas modern worship is largely about personal expression.

This begs certain questions: can you worship God well in a setting that isn’t lead by acoustic guitar? And what constitutes worshiping God well? Isn’t worship an act with no self-focus at all? Isn’t the only human involvement in worship the act of surrender to God?

It shouldn’t matter how a person feels after worshipping. But I would be interested to see how many people would show up to contemporary rock worship service if it made everyone feel the suffering that Christ endured for humanity, instead of the euphoric buzz of the Spirit.

Reading Kurt Vonnegut or debating theology with my professors is my preferred form of worship. Both activities force me to question my faith, and even doubt it. Vonnegut challenges my faith like few people ever have, but that’s why I read him. Reading Cat’s Cradle was one of the most difficult challenges my faith has ever faced and I felt depressed afterward.

But that’s when I’ve found worship to be at it’s best. It’s in times of challenge that I cannot help but focus on God; my mind won’t let me deviate from that stream of consciousness. In such a state of confusion and complication everything else becomes unimportant and gets tuned out. I experience the very opposite of when I’m listening to a sermon and my mind wanders to what happened yesterday, or when clap coordination during a worship song becomes more important than the purpose of the song.

My purpose is not to discourage people from going to praise chapel, or to incite the masses to throw out their Christian rock records. Rather, it is to gain greater insight into what I think worship is all about. But I have learned not to judge a worship experience by how it makes me feel. I would encourage everyone to go out, get offended, and fight the urge to feel comfortable – find something that puts you in such conflict that you can’t help but to focus on God, because that is where the heart of worship lies.