Thoughts on Worship at My Church, an “in-house” kind of thing…

The following is some thinking I did earlier this year on an issue we wrestle with at our church: worship that is inclusive and inviting and that covers different styles, tastes, generations, etc. Feel free to read if it is “one of those days.

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Worship at Christ Church

Some of us have been thinking for some time about our “win” for Sunday mornings. As I have been preaching and preparing for preaching about worship, this question has been at the back of my mind constantly.

I think the sermons I am working on are helping me see that win.

At the end of the day, the question we must ask ourselves about Sunday 11 a.m. are, did we work as hard as we could to create the conditions conducive to worship? In one sentence, I would say our win is to “facilitate worship that is guided by the criteria of focus, relationships, and quality where people have a genuine opportunity to worship God in spirit and in truth.”

So now let me unpack it all.

Focus:

Focus primarily refers to being fully present with God, with our ministry task, and with the community at “game time” (10:30 AM Sunday). Any number of things can distract our focus: insufficient preparation and practice of our task; family difficulties; confusion about what we are doing; worry about whether some people are going to do their jobs; insufficient time of quiet centering before God; the presence of unresolved fear, shame, or guilt; or operating in a role completely outside of my gifting.

There are a number of different ways to express “being focused.” The Bible calls it, “being still” inside. The Quakers called it “centering down.” Another tradition calls it, “taking your seat on the edge of the chaos.” I don’t really care what we call it, but when we show up, we should have already done what is needed to have a core of stillness (awareness, mindfulness, attention) in our being, our speaking, and our interrelating. I know what I am there to do. I am confident that it is what God wants. I am confident that others know what they are supposed to do, that they have prepared, and that they are also present.

Above all, we are striving to be in communion with God’s heart, so geared into him that every breath is an act of worship.

Relationships:

What is our worship supposed to be like? The most obvious New Testament criteria are that our worship is to be:

1. in spirit and in truth (John 4)
2. in love for God and in love for our neighbor (Matt 22:37-39)
3. conducive to carrying out the Great Commission (Matt 28:18-20)

We might add here that a pattern laid out by the early church is also considerable. Acts 2 describes how the church met together DAILY (not just on Sundays) to “devote themselves to the apostle’s teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayers.” While this verse doesn’t prescribe what we must do in our every common gathering, in certainly describes (and therefore strongly commends for our practice as well) the types of activities that characterized the early church.

In those commands and commendation I see a strong focus on honoring God, in worshipping with our whole being (spirit and truth), in taking into account our brothers and sisters, and in worshipping in such a way that invites people to become Christ followers.

So, our win? We win when we “old-timers”, the “newcomers”, and even the “non-comers” all have an environment where they can engage God in spirit and in truth. The criterion of our relationships poses a direct challenge to our public presence, our communication style, our music style, and even our entire litugical approach.

The experience of worship is so extremely subjective and individual that any given order and style that might lead some into a place where their head and heart are aflame with God’s glory might actually seem anti-Christian to others. One who glories in hymn-singing might cause another to scratch their head and say, “How can I worship God when all the notes are too high, the melodies are so weird, and the words so confusing?”

I am a bit of an odd bug because I love reflective silence and well-orchestrated hymns, as well as electric guitars and drums. However, there is no way that I could truly love my older brothers and sisters and at the same time insist that they worship in a way that has a bit more of a “charsimatic” and “modern” bent to it.

In societies where there are various options for worship, the problem is readily solved when people pick a congregation that “fits” their tastes. In the U.S. and Commonwealth nations English services run the entire gamut of styles and traditions. The same is true of Spanish language services here in Uruguay. We, however, being basically “the only game in town,” as far as English language worship goes, choose to stay in the “container” of Christ Church and to live with the tensions inherent when so many different worship cultures are present. Sadly, however, there are those in our community who, unwilling or unable to adapt to our older traditional worship, have remained out of fellowship, and to their and our loss, they languish spiritually. Additionally, we could also be selling ourselves and our Lord short in terms of reaching the lost because of worshipping in ways that speak an incommunicable tongue to the unchurched English-speaking community around us.

So, because God has not give us a set liturgy or specific instructions on how to carry out a worship service, we look to the principles of our relationships—relationships of love with God, with each other, and with those who potentially will become new Christ followers—in order to guide our choice of liturgy and style. What this leaves us with is a vast amount of freedom and the burden of making good choices.

We have then, several options of how to choose an appropriate liturgy:

1. Go with the way it has always been done, do it as good as we can, and acculturate newcomers into the Christ Church “culture of worship” (assuming we can identify a “Christ Church culture of worship”).
   
   
2. We can try to find a “middle ground” where we blend “contemporary” worship with traditional worship (hymns led by piano or organ, sung from the hymnal). This has seemed to be what we have done in the past, but sometimes feels like more or a “lose-lose” proposition than a “win-win” proposition.
   
   
   1. One brother and sister used to come early and do praise choruses before the traditional service (and those praise choruses themselves were arguably “traditional” and “out-dated” by some modes of considering them). The drawback here was that it was perceived by some as divisive. Why do something “outside” of the worship hour if it really does help others to worship?
      
   2. We have also integrated worship choruses into the traditional liturgy by printing lyrics in the bulletin or projecting them onto a screen. However, this also causes disruption for “traditionalists” in that the songs are unknown, the words sometimes unreadable, and without any written musical notes, there is no guide to sing by. The “contemporists” are also unsatisfied as they are more accustomed to a pre-arranged block of songs that flow melodically and thematically and that devote more uninterrupted time to “abide” in the presence of God while singing.
      
      
3. We can do the option of alternating “contemporary services” on some weeks and “traditional services” on others.
   
   
4. We could add a second service, allowing one to be fully traditional and the other to be fully contemporary, applying to same “relationship principles” above to determine which time slot we allot to which service.
   
   
5. We could do the hard work of creating a new worship culture. Rather than trying to “compromise” on combinations which disrupt worship for either “traditionalists” or “contemporists,” we could form a diverse committee to pray, dialogue, experiment and grow into a new way of doing worship altogether.Rather than seeking a “middle ground” between styles, we could seek a “third way”, a way which is at present unknown and unexperienced by any of us. This way first and foremost takes into account the fundamental New Testament worship directives (love God, love one another, make disciples) as guidelines. And then we begin, in prayer, and under direction of the Holy Spirit and the truth of the Scriptures, to dialogue among ourselves and among those potential disciples and to come up with some new approaches.

   These approaches seek will seek to:

   1. honor God
   2. create environments where the majority of attenders can worship God with their hearts and their heads (“in spirit and in truth”)
   3. honor the traditions and “worship cultures” of older generations (including the “worship cultures” of the Church throughout its history).
   4. honor the traditions and “worship cultures” of younger generations.
   5. invite and encourage newcomers (including youth, children, and Christian and non-Christian visitors from abroad or from nearby) to participate in worship.
   6. enable gifted and talented Christ-followers to use their gifts for the encouragement of the body.

It’s not hard to guess which of these approaches I like best, even though it might be said that I am a glutton for hard work!

A Couple Other Principles

There are a couple other New Testament principles to guide us in shaping our common worship. They are: 1.) deference to the weaker brother and 2.) deference to the potential Christ-follower.

Romans 14 makes it clear that love for one another, rather than Law, is what shapes our common life. If something I do puts an impedance between a weaker brother or sister and God, than I am sinning against God and my brother. Paul says, “Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters” (Romans 14:1) and “make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother’s way” (Romans 14:13). The immediate context refers to foods considered “clean” and “unclean”, but nonetheless shows us that in all things, out of love, I will show deference to the weaker brother or sister.

Additionally, Paul makes clear in his ministry to non-Jews that he is compelled to adapt his lifestyle and his ways to those He desires to reach in order that they might be compelled to follow after Christ:

“Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I become like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law… To those knot having the law (though I am not free from God’s law, but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.” 1 Cor 9:19-23

We as believers will go to great lengths and sacrifice, all the while maintaining ourselves under Christ’s law of love, in order to minister to and win non-Christians to become followers of Christ.

In summary, because we are given no direct commands in the New Testament for the formation of liturgy, we must base our decisions on Christ’s teachings that deal with our relationships: our relationship with God; our relationships with each other in the “household of faith”; and our relationships with those who are on the road of becoming disciples of Christ. This implies a great deal of communication and regular reconsideration of how we are ordering our common worship (incidentally, one can easily look ahead twenty to thirty years when our seemingly “raucous” worship choruses are being billed as “outdated and irrelevant and hard to sing”; and then the whole conversation must begin again).

But it is not just focused leadership and right relationships that lead to great worship. It is also an appropriate focus on quality.

Quality

The last criterion to determine a “win” for our Sunday morning worship is that of quality. The Scriptures are quite clear on this note:

“Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.” (ecclesiasties 8:10)
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might.” (Matt 22:37)

“Whatever you do, do all for the glory of God.” (1 Corintians)

“Then men shall see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5)

“Do not give up doing good, because in due time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.” (Galatians 6) “Be ye perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matthew 4)

“I will not sacrifice that which costs me nothing.” (1 Sam 24?

We could go on and on, but the testimony of Scripture as well as the testimony of our own hearts shout the obvious truth: quality honors God and inspires humankind.

I don’t have to like classical music to be moved to tears when Bach’s passion chorale is played with quality. At the same time, my stomach can be quickly soured when my favorite music is played by unskilled and unpracticed musicians.

In fact, I would suggest that half of our common worship tensions could be resolved by merely addressing the question of quality. Regular times of beginning and ending; confident and clear moving and speaking; well-rehearsed instrumentation and on-key vocalization. All these are factors related to quality and not style.

But am I being too perfectionistic?

My answer is no. I intentionally chose the word “quality” over “excellence” or “perfection.” In the Old Testament God made it patently clear to us all that His standards are nothing short of perfection. He also made it patently clear that we His children are unable apart from grace to achieve perfection or to live in perfection. In the New Testament, He made it perfectly clear that Christ is the achievement of our perfection, both moral and otherwise.

The New Testament holds out perfection to both inspire us as well as to push us to depend wholly on Christ. We would expect no less from our preachers, our leaders, and our musicians and vocalists. We believe that talent and skill and gifting come from God, and so we would seek out those whose gifts can best facilitate worship. And we will also provide a culture of learning, growing, practicing, and improving while at the same time honoring God’s commandments to love and honor one another.

En fin.

We have been considering for some time now how we know we have done what God wants us to do for our Sunday morning service. We and others talk about that as “the win” for that particular environment. How do we know what “the win” is? In praying, reflecting, studying, and preaching about worship, I think I’m stumbling into neighborhood of the answer.

Our win is focused worship led by focused people, that takes into account our love relationships with God, with one another, and with the pre-Christian community, done in a quality manner so that those present have a genuine opportunity to worship God in spirit and in truth.

So how do we get there? I propose that we form a diverse committee (new believers, older members, younger members, ex-patriates, Uruguayans, non-attenders, male and female, elderly and young, new believers/seasoned believers/potential believers/internationals/locals) of interested persons to study worship, to reflect on our current and future realities, to lead us into new and/or renewed practices which will help this become a reality in Christ Church.