Tag Archive - Relevance

Self-Centered Worship?

November 16, 2009 in Emerging Church, Lutheran Church, Worship with 6 Comments

I’ve been thinking a LOT lately about worship services and I’m admittedly uneducated about the whole topic. In a way though, I’m sort of glad I’m uneducated about it. When I talk to other people who are perhaps more educated on the topic (pastors, church leaders, etc.), I get the impression that the education has tainted their impression of worship services. They’re so integrated with the services they’re a part of that they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a church visitor, looking for a church and a worship experience that is appealing.

Yeah, I said it. I used the word “appealing” in the context of worship.

I bet some people just stopped reading.

I typically get a lot of backlash when I use words like “appealing” to describe worship services. Usually the argument is something like this: “Looking for an ‘appealing’ worship service is a self-centered approach and worship is supposed to be God-centered.” My problem with this argument is that while a worship service may be created as a God-centric time, the choices made while designing the service are based on human appeal and preference.

Let me describe what I mean. Some churches I’ve been to have fancy (ostentatious?) lecterns or pulpits from which readings and preaching take place. Other churches have little to no supporting “props” to support such activities. One extremely large and very local church (it’s maybe a mile from where my wife and I live) typically has just a simple stool and a small table where the pastor is able to lay his Bible down while he’s preaching. Is either approach more “God-centric”? Is either more worshipful? What drove the decisions to choose such decor?

Another example is music. The church I mention above uses loud, energetic, contemporary worship songs complete with drums, electric guitars, huge projection screens, moving lights, etc. Other churches use pipe organs and choirs. Which is more “God-centric”?

Yet another example is language. Some churches employ flowery or archaic words when they craft (yes, craft) their prayers or select their opening call and response texts. Others use simpler or more modern (more straightforward?) language.

Is an organ holier than drums?

Is a robe more Godly than jeans and a t-shirt?

What role do personal preferences play in designing a worship service? How much do the personal preferences of church leadership and members influence a typical worship service? If personal preferences drive the choices we make when we design a service, does this make our services self-centered?

Perplexity From The Puplit

October 20, 2009 in Emerging Church, Lutheran Church, Thelology with 0 Comments

(Thanks to @somelutheranguy for sharing this with me!)

It’s like 5 minutes of your time. Just watch it already! :)

This is fantastic:

Part of it is making the pulpit a place where perplexity, where doubt is spoken and shared in the community. Where we really face darkness together, where we really stare down darkness in the thickness of life. [...] I think part of the reason younger populations of people don’t hear much in preaching is because they don’t hear anything that’s at stake and there’s no one that seems to, in this moment, bare reality.

I find myself thinking a lot about relevance and what it means to be relevant. Specifically, what it means for a church to be relevant. There have been a few blog posts over the last couple of weeks to address what young people are looking for from a church. Obviously, items like modern worship made the list. But oddly enough, theology seemed to play an important role. Young people seem to crave not just cultural or generational relevance, but theological relevance.

I find what Andy Root says here to be quite significant. How often do you hear real perplexity or doubt or darkness shared from the pulpit? These are things that are plaguing young people on a daily basis, and yet are often missing from the sermons of many pastors and preachers.

One word that keeps getting lodged in my head is accessibility. Today’s young people are amazingly accessible. They’re on Twitter and Facebook and blogs. They’re used to sharing openly and they expect such openness from others. Consider this from a 2004 article on the subject of the online disinhibition effect:

It’s well known that people say and do things in cyberspace that they wouldn’t ordinarily say or do in the face-to-face world. They loosen up, feel more uninhibited, express themselves more openly. Researchers call this the “disinhibition effect.” [...] Sometimes people share very personal things about themselves. They reveal secret emotions, fears, wishes. Or they show unusual acts of kindness and generosity.

This new generation is comfortable online. As a result, they’re more open and accessible than any generation before them. How open are we, as a church? How open are we when we preach Christ? Are we tackling real issues head-on? Are we embracing perplexity from the pulpit? Are we facing the doubt and the darkness?

Are we speaking out of the thickness of life?

Liturgy: Beauty and Beast

July 2, 2009 in Lutheran Church, Music with 17 Comments

Not long ago, I attended a contemporary worship leader conference with some big names in modern worship. Matt Maher was one of the key participants. For those who don’t know, Matt Maher is best known as the author of the song Your Grace is Enough. This song is played in modern worship settings in countless churches every week. I just checked, and Christian Copyright Licensing International (CCLI) lists it at #13 in their CCLI Top 100. If you tune to a Christian radio station, give it maybe 20 minutes, and I bet you’ll hear it. Especially if your Christian radio station is as repetitive as mine…

I only say this to establish this fact:  in terms of modern worship, Matt Maher is A Big Deal.

That being said, Matt Maher is also Catholic. I’ve always found this to be amazing. I’ve been leading groups with this song since its release and when I heard he was Catholic, I was somewhat amazed. Here’s a snippet of his lyrics:

Great is Your faithfulness O God of Jacob
You wrestle with the sinner’s restless heart
You lead me by still waters into mercy
Where nothing can keep us apart

So remember Your people
Remember Your children
Remember Your promise O God

For Your grace is enough
Yeah Your grace is enough
Yeah Your grace is enough
Yeah Your grace is enough for me

Now, his Catholic background amazes me for a couple of reasons. One, quite simply, is theology, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

The other is that he’s written a driving, pulsing, lively worship song that is embraced by churches across the denominational spectrum… and he’s done it all while being a part of a church steeped in age-old traditions and rituals… and organs. Such a dichotomy.

Maher is also interesting because he’s brilliant. Seriously, brilliant. A small group of conference attendees (perhaps a dozen of us were in the room) sat and listened to him talk for a couple of hours one day. I’m not sure I saw him breathe at all. The man has an amazing memory. Combine this with unique insight and wit and you’ve got someone that I can listen to for a while.

What was he talking about for 2 hours? Liturgy.

Completely off the cuff.

With no notes.

At all.

I thought the talk was going to be about meshing modern worship with traditional churches, at least that’s what I was hoping for. He never got to that topic (which he apologized for later). Instead, he walked us through the entire church calendar of the Catholic church, a calendar almost identical to that of the Lutheran church. And through this odd, lively Catholic, I found an appreciation for liturgy.

Maher addressed the fact that many “modern” churches are attempting to throw off “old” traditions in order to meet new generations where they are. His opinion seemed to be that while this approach may be successful in the short-term, these churches ultimately end up either bringing back some elements of these traditions later on or simply creating new ones that seem very similar to the old ones. He seemed to be saying that if you’re just going to come back to the same traditions you threw off, why throw them off to begin with?

He began to discuss the liturgical calendar of the church as an example of this, but I don’t think he ever got around to tying it back to his original point. Primarily because he was so clearly passionate about the liturgical calendar, that he distracted himself right out of the original topic of the discussion. And none of us seemed to mind…

Maher understood the liturgical calendar so well that he saw beauty in it. The liturgy follows the life of Christ from birth to ministry to death to resurrection and the descending of the Holy Spirit. It gives the church a way to ensure nothing gets missed, as the entire life of Christ is important to the walk of a Christian. Maher stepped through this calendar section by section, from memory, and with a passion that was contagious. Through him, I began to see the beauty in it as well.

While I can definitely see a beauty now in the liturgy, it still prompts some questions from me. The biggest question I have on this is:  how can the church ensure contextual relevance if it is locked into a set path through the scriptures? In non-liturgical churches, pastors discern the needs of the congregations in their care and select scriptures and teachings appropriate for those needs. But in a liturgical setting, the scriptures have already been selected. Wanna’ know what the sermon is for this week? It’s Mark 6:1-13. Wanna’ know next week’s? And the weeks after that? It’s all mapped out. We’ve got it all covered. Some Lutheran pastors, I’ve noticed, force themselves to “lock in” with the liturgical calendar and won’t stray from it. So while the church may have a need to hear a certain scripture or a certain topic addressed by the pastor, they may not be able to get it since the pre-selected scripture for that week has already been determined. Or worse still, a pastor may discern the need correctly and attempt to force the pre-selected scripture to fit an application that is out of place. These square-peg-round-hole sermons are immediately noticeable.

So while I see that a non-liturgical church can miss some important aspects in the scriptures as they strive to maintain contextual relevance, I also find that the occasional lack of contextual relevance in a liturgical church seems to be missing something. Is it possible to get the best of both worlds?