Beginnings. When you grow up in church, you don’t realize what it is about worship that makes your church different from other churches because its the only one you know. Really, all you might notice is if the church you’re in undergoes changes in worship style. I grew up in a small church. We sang from a hymnal, the Trinity Hymnal. Services were accompanied by either organ or piano (we had alternating accompanists). Sometimes there was a children’s choir or an instrumental prelude to the worship service. For a while the church tried having one of the members who was a strong singer stand in front and lead the singing. I’m not sure why, but eventually they abandoned that practice. When we had a change of pastor, the church purchased Trinity Psalters to put in the pews, but their use never caught on. Overall, worship remained pretty consistent at this little church, and is still pretty much the same when I visit with family.
College. So, it wasn’t until I moved to college that I began to think through worship style. I went to the University of Missouri, Columbia and began attending RUF (Reformed University Fellowship) and transferred my church membership to the small church east of town where my sister and brother had gone before me. RUF had many hymns which were arranged to upbeat tunes which worked well with guitar accompaniment. I even joined the praise band as a vocalist, something I enjoyed as an outlet of my talent (though looking back I wonder if I really had any!). At the local church, worship was really similar to the church in which I grew up. When I took the new member class, the pastor had a "priorities target". In concentric circles, he had placed what was most important in the center, with lower priorities as you moved away from the center. In the center were things like Christology and justification by faith. Moving out several circles was eschatology. On the outside circle was style of worship. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt that maybe he meant to say that all the things on the target were important and he was stressing only their relative importance, but at the time I interpreted it this way: that worship doesn't matter.
After my freshman year at Mizzou, I got a summer internship in St. Louis. During that summer, I visited numerous churches within my denomination. I was surprised to find such variety in worship style -- even among people who were doctrinally in agreement and organizationally united. With each congregation worshipping in a different way, I felt a subtle implication: that worship doesn't matter. That same year I visited another denomination’s church, a very large church. The worship there was with a large praise band up front and several vocalists on stage leading. At first I sang along, but I noticed that nobody around me sang. In fact, a few people around me looked at me in surprise that they could hear my voice over the amplified sound coming from up front (I do sing pretty loudly). I didn’t think about it at the time, but looking back it was obvious to me that if the praise band was supposed to be “leading” the congregation’s praise, they weren’t doing a good job. Quite to the contrary, they were drowning the praise from the pews (actually, seats, if I’m remembering right). My point is that I was beginning to see that even though many were saying that worship didn’t matter I couldn’t help feeling that it did. I didn’t like some of the worship styles. I admit it! In a way, I feel that I was wrong to not like some of the congregation’s worship. Worship shouldn’t be judged by my personal preference, but at that time in my life I did judge. Even if I didn’t say anything out loud, inside I felt uncomfortable before the living God next to some of my Christian brothers and sisters. I don’t think any Christian desires that uneasiness. Worship should unite Christians, shouldn’t it?
In my last year at university, I met the woman who would become my wife, Maggie. I noticed her right away, but because I was graduating soon I didn’t want to be in a relationship. And, she was Roman Catholic and I knew enough to know that Catholics and Protestants haven’t had a good track record at agreeing on things. But, as a friend I invited her to RUF. It was there that she heard the gospel preached. She believed, and to this day I praise God for granting salvation to my wife. So, after coming to faith in Christ, she wanted to know more about the differences between her church and mine. On Sundays, we started going to my church in the morning and to mass in the evening. After we had been to both, we opened the Bible and compared what we had seen to what we read. The thing we found was that the Protestant worship was, in comparison, profoundly Biblical. The words of institution for the Lord’s Supper were lifted directly from Paul. The congregation sang. There weren’t bells and incense and statues. These differences led Maggie to leave the Catholic church and join the same small church east of town where I was a member. Looking back, it seems that we were on to something important. If we did want to compare worship, shouldn’t the Bible be the place we’d go? Hasn’t God given instruction in how He is to be worshipped?
Just before I graduated, I overheard a friend of mine ask our campus minister a simple question -- what is worship? -- and I thought it was a profound question. But should it be? Shouldn't worship be a foundational thing for Christians? Shouldn’t we know a lot about it? Shouldn’t we agree on it, at least in principle? If we're going to spend eternity worshipping God together, shouldn't there be some concrete instruction for how we can begin now?
Post-College. After Maggie and I got married, she moved to Shawnee, KS where I had a job. We were both still members of the church we had gone to in college and, now in a new location, we wanted to find a church like that one. We went church shopping. I admit it, we were blatantly looking for what we were comfortable with. But we had a conflict internally. We had both been part of RUF with upbeat music and guitars but also the church we had come from had piano and hymns. Which would we find? Which would we choose? Similar to my summer internship experience, we found that even within our denomination, there was a wild variety of worship styles. One was like RUF, but with the guitars turned up a lot louder and a few extra solos. Another we jokingly described as "soft rock 102.5". The leader of the praise band had a cheesy, lounge-singer voice and neither of us liked it. We caught ourselves later mock-imitating his voice, “this next one is one of my favorite hymns.” But, looking back, what gave us the right to mock him? In doing so, weren’t we mocking worship! Where did our criteria come from which we used to judge our brothers and sisters? It was merely tradition, experience? Again, I admit that we were wrong in our hearts for some of the judgment we passed. In the end, we definitely didn’t go to some churches because we didn’t like their style of worship.
Was worship really just a matter of preference? Is it just my style against your style? Where did my style come from? Where did yours? If I'm a punk rocker and become a Christian, does that mean the church needs do develop a punk worship service? Or techno? Or opera, death metal, or bluegrass? Is worship just meant to draw people in? If so, why were my wife and I repulsed by some of the church’s worship? Or is there something deeper wrong with the way I, like many other Christians, had been seeing worship? Has something changed in the church in regards to our views of worship?
The church which my mother attends used to have an eclectic worship service. They tried mixing styles by having a hymn and then a piece with the praise band. They tried to please everyone by having something for everyone. Later, they started having a Saturday night service. This service was completely different in style than the one on Sunday morning. Later they split services on Sunday morning, to one traditional and one contemporary. In the end, everyone just chose to go to the one that they liked based on their preference. The issue of worship style is divisive. The old people would go to one service and the young people would go to another. I have a friend who raised some questions about the way his church, the church he had grown up in, was worshipping. The response he received was, “maybe this church isn’t for you.” Why is this dividing us?
Thoughts. I recently heard that the Beatles weren't just big in rock; they were big in music. What was meant was that in the 1960’s there wasn’t a rock station and a country station and an oldies station and a soft rock station. There were just music stations. The proliferation of genres hadn't happened. But contrast that with how things are now. Now, with Internet radio like Pandora, everyone gets his own radio station. Just click a few thumbs up or thumbs downs and there will emerge a music station that’s custom tailored to you and you alone. Sure there is overlap with others, but the goal of a personalized music station is for the listener to never have to hear a song he won’t already like. Our postmodern culture breeds people who are intolerant of music that doesn’t match preference. And, has this culture infiltrated the church? I think so.
Imagine if things were different. What if every church was moving in the same direction? What if every church had the same goal in mind as regards worship, even worship style? What if the church weren’t meant to adapt to everyone’s tastes, but was intentionally trying to refine each Christian to grow to like a certain thing? Imagine if in a generation or two Christian's tastes were refined in the same direction and that direction led to greater unity in the church? To me, this sounds good. I know some people don’t like the sound of it, though. Perhaps this sounds like a brainwashing exercise to them. At the same time, though, when we get to heaven, will anyone say, “you know, I was hoping for something else”? Of course not! Our tastes in everything will be changed -- be perfected -- when we get to heaven. We will worship together, in the same way, and we will delight in doing it! If our preferences will be changed in the future, why shouldn’t we be beginning to refine them now?
And why can’t we talk about this? Recently, I posted some brief comments about worship on Twitter and Facebook. Granted, I was limiting myself to 140 characters and there’s a thin line between brief and terse, but I got some prompt feedback from a dear Christian sister. I called her and we spoke for a while. She said that some of the things I’ve said about worship have shut down the conversation, that she feels that she wouldn’t want to talk to me about worship. I am heartbroken that anyone would feel that way, especially a sister in Christ. I don’t want us to feel we can’t talk about worship; to the contrary I think we really need to be talking about worship. I don’t have everything figured out! I need to learn from Christian brothers and sisters more than anyone. But, there’s also a sentiment that I think is unhelpful when such conversations begin. I’ve heard people ask the following, “How can you judge between worship?" At first it sounds right because I recognize that there is a degree to which I’ve judged worship wrongly, basing my judgment upon my personal preference and degree of comfort based on prior experience. However, just because there is a possibility of judging with poor motives, does that mean we are hopeless to have discernment when it comes to matters of worship? Does it mean that no one can learn from one another about worship? Is there is no hope for unity on matters of worship? When someone next asks me, “How can you judge between worship?” I will ask them back, “How can you not?” Surely every one of us could walk into a Christian worship service from a different tradition and feel out of place, awkward, uncomfortable, or just plain confused. But the point should not just be to stop there. If there’s such a thing as wrong worship, we as Christians should be seeking out what is right worship.
Conclusion. There are two recurring themes I’ve discovered as I’ve written all this out. 1) Many Christians hold that style of worship doesn’t matter. 2) Style of worship is divisive. I’m convinced that these two themes are incompatible. One of them is wrong. Let me illustrate. Suppose two churches couldn’t agree on something trivial, on which color was best. Their disagreement was so sharp that they could not worship together, they would not assemble as the body of Christ because they could not agree on pink or puce. If Jesus were to come that day and judge them, how would they fare? Should something trivial, something which doesn’t matter, be allowed to divide? More and more I’m convinced that worship is not trivial. Style of worship matters because it divides. And if it matters, we need an arbiter. We need someone who is not just pushing his or her personal preference. Perhaps it would be best to say, not that style of worship doesn’t matter, but that our preference in style of worship doesn’t matter. If it is only our preference which divides us from our brother, we need to be willing to let go of our preference and embrace our brother. It shouldn’t be about us, it should be about the object of our worship. Our worship should be about the Triune God! As such, we need a word from God, and we as Protestant Christians should agree that this word is the Bible.
In the Bible, God does judge worship. Consider the examples of Nadab and Abihu; Hophni and Phinehas. Also, Deuteronomy 12 (esp. v. 32), where God warned of a coming unification of the place of worship and that Israel should not seek to syncretize worship of God with the worship practices of pagans living in the land. The first four of the ten commandments concern worship. Jesus himself talked about worship with the Samaritan woman at the well John 4:19-24. There’s plenty more. I’ve been surprised to find how little I knew about what the Bible says about worship. Let’s get a conversation going and let’s start with the Scriptures. And let’s be willing to say what is coming from us rather than Him. If its coming from us we should expect it to be divisive -- we’re all different people. If it’s coming from us, we should be willing to let it go for the good of our brother and the glory of God. But if what we believe concerning worship is from Him, truly from Him, it should truly unite us as one because there is only One True God.
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