The past couple days I was on a retreat with the church where I currently serve. We had a great time together, but fear not, I’m going to refrain from giving the details. What I want to talk about was an insight I had into the corporate worship of the church (and by this I don’t just mean music, but all elements that contribute to worshipping God when we come together as a larger body).
There are nearly an infinite number of things to consider when it comes to this topic—many of which have been beaten to death over the years. What role does emotion play? Which songs should we sing? What should their content be? Which forms of music are appropriate? Who makes these decisions? How do we gauge the appropriateness of our worship? Does experience flow from content or vice versa or neither? What role do aesthetics play? I suppose the questions could go on forever.
What I realized as we had an in depth discussion about many of these things is that it is very difficult to come to a consensus on what is most important and how that looks. I think there are two main reasons for this. 1) I think this one might be the most neglected reason—things like the worship of a larger body of believers are more than the sum of their parts. You can’t dissect worship, put it back together, and lose nothing in the process. It is so much about the relationships between the parts. Our relationship with God as individuals and as a group, and our relationships with each other. There is so much importance in these relationships and what goes on there that just looking at the parts is like looking at the piano part of a movie’s soundtrack, the printed script, and its costumes and then assuming you have fully grasped the movie. 2) God has created us with such great diversity that we will all have nuances to what we believe about how to faithfully worship God—even among those who are completely committed to true discipleship. We’re just different. The challenge is to learn to use these differences to create greater beauty rather than disputes.
So those were some thoughts. Your thoughts?
4 comments:
Good questions, I think the only way we live in this tension is to define worship broadly enough to encompass it all, including corporate worship issues. I just did a two part series on worship the past two Sundays, the first called "worship as a life" and part two titled "worship as a slice." My point in week one was that in the OT worship was about a particular place and time and now it is about every place and all the time. It is about our life.
Part two we focused in on worship in regards to the time we come together for corporate times of singing, prayer, confession, baptism, study, celebration.
I like the titles! I wonder if we lived our lives as worship faithfully if some of the "slice" issues would fade a little bit?
Hmmm...I've dissected our corporate worship so many times, and you are right - I've never been able to "put it back together again".
I agree that the relationships that exist between the individuals and God, the gathered people and God, the people with one another, and the people with others outside the church all play a factor.
In light of this relationship aspect, it would seem that the more confidence you have in God, the more delight you have in him, the more history you have with him, the "better" the worship for everyone involved.
It seems to me that another difference - related to the whole is greater then the sum of the parts - is the "specialness" that the church feels. Churches that feel that God is using them for something special, either all together or amongst some of them, raises the intensity of the worship. Churches that have no sense of specialness tend to have blah worship.
The relationship comments - those I will be thinking about for awhile. Thanks.
I made a comment at Huntington when I was leading the student led chapel... I said "I worship when I listen to Eminem ask questions about God, because He's asking questions about God which shows me that God is pursuing all of humanity." I took some hits on that one, but I still think it's true. I can worship God in anything because of his involvment in creation maybe???
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