Good Worship

Ben gave me this book to read about making congregational Worship better without dumbing it down. It’s a fascinating read by a woman of a very liturgical persuasion who is all for adapting worship to the times. She and I see a lot of things eye to eye.

One thing she said with the help of some outside references, hits the nail on the head. Back in the day, product ads were about the products: why you should have the product, what it can do for you, why it’s the best, etc. These days, it’s all about image. The reason is that people don’t care about the product…they pay attention to how they’re told the product will make them feel. If you smoke Marlboros, you’ll be like a rough and ruggedly handsome cowboy. Gatorade makes you play sports like a machine and sweat colorful droplets. Sometimes you don’t even know what the product is until the very end (Mentos freshness, full of life).

A lot of worship is changing like that too.

How many times do you hear a song on the radio, on a Christian station, and you’re not sure if it’s a love song or an adoration of God? How many songs do we sing at Praise and Worship at Eastern Camp just because they’re “fun” and get the kids excited? How many songs we sing say things like “I will”, “I am”, “I love”?

Commercials aren’t based on the product, but on the intended market. They target what people want to feel, but not what the product does. Is our worship based on the God about whom we sing or on making us, the singers, feel good? A danger is that if we sing every song with “I” as the subject, we might lose sight of the fact that God is doing the work in the first place. She says in her book that if we cater to our crowd instead of our King, “worship becomes pseudo-therapy and not the healing revelation of God.”

I totally love that. Worship isn’t to make me feel better. Sometimes it might even remind me of sin, making me feel “worse”. But that’s when Jesus steps in and reminds me He’s already paid the price for my sin, which then brings me to a joyful worship that actually does make me feel better. Songs these days can be so empty of any spiritual depth, but we like them because they sound nice. So many kids these days don’t know how amazing the traditional hymns are. They’re just old and boring, no one cares about them anymore. But they’re so full of spiritual depth! I try to make it a point, actually, to get a hymn in nearly every time I lead singing here in Paraguay. My hope – my prayer – is that the folks who don’t sing them as much will realize how great they are and develop a love for them. At least as much as they love Hillsong. I’m anxious to finish the book to find out what else she says that I like. Maybe it will revolutionize my ability to lead worship.

-j

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