Have Worship Your Way, or: The Real Reason the Worship Wars Were Terrible

As I said in my last post, the worship wars sucked. But they didn’t suck because the way we worship isn’t important. The worship wars sucked because they recreated the church’s worship in our image. They reduced it to a matter of preference. They devalued it into a marketing tool for church growth. And they left us with a weird dynamic in which we tiptoe around too afraid to question the wisdom of the prevailing worship trends and the worship industry’s choke-hold on Sunday morning. It’s that uncomfortable, whispered, awkward egalitarian dynamic that pushed me to start writing about it and, hopefully, bring about some difficult, yet direly important conversations.

Frankly, the walking on eggshells must stop.

Pastor Josh over at the MTV Pastor blog here on Patheos has respectfully responded to my 9 Reasons to Stop Dividing the Church over Its Worship post. His heart for his congregation is evident, and as a recovering Baptist myself, I can understand the theology behind some of his reasoning. But his list of 9 Reasons to Start Expanding Your Church’s Worship Through New Styles reads more like a litany of ways in which the worship wars have distorted our understanding of Christian worship, and I think it warrants some attention.

“It’s a picture of what heaven could look like.” Pastor Josh says that we don’t know what worship in heaven (I prefer to say “on the renewed earth”)  will look like, and that diversity in “worship style” may be a foretaste of glory divine. Well, we actually do know a few things. We know from John’s Apocalypse that it follows a heavenly liturgy, which we will one day join the angels in proclaiming. Will the song sound like western classical music? American commercial pop? I don’t suspect either. But here in the “not yet” period, we have millennia of history upon which to draw conclusions about our worship practices. (Woe to the Israelite who stumbled into the Holy of Holies asking where he could find the contemporary service.) When it comes to music especially, we have generations upon generations of congregational song, organically emanating from the voice of the people. We have texts crafted by psalmists, theologians, professors, mystics, poets, and pastors. And, until the recent birth of preferential worship, they all correspond to the Revelation liturgy in pointing to a triune God as the divine Object and Subject of Christian worship. A smorgasbord of worship options is a foreign and awkward concept.

“It teaches people to celebrate how God uniquely designed each one of us.” Worship style is not imprinted on our personhood. You will find the same spectrum of personalities in historic liturgical worship as in a so-called “contemporary” one. The difference is not in our preferences, but what we actually believe about the act of gathered worship.

Of course, we all worship in diverse ways in that we find ourselves in many different aspects of life and work. My work as a musician and educator, as a spouse and parent is in itself a worshipful expression, and so it is for others regardless of their vocation or relationship status. But the gathered worship of the church is a uniting act in which we come together as the people of God, proclaim God’s Word, partake in God’s Sacraments, and are molded into the church we are called to be for the world. It’s not a venue in which we can expect to have our own choice of jesusy entertainment performed by a cover band and call it worship.

That’s what makes Pastor Darin’s message below so damaging. I’ve used this video in other posts, but it so strikingly (and unknowingly) preaches this worship distortion that I feel like I need to include it here.

(Does the thing about chairs remind anyone else of Goldilocks and the Three Bears?)

“It’s a compelling reminder that the church is a family of believers, not time and a building.” I don’t get this. I think the opposite is true. A gathering of diverse believers united by love for God and each other more reflects a family than different services in different times and locations.

“If a church has more than one service, it’s already ‘divided.’” In a way, but, assuming the services are identical, the divide is not theological, missional, or ideological.

“New worship styles can help reach more people.” That’s the number one lie of the worship wars. We don’t worship to attract unbelievers. We don’t worship in a way that gets the most butts in the seats. We don’t worship according to the prevailing winds of contemporary culture. We don’t worship so that music or entertaining preaching can do our dirty work for us. Of course, the liturgy is inherently evangelistic, in that it points to Christ, ideally culminating with the gifts of God poured out for us so that we can be poured out from our places of worship into a dry, thirsty land. Reducing worship to a method of boosting attendance compromises its worshipful function and starves the church of what it needs to be the church.

“Multiple worship styles allows more to serve.” Really? Were they being turned away before?

“It reminds us that unity is not the same as conformity.” Pastor Josh says, “A united church doesn’t have to be a homogeneous church.” But multiple styles do in fact tend to create homogeneous congregations within a congregation. They create demographically homogeneous services. They create musically homogeneous services. Admittedly, in many cases, like a church announcement I saw on the Facebook the other day that revealed plans for a new service and the hope that it would attract new and younger attendees. And thus, they divide the church. They build silos. They create larger congregations in which the right hand has no idea what the left hand is doing, nor does is care.

“You can become ‘all things to all people’ without bowing at the altar of consumerism.” This pauline snippet spawns more problematic church practices than perhaps any other. Paul is not advocating some wild, radical, no holds barred evangelistic pragmatism. The message remains the same, “foolish,” unbelievable, offensive gospel (Paul’s word, remember!). Paul is preaching the personal revocation of rights here, a willingness to forfeit personal freedoms for the good of other believers and the message of the gospel. There’s a message for the church there, but it has nothing to do with worshiping in a way that appeals to different audiences. And, regardless, gathered worship is not supposed to “win” the coveted, elusive prize of butts in the seats. In fact, trying to hook in an audience through entertainment is nothing if not consumer-oriented. 

“I’ve seen multiple worship styles work to be a net positive to the churches I’ve served in.” How do we know it’s a net positive? Attendance gain? The lack of apparent discord? That’s hardly proof of positive results. It’s possibly just proof that nobody notices, or worse, cares about the division, the homogeneous congregations within the congregation, the silos, the theological disparity, or the consumer-oriented approach. It means churches might just be content to live in ignorant bliss, as long as attendance is high and dissent quiet. It means people may not even know why they’re there to begin with. It means people might not understand the function of the liturgy. And that’s a terrifying position to be in.

We’ve got to believe that how we worship matters. Not because more butts are in the seats, but because like a diet of junk food, preferential worship leads to an unhealthy church.

Photo: Flickr: Andrew Stawarz, creative commons 2.0