Monday Morning Music Ministry

11-13-23

I was talking with a new friend this week about worship – how it has changed in the church; radically changed, even in our lifetimes, but also radically through the centuries. Does worship follow the culture… and should it? should it readily conform to contemporary trends? There is the legitimate caution that if a worship style slavishly follows styles of music and communication and – dare I say it? – entertainment, then a church risks alienating as many people as it attracts.

Is the function of worship music to attract worshipers? Or is it the role of worshipers to gather, and seek God, and praise Him, and celebrate His worth-ship (a theory about the word-origin)?

I have long been tempted to wonder if contemporary worship music is scarcely neither worship nor music. That extreme view can be found in the virtual book, Rick’s Epistle to the Curmudgeons. But I am far from alone. My late wife and I were… well, literally late for a service at a church we attended in San Diego. As we passed through the lobby, we saw an elderly lady sitting alone on a bench with her walker. We asked if she need assistance to enter the service, which was loud enough to indicate it had begun.

“No,” she said. “Every week I wait out here until the music is finished. It is too loud; I can’t understand the words; and the leader always insists we clap and jump. I cannot manage.”

This poor lady was robbed of a worship experience because she was, frankly, made to feel unwelcome for a part of the service. Alone, in fact. And she was alone. Was she, in a way, outnumbered, or out-voted? I began to notice that many people in the congregation (there and at many churches I subsequently visited) seem uncomfortable with reading from screens, jumping on cue, smiling when the worship leader says, “Good morning! Say it louder, like you mean it!!!”

There was a time in church history when people gathered to worship in diverse ways. Sometimes believers gather to “be still and know that I am God.” Sometimes to bow heads, or lie prostrate before the Lord, and not jump or wave. Sometimes to cry; not always to laugh.

How many people, in churches today, are more focused on the worship than the One who should be worshiped? Or respond to the music – the instrumental riffs, the drum beats – more than the message? Or who regard the entire service as entertainment? – how many leaders, not only the “audience” – feel that way?

I think what is at play is that the contemporary church recognizes a pervasive problem in modern life – let us categorize it as alienation – but reacts in a completely inappropriate way. Megachurches, “big box” churches, mass worship are superficial attempts to draw people together… have them share experiences… bond with each other. Yet, largely, these types of gatherings merely assemble strangers as at a pep rally – prompted to cheer, respond in unison, be audiences and not congregations, and applaud when the show is over.

Contemporary worship accelerates the problem, instead of solving it. And it is a problem. The church should resist these tendencies, not perpetuate them. These church services often can be gatherings of people who gather “as one”; but many of them are rooms full of people who feel terribly alone, even sandwiched in the seats. Worse: feeling as alone when they leave, as when they arrived.

Alone. Ironic in busy churches. Ironic in a mass culture. Ironic in crowded cities and neighborhoods, schools and offices. It is recorded and reflected in statistics: More and more people seek counseling because they feel unconnected. Murderers and criminals invariably are ID’d in press reports and police statements as “loners.” We jostle people on city sidewalks and packed lunchrooms, yet unprecedented numbers of folks desperately turn to internet dating sites, or “virtual” web friends, looking for fellow strangers… other lonely people.

The answers surely are explained by psychoses, not demographics. When the landscapes were sparsely settled, and before towns became teeming cities, people are recorded in history as being relatively alone, but not lonely. Folks dealt well with distant neighbors. It was only in the Twentieth century that social scientists began to recognize the “Lost Generation” and “Disillusioned Youth”; pervasive cynicism, ennui, and resignation. Then, the “Beat Generation”; radicalization; the secularization of society. How many people today really know their close neighbors? Or want to?

I think it is all a symptom of the condition that Contemporary Man simply does not like himself. And the church neither recognizes it, nor tries to solve it, except by superficial and futile means.

My friend told me about her church which institutionally encourages neighborhood groups that meet for fellowship, study, and… worship. Meeting regularly, in small groups, arranged by interests, professions, personal challenges, geography, whatever. But common care is visceral; bonding happens, and fellowship is genuine.

This was a paradigm of the First Century church. It was real. It was precious. Did it “work,” as church leaders today would calculate the numbers of “people in the pews”? Oh, yes. Christianity grew and spread, People wanted what it had.

Let’s pray, church friends, for common sense. If feeling alone is today’s deep-seated cultural problem – how is that best overcome? In a mass setting where people are instructed to worship like robots… or in circles of friends who develop authentic, intimate relationships?

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Click: No, Never Alone