Monday, May 05, 2008
Worshipping With Others
Jollyblogger hit a homer a while back writing about "horizontal worship." He bases his thoughts on an extensive quotation about a worship leader that stepped on others in the ecstasy of his own experience, then David picks up the thoughts:
That is where I have a great deal of trouble with the whole ecstatic worship movement - it seems to concede to human preferences instead of ask "What is best?" It is interesting to me how this whole thing as evolved. "Seeker-sensitive" somehow got translated into "genuine worship."
I don't know about everywhere, but I know what I have seen. Churches know they need to reach out so they start talking about appealing to the outsider. So they transform the entire worship experience to make it "seeker-sensitive" or attractive, or whatever adjective you want to apply. It is not long before they start getting complaints from the people that have been around for decades and understand the traditional worship methods about the lack of depth and "What about my preferences" and so forth.
That's when the "genuine worship" talk starts to take center stage. Gone is the reasonable, if overwrought, justification of reaching out, and replacing it is the claims of better worship which is typically cover for, as David so aptly demonstrated, "Gee I like this better, it's more fun."
And the church sinks into an oblivion of self-involved spiritual infancy.
But the pews are full, and so are the plates...
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We often think of worship as purely vertical, a time when we focus exclusively on God to the exclusion of all else and all others.Here's my question - if we focus exclusively on the vertical aspects of worship, to the point of stepping on the toes of other worshippers, have we not dipped into self-centeredness? Have we not placed our ecstatic experience at the center of the worship experience?
This is true, that worship is all about God, but to worship God properly (the vertical) we must also pay attention to our fellow worshippers (the horizontal). If worshipping God is analogous to loving God then we need to consider the relationship of loving God and loving others.
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Hence, Labberton gives a wonderful illustration of the fallacy that one can worship God while stepping on the toes of a fellow worshipper. A break in the horizontal causes a break in the vertical.
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But the bottom line is that we need to be very careful about opposing the horizontal to the vertical in worship. In our quest to be God-centered we can't neglect a proper biblical practice of man-centeredness - to love God is to love our brother. To worship God properly we must give proper deference to our fellow worshipers.
That is where I have a great deal of trouble with the whole ecstatic worship movement - it seems to concede to human preferences instead of ask "What is best?" It is interesting to me how this whole thing as evolved. "Seeker-sensitive" somehow got translated into "genuine worship."
I don't know about everywhere, but I know what I have seen. Churches know they need to reach out so they start talking about appealing to the outsider. So they transform the entire worship experience to make it "seeker-sensitive" or attractive, or whatever adjective you want to apply. It is not long before they start getting complaints from the people that have been around for decades and understand the traditional worship methods about the lack of depth and "What about my preferences" and so forth.
That's when the "genuine worship" talk starts to take center stage. Gone is the reasonable, if overwrought, justification of reaching out, and replacing it is the claims of better worship which is typically cover for, as David so aptly demonstrated, "Gee I like this better, it's more fun."
And the church sinks into an oblivion of self-involved spiritual infancy.
But the pews are full, and so are the plates...
Technorati Tags:church, worship. self-centeredness, vertical, horizontal
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