Monday, October 07, 2013
Will It Really Help?
Jeff Dunn @ iMonk lists some ways to "renew" the Evangelical worship service. Just one of his suggestions:
If you think about it at all, there is no straightforward answer to that question, it's circular in nature. Which tells me that if we change the worship service, but do other things about the church, those changes will be ineffective. At root, the problem with Evangelicalism is not what is done in worship - but the overwhelming focus on worship. (Oh Lordy, I can here the people screaming at me now, "We were created to worship!")
A church is many things - many, many things - it is not simply a provider of Sunday morning worship/entertainment. If the church does not build the infrastructure to be all those things, then it really ought to be the Sunday morning show that attracts the most viewers.
Evangelicalism church worship
This takes us to the song service. It is the part evangelicals like to call “worship,” as if we only worship God with music. We have discussed the full-fledged assault contemporary Christian music has made into the song services in great detail often on this site, so I am not going to revisit those refrains. For today, let us remember that the purpose of the worship service is to focus our eyes on Jesus. Any song that does not help the worshipper to do this should not be included in the service. We need to be singing about who Jesus is, not what he means to me.I agree with this and just about every other suggestion Jeff has for the worship service. But that said, I wonder if it will help matters much? IF Evangelicalism is really to get better it has to move past focus on the worship service. The essential question is this - if the worship service were to change, would it change the people in the pews, or must the people in the pews be changed for the worship service to change?
If you think about it at all, there is no straightforward answer to that question, it's circular in nature. Which tells me that if we change the worship service, but do other things about the church, those changes will be ineffective. At root, the problem with Evangelicalism is not what is done in worship - but the overwhelming focus on worship. (Oh Lordy, I can here the people screaming at me now, "We were created to worship!")
A church is many things - many, many things - it is not simply a provider of Sunday morning worship/entertainment. If the church does not build the infrastructure to be all those things, then it really ought to be the Sunday morning show that attracts the most viewers.
Evangelicalism church worship
