We live in a day where the excellence of local church worship is at an all time high. There are more original songs, more recordings, and more professionalism than ever before.
We talk enough about excellence here at Beyond Sunday to know there’s nothing wrong with a well planned, well executed worship service.
But oftentimes a passion for excellence can be a disguised as an over-dependence on the epic. We don’t truly believe God is enough so we seek to make “powerful worship” happen in our own strength more often than not.
Have we become so dependent on “powerful worship experiences” that we don’t know how to seek God without them?
- What happens when you’re on your death bed?
- What happens when you’re alone with God on Monday morning?
- What happens when your son or daughter is addicted to heroin?
- What happens when you’re in the darkest night of your soul?
For most of our lives, the massive doesn’t meet us there. But do you know what does? A faithful God who is ever-present, always near, good all the time. And so when I talk about normal, average worship, I’m not talking about a lack of excellence or lack of care and attention to the worship experience.
That’s an issue in and of itself.
There’s no virtue in making worship plain for plain’s sake.
What I’m talking about is becoming addicted to anything other than the very real presence of God.
We’ve become addicted to the experience but have forgotten how to seek God in the mundane .
We’ve become connoisseurs of worship songs but have forgotten how to faithfully and consistently seek Jesus in the secret place.
It is kind of like worshiping worship, right?
Sounds ridiculous, right? But we need to be careful. Worship teams, large and small, listen. Worship departments in mega-churches and house churches, listen.
Create a worship culture and environment where people truly learn how to seek God. Don’t leave them in awe of your talent or simply reciting a song. Teach them how to go to war. Teach them how to pray. Teach them how to worship in silence. Teach them how to interact with Scripture.
Prepare them for the mundane of Monday.
Prepare them for the terminal diagnosis at the end of their days.
Prepare them for Jesus.
Not. Just. Worship. Experiences. Not just isolated moments of emotion. It won’t last.
The Power of Local Church Worship Ministry
Here’s the power of what we do. We need to stop keeping our eyes fixed on crafting worship experiences. We’re actually preparing people for life. Worship gives us perspective through the struggle and through the storm.
I know, this isn’t very practical. I don’t have 10 steps for you to implement. I sound like I’m jaded against modern worship. I’m not.
Keep your band, lights, cameras, haze, coffee, skinny jeans, leather jacket, & $25,000 pedal board. That’s not the problem.
But what if you filtered every creative service decision through the question of, “Will this help our people resist a consumeristic worship approach?”
Because it needs to stop. We can’t just entertain our churches with our songs, style, & celebrity leadership. We need to make warrior, worship disciples who are prepared to exit our worship centers and storm the gates of hell, being delivery agents of the grace of God.
Are you with me?
Let’s talk about it in the comments.
P.S. We have a new record out today, called Here & Now.
This is our attempt to do live these words. These are songs we wrote for our church to sing. More than anything, they are a desperate cry for us to return to the real thing.
Not an obsession with songs, experiences, & emotional highs. We don’t just long for spectacle and intensity. We long for Jesus, plain and simple.
The Jesus that is there on our death bed. The Jesus that is there as we read the Bible in quiet. The Jesus that is there in the midst of our greatest doubts. The Jesus who is here with us, now with us.
That’s where these songs come from. I pray you enjoy them too.
Check it out here: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/here-now/1345475547
[ois skin=”Beyond Sunday 2″]
“For most of our lives, the massive doesn’t meet us there. But do you know what does? A faithful God who is ever-present, always near, good all the time. And so when I talk about normal, average worship, I’m not talking about a lack of excellence or lack of care and attention to the worship experience.”
Beautiful! Thank you David.
Not so beautiful:
“Keep your band, lights, cameras, haze, coffee, skinny jeans, leather jacket, & $25,000 pedal board. That’s not the problem.”
This is like a doctor saying, “keep taking your HBP pills, overeating and not exercising–that’s not the problem.”
They are symptoms–they are very real pictures of just how far off course the church has veered.
We are children playing with toys, and these plastic devices will not sustain us in any battle. They just give us a jolt, a temporary better feeling about ourselves.
As leaders in worship, are we not more like the teen-aged boy who says he is in love with the girl, when he is really in love with himself–the way he feels about himself when he is with the girl? Are we not merely in love with our gear, scene and image? Narcissism at its finest. As such, our task of leading others swallows us as Jonas whale.
I love the lights, glitter, fame and image not belonging to a child-like servant. I love this more than humility and people reward me with what I really want more than God does.
Further, I resent that my church sets me up for failure by allowing worship to be cheapened and reduced to showmanship and performances with the applause of man as reward–by providing this stage and its accoutrements.
“If you love the world, you cannot love the Father. 16 Our foolish pride comes from this world, and so do our selfish desires and our desire to have everything we see. None of this comes from the Father. 17 The world and the desires it causes are disappearing. But if we obey God, we will live forever. (I John 2)
Pretend, for a month, that your church only has enough electricity for a few lights, enough for people to get safely to their seats and enough to project the lyrics up on the screen.. No electric for stage lights, or amps and mics or organs. The piano, acoustic guitars, drums, flutes, tambourines, bells, and hand-claps and voices and upright base and violins still work fine. Let’s get everyone off the stage, just for a month, and take the heat off our worship teams. They can sit down on the side, facing the screen, play and sing their hearts out, without having to smile and wear cool clothes and think about being too fat or bald. Jesus is not the king riding into Jerusalem to rule and reign. He is still the guy who came in riding on the foul of a donkey. He chose that humiliation on purpose. We seem to have rejected that donkey and chosen to ride on huge white chargers, magnificent war horses like the ones the generals rode triumphantly into Rome, with the pomp and glory. Our worship leaders have even become famous, their names on everyone’s lips. “How was worship today?” “It was awesome! The band was rockin’ and dancing and the stage was even moving. It was a blast. It was quite a sight to behold!” How can we forget that Jesus was a man of sorrow, despised and rejected, acquainted with grief, a prophet rejected by his own country, humble, self-effacing, taking the lower place, deferring to the Father always, denying the self, fleeing adulation and the honor of man, preferring the honor that only God gives. We can make it back to simplicity, but our leaders have to take us there, but they are afraid of the rejection and judgement that will come to them. Watch the comments that come from this to see what I mean :).
David Santistevan, thanks! And thanks for sharing your great posts every week!
Today,worship and music are never disconnected. You can”t have one without the other. The music gets louder because younger are getting involved. The lyrics are emotion driven, we worship how we feel on Jesus more than what we know of Him. When a song is done, quiet. Why? Simply, the congregation doesn”t need to sing or easily getting drowned out. We need to get back to fully understand what worship really is, not what we assume it is.
Hi all,
David:
This post is very interesting and asks many good questions.
Thanks for preparing and sharing it.
Best,
Gary
Southern NH (USA)