A couple of weeks ago, I found myself at a hotel in Coalville, UT. Looked like the hotel was the town as far as I was concerned. Eric and I drove up to catch the last three sessions of a five session men's conference there at the Best Western. The topic was leadership development in a number of different settings within the church and it was being facilitated by one of my favorite teachers. He had split everyone up into five or six different groups for the first two sections, and he had each group looking at a specific area of ministry (elder training, youth and special programs, outreach, etc.).
I tried to latch on to the outreach group pretty quickly after I got here because they had a sub-topic that is very important to me - worship. Ah, if only everyone were like-minded on this. As I'm pretty opinionated on the subject, I made it a point to remind my mouth not to say anything stupid. The guys had already built a chart called "The Master's Wheel" that described what the fully competent person in an outreach ministry would look like. I asked them to very quickly review for me what they had accomplished and one of the guys who is in the worship team at a local church filled me in. He threw out this idea.
He said that he is sick of the way worship is handled in most churches (he was using the term "worship" to mean the music ministry). He knows that worship is not about emotion but that emotion is a by-product of worship. (I think I could take a few minutes and probably argue that idea - we're told in the Bible to bring emotion with us into the "worship" experience.) However, he thinks that we should really build the emotion up to the sermon using "smoothing" techniques like continuing to play between songs, giving devotionals that lead into songs, and then after the sermon playing a song that reinforces the message and gives the congregation time to ponder it. So for instance (and this is an example he gave), if the preacher is preaching on repentance and giving up our sin, we should launch right into my favorite song in the world, "Trading My Sorrows."
Quick tangent: The reason I love this song is because the words in the refrain just speak to my soul: "Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes, yes, Lord. Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes, yes, Lord. Yes, Lord, yes, Lord, yes, yes, Lord, amen." This is a really great example of how we should talk to God. If you like the song, I'm sorry. It's not my cup of tea.
Anyway, those were the gentleman's opinions of the other night. Now, I don't know about you but that sounded a bit sermon-centric, or in other words, we come to church to hear a sermon and the music and prayer and everything else points to that. My initial knee-jerk reaction was something like this (and imagine JD doing his thinking out loud thing on Scrubs): "What? What is he saying? That we should play to the sermon? I know that music isn't all that the service is about, but is he saying that the sermon is the main point? Ooh, I don't know about that. I should speak up and tell him I don't agree." At this point, I opened my mouth about half an inch to make a statement and then shut it as my mouth reminded me of what I had told it - no blurtage of opinion.
As I thought more about it, I became a bit less sure of my position on this. I know that the Bible says in I Corinthians that when the people came together, each person had a hymn or a prayer or a prophecy. It says that they were supposed to take turns sharing what God had laid on their heart, not that they were to coordinate around a central theme. Should the church service be a much more organic experience, a potpourri of congregational input that is shaped by the God's Spirit or should it be a shaped experience, a painting done by the worship leaders that involves the minds of everyone?
I'm pretty excited because we're going to be discussing this on Wednesday night to some extent. We'll see...I think it depends on whether we consider Paul's instruction to the early church to be normative or not.
