It would seem that if there is going to be unrest in the church, if there is going to be complaining and threats of leaving a church, it is usually centered around worship. We Christians love our worship. We love to meet in our familiar place, see our familiar friends and sing our favorite/familiar songs. If the most used word in this last sentence is an indicator, that thing that causes unhappiness in our worship services is change. We love the familiar.
We should come to worship to worship God. But the reality is we come to worship for many different reasons. We come to see and hang out with some people we like. We come to worship to be encouraged and renewed. We come to worship to enjoy a familiar positive experience. We come to worship to find calm in our often stormy lives. We come to worship to experience God's grace and healing.
We come to worship for many reasons. But we rarely come for the right reason – to worship God. We come, not for what we can give, but for what we get. At our church often revisit the concept that worship is not about you, it is not about us, it is about God. We repeat this concept. We agree to this concept. But we fail to truly embrace and live out this concept.
Understanding that is not difficult for a person who listens well. If one listens to complaints about worship, one consistently hears phrases like, "I don't like…" "I am not getting…" "I'm not comfortable…" Notice the big "I" that consistently runs through such conversations. When confronted with this fact, we Christians immediately begin wrapping our conversation in religious words and deny that it is about "me" but is, instead, a spiritual problem. I must admit that one of my weaknesses as a pastor is that when the spiritual blah, blah, blah starts I just go absolutely ballistic.
There are two very popular spiritualized complaints that just about every pastor hears on a regular basis. The first is, "I am not being spiritually fed." Without going into a whole lot of detail, let me just say that such a statement is akin to a fully functioning adult complaining to me that they are hungry. Really? Well then feed yourself. When did it become someone else's responsibility to feed you physically or spiritually? If you are not severely physically or mentally handicapped, why would you ever think you would not take care of yourself? It is not someone else's responsibility to feed you physically or spiritually. And spiritual feeding is not what happens Sunday morning when the church gathers. We call that worship.
The other popular spiritualized complaint about worship is, "I don't feel the Spirit of God present in our worship services." Most people who make that statement don't realize that it is a confession of what they are lacking. You see, Jesus clearly stated, "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there also." So, Jesus, or the Spirit of God, is present every time we meet for worship because Jesus promised He would be there and Jesus is trustworthy. What you are saying is, "The Spirit of God is present in our worship services but there is something dysfunctional in my personal life or my spiritual life or my approach to worship that is blocking my interaction with the Holy Spirit during worship and I need to get my stuff together." Quite honestly, when people do their spiritualized complaining they are much more interested in fixing you or having you fix something the church is doing than they are in being fixed themselves.
At the heart of our worship struggles is that we come to worship seeking to receive rather than to give. We come seeking to get what we perceive we need rather than coming to give God praise. We come seeking for someone else to do something that will make us feel or do better. We come to listen, to take, to hear, to receive.
In 1 Corinthians 14:26 Paul says something simple and yet life changing about worship. "What then shall we say, brothers? When you come together, everyone has a hymn, or a word of instruction, a revelation, a tongue or an interpretation. All of these must be done for the strengthening of the church." Paul tells us the simple truth that we all need to bring something to share in worship. Often all we bring is our neediness, our bad attitude, our depression, our sinfulness, our sickness. On occasion that can't be helped. Sometimes life is very difficult.
But, more often than not, we should take care of such issues in our daily walk and encounters with God as we seek to grow spiritually on a daily basis in our spiritual disciplines. Instead, we should bring with us some of the good gifts, the spiritual joy, the word God has given us, the insights and the positive experiences we have received from living a life of worship with Him in the past week. We should bring those to worship to share with others. In many ways, as far as the believer is concerned, Sunday worship is not a soup kitchen for the starving; it is a church potluck dinner. Coming only to receive should be a rare happening and coming to share the goodness of God should be the norm.
So, next Sunday morning, as you pack the family into the car, ask yourself, "What am I bringing to the party?"
Copyright © 2010, William T. McConnell, All Rights Reserved
1 comment:
Yeah, I like the "cruise ship" or "battle ship" analogy.
If you're lost, then there are times you need a cruise ship in your life. It's that we get comfortable on the cruise ship and think that's where we're supposed to be.
We're supposed to be on the battle ship. You come to service to refresh, tell of triumphs and battles, and then get the next assignment, which is done out in the field.
Problem is we get comfortable on the cruise ship and think that the cruise ship is for "us". Next thing you know is you're rattling your empty glass at the captain because you need a refill. (This also includes complaining about the music)
If you want to be fed spiritually, you need to either get a job on the battleship, or get a job on the cruise ship.
Just sitting on deck in the lounge chair as you wait for the captain to ask him to adjust your umbrella is going to leave you horribly unfulfilled.
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