Worship – A Dialogue on the Purposes of the Church: Who do we Worship?

Sing to the Lord, all the earth. Psalm 96:1b

This post is a part of an ongoing dialogue about the five purposes of the church. The first post addressed the question of Who Do We Worship?  I want to continue to interact and dialog with Marva Dawn as she dialogs about the “Who” of worship in her book How Shall We Worship?

There is an interesting observation in her book (p. 20) about the nature of our cultures today, described by social analyst Christopher Lasch as a Culture of Narcissism.

Lasch stated that social developments in the 20th century, such as the end of World War II and the rise of a consumer culture in the years that followed, gave rise to a narcissistic personality structure in which peoples’ self-concepts led to a fear of commitment and lasting relationships (including religion), a fear of aging (e.g., the 1960s and 1970s "youth culture") and a overdeveloped admiration for fame and celebrity, nurtured in part by the motion picture industry and television. The result is confusion, anxiety and uncertainty about how to live and relate in the world today (see a review of Lasch here).

Marva believes that this culture of narcissism has entered the church, which has resulted in attitudes and views that ask the question, What’s in it for me? (p. 21) Ever have anyone say to you, “I didn’t get much out of the

worship service today.”

Since worship is the response of all creation to “God’s gift of being,” any response that we have that is “hunting for what will please ourselves” can be nothing more than sin.

A couple of the results that we see in churches today is the tendency to see Sunday morning worship as an evangelistic rally, i.e., using the appeal factor of the worship service to attract those who are not yet Christ-followers by appealing to their immersion in our narcissistic culture. Thus a church can entertain and give people the impression that they have been part of a worship experience.

But if worship is for God, can those outside the community of faith enter into worship? Or more bluntly, can we say that these kind of services qualify as worship?

A pastor friend made a comment to my previous post, “One of the things we teach about worship is that it includes every aspect of life, not just what we do together on a Sunday morning. Worship is also our service to God as we serve His people.”

That to me is the paradox of the question of worship: Worship is about God, but yet as we worship, we can also serve the people of God.  The example I have in mind is the Milepost 13 Band that recently came to Grenoble. I saw some aspects of worship that I hadn’t notice before. They are a worship band, so their main purpose or goal was to worship God. But yet they were also evangelistic in their concerts, and one of the biggest benefits was how they served the two congregations in Grenoble –one French speaking and one English speaking, and the fellowship and community we enjoyed as a result.

So for me, this is a marvelous picture of what worship can be, it is more than an subjective experience on Sunday morning. As Marva points out, worship is the glad response to the immense grace of Triune God.” So when God’s grace is pouring out on us, we can experience the outworking of that grace through fellowship, evangelism, service, et. al., which in turn should rebound in our response to that grace.

Yes, grace is amazing!

 

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Worship: Celebrate God’s Presence. A Dialogue on the Purposes of the Church

To worship the Lord is –in the world’s eyes –a waste of time. It is, indeed, a royal waste of time, but a waste nonetheless. By engaging in it, we don’t accomplish anything useful in our society’s terms. (Marva Dawn, A Royal Waste of Time)

I am starting a dialog about the core purposes of the church, , following Rick Warren’s understanding of the Five Purposes of the Church.

To start the conversation, I want to dialog with Marva Dawn, who has written extensively on the idea of worship. Marva Dawn has written a nice little volume called How Shall We Worship?, which looks at the tensions that exist in the so-called “worship wars,” i.e., the battle between traditional and contemporary worship. She takes an in-depth look at worship and its implications for the church. I would like to interact with some of her questions in a few posts.

I actually discovered Marva by accident. I came into a grad class at Wheaton one day to be told that we were going downstairs to attend a lecture by Marva Dawn. Being so full of myself at the time, I determined that I would sit in the back of the auditorium and suffer through this lecture, since sneaking out would not show respect to the professor.

As I sat and listened to this diminutive woman (who did not impress me in the least), she began to speak with a quiet and soft voice. I was slowly pushed up the aisle and out the door by the intensity and passion of her message. So, I like Marva Dawn and listen when she speaks. And which is why I am sharing her thoughts on this topic.

One reason why I like Marva is more about the questions she asks than the explication. Here are some of the questions she deals with in the introduction to How Shall we Worship?:

1. What is worship?  She begins her discussion by pointing out that worship is…

“our glad response to the immense grace of Triune God.”

All of our life is worship if we live in gratitude and reverence, if coupled with a mindfulness of God and eagerness to serve Him, says Dawn.

What Dawn shows me that too much of our worship is about Me, not God. Someone once commented to me that worship is when God is the audience.

I googled the phrase “worship” to find a picture to preface this post (see above), and I began to notice that the focus of 90% of the pictures of worship had a theme similar to this picture:

What do you see when you look at this picture? --someone standing on a hill or mountain, a beautiful sky in the background, with their hands lifted to the sky, ostensibly worshipping. 

But is this worship? It may say something about the subjective worship experience (who wouldn’t want to have a worship experience like this?), but it says Nothing about WHOM we worship.

Unfortunately, much of what passes for worship is summed up in this illustration: 

I am not sure, but I think this is a long way from “a mindfulness of God and eagerness to serve Him," as Marva Dawn says.

I realize that  worship is often a subjective experience, what lifts one person into worship of God will leave another person feeling like they’ve paid good money for a bad concert.

But we come back to Marva Dawn’s questions: “What is worship?”  Is our worship biblically formed, or does it reveal the influences of the culture that surrounds the church? What do the adjectives that you use to describe worship in your church say about your church?

Why don’t our typical Sunday morning worship services cause us to tremble? Are we really encountering God?

Why don’t our churches seem to be affecting our culture? Why do so many people who say they are spiritual want nothing to do with our worship?

I want to address a few of these questions in order to establish a foundation (at least for me) of what worship is, not what how I do it. So, if you are interested in the discussion, come back and sit a spell, and let’s talk.

 

Technorati Tags: Worship,kingdom,France