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Earlier this month my son and I had plans to see the Vancouver Canucks play the Florida Panthers on a Sunday evening. This was a big event in our part of the world as it marked the first meeting of two teams who were involved in a block-bluster trade earlier in the summer. Kirk was also anxious to test out the new telephoto lens he had got for Christmas. We were looking forward to the game. A few days before that Sunday, Kirk got a call from his soccer coach to say that their game had been moved to Sunday morning at 10am, just the time of our church’s morning service. Normally, that isn’t a big deal for us, because our church repeats the morning service in the evening, but this time the evening service conflicted with our plans to go to the hockey game.
How you might be willing to respond to this little case study might depend upon how old you are, what generation you belong to, and how you understand your ecclesiology. The practice of corporate worship within the local church has changed dramatically within my own lifetime. The church I grew up in was very traditional. To borrow the language of computer software, we might call that version 1.0. The churches I have led have been marked by the influence of the seeker-sensitive movement. Call that version 2.0. The churches my students want to pastor are missional and emerging. Call that version 3.0. In each case, the response to my son’s case would be markedly different.
1.0 Sunday is Sacred
For the traditional church, version 1.0, Sunday is sacred. The idea that my son might not attend church because of a soccer or a hockey game would have been unthinkable – a sign of weakness in his father’s spiritual life. Sunday worship took priority over everything. Sunday, according to this paradigm, was Sabbath, a day of rest set aside for contemplation of God, though how much of that contemplation actually took place could likely have been questioned.
“But it’s boring,” someone might say. “Boring?” the answer comes. “What do you mean by boring? What has boredom got to do with anything? This is not about entertainment. This about coming before God to worship him and hear his Word. You don’t have to enjoy this. Boredom is not relevant.”
Garrison Keillor describes being raised in such an environment. “For me, there was nothing before. I was born among the born-again. This living room so hushed, the Brethren in their customary places on folding chairs (the comfortable ones were put away on Sunday morning) around the end-table draped with a white cloth and the glass of wine and loaf of bread (unsliced) was as familiar to me as my mother and father, the founders of my life. I had always been here.” For Keillor, there was no motivation or relevance for worship. It simply was. In my own experience, this kind of worship often was boring. I knew that I was supposed to be there, but I didn’t always understand why. I remember how that Sunday evening services could be particularly excruciating.
The traditional approach to Sunday worship did not require a lot of creativity or original investment. Originality, in fact, would be viewed as suspicious. The patterns of worship were long established and not to be toyed with. Sunday worship was the obligation of believers, regardless of whether it was in fact achieving any particular purpose in the lives of those who participated.
2.0 Sunday is Central
The hold of the traditional church began to diminish with the growth of the seeker church, version 2.0, of which it could be said Sunday is central. That my son might miss Sunday worship would not be seen as sacrilege, but it might indicate that the value of Sunday worship had been somehow lost – a situation that could be addressed through more compelling worship. Sunday might not be holy in the legalistic sense, but it is central in the sense that it is a primary opportunity for corporate worship and discipleship. In this paradigm, the worshipper is seen as a consumer. Sunday worship, then, needs to be compelling so as to attract the interest of a person who could be distracted by other opportunities. In the case of my son, the goal would not be to question the depth of his (or my) spiritual commitment. It would be, rather, to create better worship services that would be potentially more attractive than the hockey game or soccer match.
“What, you’re bored?” the worship leader asks. “Well that is a real problem. We have to do something about that, because it would be sinful to offer something as meaningful and dynamic as coming together into the presence of God and for people to find that it is boring. We have to work harder to make sure that our worship services properly reflect the excellence and the attraction that would be fitting of the God that we serve.”
Of course, the problem with this approach to worship is that it readily becomes consumeristic, a performance-based approach to worship. Mark Driscoll describes trying to build a new church from among such people. “I soon tried to spend my time with the participants in our mission rather than with the observers or consumers of our church. I continually repeated our mission each Sunday from the pulpit … so that the people who stayed in our church understood that they were not welcome to bring any other agenda. The problem was that many of the people who came to the church had been sucking the life out of various program-driven, seeker-sensitive churches for years and ended up being basically worthless for mission. Week after week, they would walk in to see that we did not have the program they wanted, and then walk back out, never thinking that perhaps they should serve Christ and build a ministry. The college kids and singles who had sucked resources out of youth groups and parachurch ministries for their entire life without serving or giving were generally just more dead weight to drag around.”
The seeker approach to worship helped to revitalize a needed concern for lost people in its desire to open up the doors of the church to people who had lost interest or who had become bored by church. To that end it was welcome. Preachers and worship leaders became concerned about excellence in the production of a vital worship experience. Perhaps predictably, this created the sense that going to church was not much different that going to a hockey game. The problem is that for many churches, that kind of competition was a little too steep.
3.0 Sunday is Secondary
A new approach to worship is “emerging,” version 3.0, for whom Sunday is secondary. Whether or not my son showed up for worship on Sunday would hardly even seem an issue for people in this category. Worship can happen any day of the week, Sunday included. But the day of the week and the form of the worship is secondary to the fact that worship happens. If my son never worshipped or didn’t have a heart for worship, that would be a problem, but the fact that he chooses to be with friends in his community and spend quality time with his father on a Sunday evening might actually be a sign of spiritual vitality and not of weakness.
“I’m not surprised you’re bored in church,” such a one might say. “Performances usually do get boring after a while. The Christian life is not about being in church anyway, it is about being in Christ, and being is never boring. We want to get beyond boredom to a place where our worship is so authentic that it engages rather than bores.”
Of course even the emerging church still has church – at least they gather somehow, somewhere, though it often feels different than what many of us have come to expect from a worship gathering. Mike Yaconelli writes, “Churches are not glistening cathedrals filled exclusively with beautiful Cinderellas. Churches are noisy, rollicking madhouses filled with yelping, dancing, barking pigs who follow the real Cinderella wherever he goes. Churches are not only awe-inspiring, they are odd-inspiring, attracting an earthy assortment of Jesus’ followers. The stained glass is extraordinary, but it is also covered with ordinary fingerprints. Dirt from the fields is scattered on the glistening marble sanctuary floors. Hanging in the air throughout the cathedral of Christ is the heavenly smell of incense mingled with the piggy fragrance of sweaty, commonplace messy disciples.”
If that doesn’t sound like your church it could be because you don’t know your people well enough. Or it could be because you don’t have room for real people in your church.
What We Should Keep – What We Should Lose
Obviously, there is something to be gained and something to be lost from each of these expressions of church and Sunday worship. For what it’s worth, I would suggest the following:
1.0 Keep the humility – lose the hubris
The thing I love most about worship within the traditional church is its sense that we worship a sovereign, holy God and that we come together before him to submit in humility. I love the sense of responsibility that acknowledges the priority of meeting with God in his presence. Oxymoronically, however, the thing I like the least about this approach to worship is the hubris – the arrogance that seems to suggest that there are prescribed forms for this kind of worship and that everything else must quite literally be damned. There sometimes seems a kind of hubris that disdains attempts to make our preaching and our forms of worship more accessible to seekers. I agree that we are the church and we need not apologize for expressing the distinctives of a Christian culture. Yet this does not give us room to act disdainfully toward others where there is room for us to be accommodating.
Here’s what I would encourage that we do: we need to raise our sense of expectation. This is an event in God’s presence. Every time we come together we ought to be looking for Isaiah 6. Each time we come to worship – each time we preach – we ought to be looking for the doorposts to start shaking. We ought to be looking for the earth to move beneath our feet. We’re here to meet with God and when that happens it is way beyond boredom.
2.0 Keep the purpose – lose the performance
I love the sense of purpose that you find in the seeker-driven church. These churches are hyper-focused on delivering excellence to the glory of God and for the purpose of attracting and winning people who need to know Jesus. I wouldn’t ever want to give less than my best for Jesus and I want everything I do to be for the purpose of his glory. Yet, I would be pleased to jettison the sense of performance that seems to follow almost automatically. My preaching and worship is not a performance designed to gain the praise of people though it may be done well so as to raise the interest and attention of these people.
My counsel here is that we would raise the sense of investment that we make in the presentation of our worship and our preaching. Haddon Robinson reminded us that the person-hour investment that is made by a congregation more than justifies a significant expenditure of time and energy on our part to make sure that we are offering the best that we have available. My father led worship for many years in the church I grew up in. I remember he was good at it, but I don’t remember him putting in the kind of time that worship leaders do today. Now we have full-time employees dedicated just to that task.Now we have a full-time employee dedicated just to that task. I think it’s a worthwhile investment from a time-management perspective. This is the one time in the week when everyone gathers all at once, every week. Most leaders long for such an opportunity.
3.0 Keep the mission – lose the myopia
I love that church could be missional – that we could lose the institutional nature of the church in favor of a forward-looking, Jesus-centered, mad pursuit of the mission Jesus calls us to, whatever that means in terms of practice or wherever it is that it might take us. Hebrews 10:25 reminds us of the need to not give up meeting together but the nature and location of that meeting could be negotiable as long as we are getting after the mission. At the same time, I could live without the myopia that derives from a hyper-individualized approach to experience, participation, and authenticity. “Being real” does not always mean we’re being right. Besides, mission isn’t about me – it’s not about fixing our lives or learning the latest in self-help. We’ve got Oprah for that. When we gather we come together to meet with God and to serve his mission.
Here I would call us to a stronger sense of collaboration. In my work as a homiletician, I have found it helpful to remind my students that they are not the preachers. God is the one who is speaking and our task is just to help these people listen. It is a tremendous help for me to realize that I am a listener too – I’m a worshipper – with the advantage of a head-start perhaps, but I’m one of the crowd just the same. There are wonderful things that happen when we learn to lead each other toward good things that please God’s heart. We’re all in this together.
A Place Beyond Boredom
In the end, my son played soccer and I took him to the hockey game that evening. I’m sorry if that disappoints you. We’ve had a lot of snow lately and so his team has missed a lot of games. Kirk was able to live out the values of commitment and loyalty to his team. In the evening I was able to live out my responsibility as a father. Among other things we had a long conversation about how he could please God through his relationship with his girlfriend. The next week I fulfilled another of my parental responsibilities by taking him to be with God’s people. He sat there and heard me preach and he was pleased to be there. My son loves Jesus. I watched him stand in worship, eyes closed, concentrating on the presence of his God.
As it happened it was Sunday. He certainly didn’t seem to be bored.