I love music. I love worship. I love to worship with music. I don’t love much worship music.
We are creatures of habit, and maybe I have gone since a child, and maybe I think there may be something uniquely different about this or that gathering, or maybe I am prompted by a Spirit that is Holy, or maybe driven by my own sense of guilt that I know is not from my maker but I cannot surgically remove it from my Americana psyche, or maybe I have an insatiable desire to find good broken people seeking the I AM. I did indeed enter a house of worship, a congregation, a local body of believers, a weekend service, program, the basic idea and understanding of “going to church” this past Sunday with my wife.
We had heard of this “church” through a good couple who owns and runs the most beautiful (quality, aesthetics, taste) coffee roaster/house in our city. It is a newer church with an unattainable vision to reach every man, woman, and child in our city with the gospel of Jesus. Seemed like good people, good worship, just good in the context of a typical evangelistic worship service.
As I sat and soaked in the experience that I skip on most weekends which almost always starts with song and instruments, I wondered who is the Sunday Service for? If it was a book, the introduction begins with the act of singing worship which I believe will cause many of “the lost” to close the book before the first chapter. (I may start including myself in the lost category)
In a previous post I mention the song “The Secret of the Easy Yoke” by David Bazan or Pedro the Lion to be clear. In it he sings;
I can hear the church bells ringing
they pealed aloud your praise
the members faces were smiling
with their hands out stretched to shake
it’s true they did not move me
my heart was hard and tired
their perfect fire annoyed me
I could not find you anywhere
In it, you find the experience that many of us find on any given Sunday. It is a real worship song stating to a personal God that something is wrong with this setup, and so we are clear God, “sometimes I don’t love you at all”. This is the song I hear (it drowns out the voices in my head) during the 20 minute worship set. I cannot tell you how many churches I have been to that have found this to be the most effective amount of worship on a Sunday. Now I am pretty sure anyone who is not a regular attender, church goer, attendee for any given amount of time throughout their life, will find even 5 minutes to be foreign, odd, and bizarre at best. “The lost” rarely if ever sing songs of praise and adoration to anyone, let alone a god. So the worship part cannot be for them. To me, worship is about meeting God wherever we are at and trying to connect with him in some way. A good portion of worship is just our anger towards God for the situations of our life (King David at times used this as a method to vent and release I believe). And as Dustin Kensrue sings, he is using a form of worship that could reach those who may not know our God, but sings of a setting and structure that more could relate to.
Come all you weary move through the earth
Surrounded by rest stones and kicked out of church
A couple of loaves sit down at my feet
Lend me your ears and break bread with me
To sit and eat and talk and communicate with the divine would make life so much easier, yet we must rely on humans to translate the message of grace and love through bodies and minds of brokenness and desires of success that are less than pure. Perhaps the Sunday Service was an easier, more programmable solution to the human element. Maybe losing the human element of social connectedness (read Bowling Alone) may be what is driving “the church” towards irrelevance. And the element of unrighteousness is our flaw, it is our curse from birth, but does not separate us from God or each other. Bob Dylan worshiped through these words;
When a man he serves the Lord, it makes his life worthwhile.
It don’t matter ’bout his position, it don’t matter ’bout his lifestyle.
Talk about perfection, I ain’t never seen none
And there ain’t no man righteous, no not one.
Now this song seems like a worship song that anyone could sing and feel like they are part of something bigger. It is okay to be broken with imperfection and that in our lifetimes we may never taste the good christian life that facades on Sundays. So I wonder how we have come to where we are, but the weekend deal is not for the new but for the old, and for many of the old it feels sterilized, distant and disconnected.
I have been to many shows and concerts throughout my 32 years, and some of the best have been bands of no consequence that I paid $5 bucks to see and they sang and played with such passion and urgency that they left indelible marks on my life (thank you snapcase). I have also paid and walked out of a show 5 minutes into a bands set because they didn’t move me, and the vibe was all wrong, and the crowd was just not my crowd, and if it wasn’t going to happen in the first 5 min. the last 20 wouldn’t be much better. Not sure what “the church” should be, but it has to at least have the passion of a punk rock band.
-dan
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