Worshiping worship - Part 1
Among many of the leaders of the area of the UMC which I am located in, there is a premium placed upon worship. Worship is often described as the most important thing that we do as a Church.
A previous post touched on this idea which you can read if you would like.
It is not clear to me that there is one thing in the Church that ought to be the most important thing. To say such a thing seems more of a reflection of the priorities of the person saying it than of the reflection of God's priorities for the Church.
Can we really think that corporate worship is more important than working to eradicate slavery in our back yard? Or that teaching about the message of Jesus is more important than prayer and meditation?
How can one hold one aspect of the Church above another? Did not Paul speak of the Church being a body that is made of different parts and no one part is greater than the whole? Can the hands of service tell the heart of worship that they do not need it? Of course not.
When we elevate worship above the other aspects of Church I would submit that we are in danger of moving toward an idolatry of worship. We worship worship.
From the infamous golden calf to elevating sacrifice above mercy to worshiping Cesar, the Bible shares of of many stories of humanity struggling with idolatry.
The Church also seems to struggle with idolatry in that different parts of the Church elevate one expression of God over the others. Mainline Church elevates God, Evangelicals elevate Jesus, and Pentecostals elevate the Holy Spirit. Try talking about the 'Holy Spirit' in the mainline and you will find it to be more uncomfortable than talking about 'God'.
The Trinity is a teaching about the nature of God which says, of many other things, that no one aspect of God is greater than another. Yet, our Churches fall into the idea that there are aspects of being Church that is greater than others - namely worship is the "most important" thing we do.
What if we were to take the idea of the Trinity and apply it to the Church?
The next post will explore this a bit more...
Why would you come to my family reunion?
In November of 2010 I attended a conference in which Brian McLaren noted the differences in movements and institutions
Movements are organizations which call institutions to new social gains.
Institutions are organizations which conserve the gains made by past movements.
Both are important and both are needed.
Lately there seems to be a trend in the UMC circles I move that the UMC needs to reclaim being a movement and move away from being an institution. And that language is very populist and raises a lot of "amens" from a usually silent UMC congregation.
With all the rhetoric of getting back to a movement as a denomination, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect going on with the implementation of that "movement talk."
What I mean is that is all the talk of reclaiming "movement status" we still put a lot of emphasis on the importance of the institution. That is to say we still place a ton of emphasis on the importance of worship.
While I think worship is important I am not sure it is helpful that only one aspect of the church is elevated to most important. This elevation of worship sets up a potential to actually worship worship. So you end up getting things like the worship wars.
Let me share an example I have been pondering.
You do not want to come to my family reunion. It is nothing personal about you or me, it is just when you come to my family reunion you will be subject to hear from people you do not know, about things that happened in the past to people you never knew.
Family reunions are the institutional aspect of the family movement.
Family reunions capture the stories of the past. People break break together. People recall celebrations and advances the family made over the years. (Sounds a lot like worship...)
Why would you come to my family reunion? You were not a part of the movement of my family. You were not a part of the movement when my dad followed his dream and hit many obstacles. You were not there when my grandmother and grandfather moved in with us. You were not there at graduations or birthdays.
You are not interested in the institution of my family unless you have been a part of the movement of my family. Which is why my wife, who has been apart of our family for 10 years is more comfortable at our family gathering than you might be. She has been a part of the movement of our family. She appreciates the institution and works to keep it moving.
Because we have elevated worship as the "most important thing we do" as a church, we have made the most important thing an institutional aspect of our Church. And why would anyone who has not been apart of the movement sides of the Church want to be apart of the institutional sides of Church?
So my beloved Church, let us consider that while the institution is important, people will only be interested in preserving it if they were apart of the movements of the Church.
Movements are organizations which call institutions to new social gains.
Institutions are organizations which conserve the gains made by past movements.
Both are important and both are needed.
Lately there seems to be a trend in the UMC circles I move that the UMC needs to reclaim being a movement and move away from being an institution. And that language is very populist and raises a lot of "amens" from a usually silent UMC congregation. With all the rhetoric of getting back to a movement as a denomination, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect going on with the implementation of that "movement talk."
What I mean is that is all the talk of reclaiming "movement status" we still put a lot of emphasis on the importance of the institution. That is to say we still place a ton of emphasis on the importance of worship.
While I think worship is important I am not sure it is helpful that only one aspect of the church is elevated to most important. This elevation of worship sets up a potential to actually worship worship. So you end up getting things like the worship wars.
Let me share an example I have been pondering.
You do not want to come to my family reunion. It is nothing personal about you or me, it is just when you come to my family reunion you will be subject to hear from people you do not know, about things that happened in the past to people you never knew.
Family reunions are the institutional aspect of the family movement.
Family reunions capture the stories of the past. People break break together. People recall celebrations and advances the family made over the years. (Sounds a lot like worship...)
Why would you come to my family reunion? You were not a part of the movement of my family. You were not a part of the movement when my dad followed his dream and hit many obstacles. You were not there when my grandmother and grandfather moved in with us. You were not there at graduations or birthdays.
You are not interested in the institution of my family unless you have been a part of the movement of my family. Which is why my wife, who has been apart of our family for 10 years is more comfortable at our family gathering than you might be. She has been a part of the movement of our family. She appreciates the institution and works to keep it moving.
Because we have elevated worship as the "most important thing we do" as a church, we have made the most important thing an institutional aspect of our Church. And why would anyone who has not been apart of the movement sides of the Church want to be apart of the institutional sides of Church?
So my beloved Church, let us consider that while the institution is important, people will only be interested in preserving it if they were apart of the movements of the Church.
Worship as a spiritual feeding tube?
It it not uncommon to hear the Sunday worship is that place where we go to get "fed" for the week. It is the time in which we learn and worship and are nourished for the coming week.
I have written in the past about worship needs to be more like skiing, less like football and more like soccer and even worship as going up musical stairs.
All of these metaphors have been helpful for me to discuss and think of worship, but the metaphor of being fed has never worked for me.
The only time I can imagine "being fed" is when I cannot feed myself - when I am really young and really old. Even when I order food at a restaurant, I am not being "fed", rather I am given food but I do more than just sit as another feeds me.
So when I think of worship as a place where I am "being fed" I think of a time in which I am unable to do anything and someone else (or something else) does all the work and I just sit there - unable to do anything but spit out or consume the food.
When I hear of people talk of worship as a place where they go to "get fed" I cannot help but desire to wonder at what point do we need to drop this metaphor?
My senior minister asked if I had read The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church by Alan Hirsch. It has been a while (December 2010) but I pulled off my kindle my notes and came across this little gem in light of worship:
"[People] come to "get fed." But is this a faithful image of the church? Is the church really meant to be a "feeding trough" for otherwise capable middle-class people who are getting their careers on track? And to be honest, it is very easy for ministers to cater right into this: the prevailing understanding of leadership is that of the pastor-teacher. People gifted in this way love to teach and care for people, and the congregation in turn loves to outsource learning and to be cared for. I have to admit that this now looks awfully codependent to me."
Just to clarify, codependency in this context is not a great thing.
I have written in the past about worship needs to be more like skiing, less like football and more like soccer and even worship as going up musical stairs.
All of these metaphors have been helpful for me to discuss and think of worship, but the metaphor of being fed has never worked for me.
The only time I can imagine "being fed" is when I cannot feed myself - when I am really young and really old. Even when I order food at a restaurant, I am not being "fed", rather I am given food but I do more than just sit as another feeds me.
So when I think of worship as a place where I am "being fed" I think of a time in which I am unable to do anything and someone else (or something else) does all the work and I just sit there - unable to do anything but spit out or consume the food.
When I hear of people talk of worship as a place where they go to "get fed" I cannot help but desire to wonder at what point do we need to drop this metaphor?
My senior minister asked if I had read The Forgotten Ways: Reactivating the Missional Church by Alan Hirsch. It has been a while (December 2010) but I pulled off my kindle my notes and came across this little gem in light of worship:
"[People] come to "get fed." But is this a faithful image of the church? Is the church really meant to be a "feeding trough" for otherwise capable middle-class people who are getting their careers on track? And to be honest, it is very easy for ministers to cater right into this: the prevailing understanding of leadership is that of the pastor-teacher. People gifted in this way love to teach and care for people, and the congregation in turn loves to outsource learning and to be cared for. I have to admit that this now looks awfully codependent to me."
Just to clarify, codependency in this context is not a great thing.
Be the change by Jason Valendy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.