Pastor’s Corner August 2007
Offering Something Different: Worship
After coming home from my college alma mater, Houghton, I began an intense look at the worship service in our church. There was a class that week that I went to titled, “The Worship Wars.” The worship wars refer to this growing separation between contemporary music or praise music and traditional music or hymns. Churches are continually struggling with these two ways of worship and the object of this class was not to defend one position or the other but to find a place of Biblical and Theological integrity.
In looking at churches across the country two extremes start to appear. Either churches continue to do what they always have done without noticing the changing culture around them or they morph into the culture and lose their identity as the church. Churches that never change with the culture will continue to lose their voice in the culture, shut their doors to the changes outside, and never influence those around them because their message will not be relevant. Churches that take the second approach become the culture, but they are so immersed in the culture that they lose their identity and soon you can’t tell the difference between the church and the coffee house down the street. The key is finding a balance. We need to change and be relevant to the culture around us, but at the same time not become the culture. As Rev. Dr. Michael Walters puts it, “a service in which we can engage our culture with biblical and theological integrity is key.” That is where it begins.
In light of this, the deacons and I will be taking a hard look at our worship service. We will be asking questions about each part. Why do we sing hymns? Why do we have a Call to Worship? Why is there an offertory? Is there a better way to begin worship? Is the Lord’s Prayer important for us? Are there elements that are missing? As we go through this process, we will be defining what worship really is and who it really is about.
Many times we come from a service, (I do this quite often when I’m at different churches), and we critique the music, offering, sermon, leader or pastor, and other parts of the service. One small thing takes our minds off of the reason we worship. As we go through this process we will be looking at ways to keep our eyes on God, ways at keeping the worship about him, and ways that we all can participate in the worship of Him. We will return to the primary teaching of worship and the church. We will return back to our mission statement and vision statement and align ourselves once again. We will ground the lightning rod of worship.
I want us all to be careful as we go through this process to be open to new ideas, but also relevant to our congregation. It is difficult to change worship at times because we do many things that we have done for over 50 years. Much of this process will be relearning why we do the things we do and some of it will be adding new elements or changing the form of different elements of the service.
Our end goal is to make our worship service relevant to the culture around us and engaging to all who come with biblical and theological integrity. We want our service to truly be about God and lead God’s people into the worship of God. Please be in prayer for this journey and share your ideas as you have visited other churches and services. What services did you feel you truly worshiped God and why is that? As we begin the conversation, may our worship offer something different to the world!
