Worship - out of the dark into the light

In the introduction to "Give Praise to God, A Vision for Reforming Worship," Philip Ryken describes how the late Dr. James Boice (who died in 2000, and in whose memory the book was written) was (rightfully) troubled by what he saw happening in the contemporary church. Ryken writes:

"Given the priority that he placed on honoring God in our worship, Dr. Boice understandably was troubled by the shift from God-centered to human-centered worship in teh contemporary church. Particularly in last years of his ministry, he believed that many (if not most) Christians had forgotten the meaning of true worship. In seeking to explain this unfortunate phenomenon, Dr. Boice observed the following connections between contemporary culture and the evangelical church: 1) Ours is a trivial age, and the church has been deeply affected by this pervasive triviality; 2)our is a self-absorbed, human-centered age, and the church has become, sadly, even treasonably self-centered; and 3) our age is oblivious to God, and the church is barely better, to judge from its so-called worship services.

In Dr. Boice's view, the result of God's dramatic disappearance from Christian worship could only be a catastrophic loss of divine transcendence, not only in our worship, but in every aspect of Christian life. The Cambride Declaration he helped to produce gave voice to his concern:

Whenever in the church biblical authority has been lost, Christ has been displaced, the gospel has been distored, or faith has been perverted, it has always been for one reason: our interests have displaced God's and we are doing his work in our way. The loss of God's centrality in the life of today's church is common and lamentable. It is this loss that allows us to transform worship into entertainment, gospel preaching into marketing, believing into technique, being good into feel good about ourselves, and faithfulness into being successful. As a result, God, Christ, and the Bible have come to mean too little to us and rest too inconsequentially upon us."

These are concerns that we share at our church and it is lamentable that, as our contemporary culture has an ever-increasing influence on the way in which we think, such concerns are often dismissed as merely the thinking of those who are trapped in the archaic forms of the past and are not sophisticated or mission-minded enough to emerge from those "dark ages" and embrace the new wave of "true" worship.

The irony is that I firmly believe that the opposite is true.

Now on my third church plant, I have experimented with various church forms and worship styles. In past works I had read all the latest church growth books and tinkered with the latest fads. During corporate worship I have (I am now embarrassed to say) done the dramas, the comedy-style routines, the videos, the puppet shows. There were Sunday mornings in which I laughed until I cried over our antics and was under the impression that this was "good," this was "real," this was community lived out to its fullest.

But while what I gained was a "fun" church experience, what I lost was a vision for God's transcendent glory.

What I gained was what I wanted, but what I lost was what I needed.

And that is the tragedy. The more you spoon feed people what their itching ears want to hear, the less they want what they should want- and the pastors are right there with them. Suggest that there should be more prayer and more Scripture in churches today and many pastors, let alone congregants, recoil at the idea. But, please tell me, Scripturally speaking, what should we then have more of? And if the Scriptures aren't speaking to us in these matters, pray tell, who is?

And when you downplay Scripture, when you downplay prayer, when you substitute songs of theological depth with ditties that sound like a teenage lovers crooning to one another, when you are more concerned with entertaining people than glorifying God, then, I contend, you have now left the light and have entered the dark.

I've been there. And while it satisfies for a moment, it does not equip for a lifetime.

More on this later.....