Theology of Worship?

A few year’s ago, I attended worship at a hot, new, up-and-coming congregation situated in a strip mall, eschewing anything smacking of “traditional” church (at least in The United Methodist system). We sang a lot of ‘contemporary’ tunes, saw a ‘post-modern’ dramatic interpretation of scripture (in mime and ‘liturgical’ dance) and heard a very funny ‘message’ that neglected to mention God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit. The only prayer offered during the service instructed us to “Leave here and be the change you want to see,” at the very end, before the band broke into a hard-rock anthem guaranteed to blast people out the doors. I had a chance to talk with the pastor and worship leader over lunch, and I asked the question, “So, what is your theology of worship?” The pastor scrunched up his brow and said, “What do you mean by that?” I explained, “what are the underlying beliefs and motivations about God and the worship of God that shape and inform what you offer as leaders?” The worship leader chimed in, “We don’t really think that way. Worship is about giving people a memorable experience.” The pastor added, “Our theology of worship is engage, inspire, entertain, and excite.”

This is just one example that illustrates a widespread condition in The United Methodist Church — a common lack of understanding of why we worship, not on the part of the congregation, but on the part of our worship leadership. In 2002, almost 4,000 churches took part in a survey as part of the study resulting in the book, Vital Signs. In response to the question about “theology of worship,” 31% of respondents (27% of pastors) “did not understand the question; 17% (20% of pastors) articulated an answer that indicated a confused understanding of the question, resulting in approximately 50% who gave an answer that left some question as to their rationale for worship. Among the answers from those 50%:

“to make people feel better about themselves and the world”
“to teach people the Bible and how to live their lives”
“our worship isn’t really about theology”
“to reach new people with the gospel of Jesus Christ”
“we give people a quality experience that makes them proud to be Christian”
“we focus more on faith than theology”
“get people on their feet, make them excited about God, and make them”
“worship is a port in the storm — a safe place away from the world”
“a time to figure out what God is all about and what He wants”
“it’s like the filling station — people come to get refueled to cope with the week to come”
“it’s what churches do on Sunday morning”

This is not meant to be cynical (much), or even overly critical. Below I will share some of the more solid, thoughtful answers that give hope. The point I am making here is that “the unexamined church is not worth attending.” If we lack a clear theology of worship, we lack a solid foundation upon which to build a community of worshiping Christians — and worship is where we make outward and visible the deepest values and expressions of our hearts.

One of the questions we asked worship leaders was, “What are the expectations around which you design worship?” (What are you hoping a person will experience who worships with you? is another way of putting it.) In the majority of cases, the expectations focused on the delivery and performance of worship leaders rather than the experience of the worshiper. The desire of worship leaders is that people will hear a good sermon, will hear good music, will feel welcome, will feel comfortable, and will want to come back (the top five answers). It isn’t until we get to the eleventh most popular answer that we find, “experience the presence of God/Holy Spirit.” The fifteenth most popular answer is “have the opportunity to praise God,” and number seventeen is “a chance to rededicate their life to Christ.” In the vast majority of the United Methodist Churches in the sample, worship is fundamentally about us, and only secondarily about God.

Many church/worship leaders offer thoughtful and provocative answers to the theology question. Among them are some seeds for thought, seeking fertile soil in which to take root:

Every week, we want worshipers to experience four things — we want them to have an opportunity to say ‘thank you’ to God, we want them to better understand God’s will for the lives of God’s people, and we want to challenge them to make a commitment to God, and we want to give them a chance to make that commitment.

Worship is about God. We don’t use worship to attract new believers; we create meaningful experiences for those who already believe — to honor and praise God. We build faith through relationships in non-worship settings, then provide times for those who are growing in their faith to worship in meaningful ways.

Our focus is on the Lord. We gather to worship the Lord. It’s not for education and it’s not about missions and programs, and it isn’t social time. We focus on God. We can do the other stuff in other settings, but worship time is the Lord’s time.

What makes the sanctuary a ‘holy space?’ We want the people who come into our church to experience the presence of the risen Christ and the power of the living God. If people don’t experience God, then we’re probably getting in the way. We try to remove anything and everything that takes anything away from a focus on God.

Everything we do, we do with the hope that it will help people pay attention to God. Our songs and choir help people sing praises to God. Our scripture reading is done reflectively and contemplatively, to allow people to think about God. Our prayer times are open to everyone, and we never hurry them. Our sermons illuminate the scriptures — they are very interesting and sometimes entertaining, but we never allow the information and delivery to replace the real meaning. We want people to come here to be with God.

There are some common elements in the responses of worship leaders who give a lot of serious thought to worship. Among them are:

worship is fundamentally about God, then about our relationship with God, and then about us
people need an opportunity to offer thanksgiving, praise, and adoration and that is the main purpose of worship
it is important to identify specific things for worshippers to receive, experience, and act upon (and ways to measure how well these things are happening)
worship is not a means to an end (as a tool for evangelism, or missions, or education, or stewardship, or fund raising, or making announcements, etc.), but an end in itself — an integrated experience of the community of faith with and for God
worship has a purpose and direction, and doesn’t just happen because “that’s what churches do on Sunday”

I am not advocating a particular theology that all United Methodist congregations should subscribe to. I am reporting that the congregations experiencing the most vital, vibrant, transformational and meaningful worship (as reported by the worshipers, not the worship leaders) are those where the leaders can articulate a clear, precise, deeply spiritual, and widely shared answer to the question “what are the underlying beliefs and motivations about God and the worship of God that shape and inform what you offer as leaders?”

The other key learning from our survey of United Methodist churches — one that is rather disturbing to me personally — is that 3-out-of-5 (62%) regular worship participants are perfectly satisfied with a “good show.” United Methodists especially like “great music,” “entertaining sermons,” “children’s choirs/participation,” “comfortable pews,” “easy parking,” and “beautiful windows,” as important elements of worship, regardless of content, subject matter, or message. These people — regular participants all — don’t really know whether there is a theology to worship or not. They have little opinion about the substance of their experience, only an opinion about whether they “liked it” or not. One of my favorite hobbies on my travels is to briefly interview congregants immediately following a worship service. I regularly ask people what they liked best about the service they just attended. (“Music” is far and away the number one answer. “Seeing friends” is number two. “Being in church” is number three. Number four is the “sermon/message.”) The other question I most frequently ask is, “What did you hear about God, and your relationship to God, during worship this morning?” One-in-five people give me a clear, thoughtful answer. About a third offer a simple, “God loves us” type of answer, regardless of whether anything of the sort was said in worship. Another third will honestly say that they don’t remember. (Within moments of the end of the service…) What is most troubling is the growing number of people who think for a moment, look puzzled, then say, “You know? I don’t remember hearing that much about God in the service.” Certainly, this is a minority response, but the fact that people say it at all is a challenge to our current status quo.

Let me say again, where church and worship leaders think deeply, clearly and intentionally about the role of worship in the life of the community of faith, it is a much more meaningful and potentially transformative experience than in congregations where it is taken for granted or just performed as a matter of course. It’s worth thinking about — seriously.

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47 responses to “Theology of Worship?”

Taylor Burton-Edwards

February 10, 2009

Yes, Dan… the notion of the musicians performing FOR the congregation… in the sense of performing to please the congregation aesthetically in some way… is a relative newcomer. In North American Protestantism, this phenomenon appears to be associated with two different movements… revivalism by the late 19th century (where musical performance was a means to an ends of moving the congregation to “decision” in some contexts), but especially the “Aesthetic Movement” of the late 19th/early 20th century, most commonly (though not exclusively) found in the more “mainline,” “liberal” and “upscale” congregations– county seat churches at the “low end” and big city “First Churches” (or their “designer church” equivalent) at the “high end.”

The revivalist use of this “means” was intuitively correct in some ways– music DOES have the power to move people to change. What is important to note here, though, was that revivalism was not using choirs for Sunday morning worship… but for its extra-congregational (one might say) evangelistic work. The whole ritual experience– not just the music– was designed, on purpose, to lead persons toward “the moment of decision.” After they had done that, THEN they might get connected to a local congregation and become part of its “regular” worship life and ministry. And there, in the “regular Sunday worship” at least for a time, one would not be likely often to see the choir, music or other elements of the liturgy “coopted” to achieve that kind of end. There worship would, generally speaking, even in Arminian settings, follow the Calvinist dictum of “the praise of God and the edification of the people”– edification not necessarily as their “consumerist” enjoyment, but rather their instruction in the faith.

The “Aesthetic Movement” was a rather different kind of animal. It was centered in congregations themselves (unlike revivalism, at least initially) and the “regular” Sunday morning experience. It, too, was intuitively correct in making a link between the “aesthetic enjoyment” of the people and their capacity to link to “the sense of the Divine.” It was a reaction against the sort of Protestant asceticism in worship that left Protestant sanctuaries looking quite plain and sensually boring, one might say. These are the folks who brought things like paraments, and processions, and banners, and art of many kinds, as continued to be found in Roman Catholic and some Anglican churches, back into the “mainstream” of Protestant worship. I think most of us are glad for these “re-contributions.”

The flipside was, however, that the metaphor for worship became much more about doing these things for the enjoyment of the people as a means to “elevate their thoughts to the Divine”… except that the “end” was often and easily lost for the means.

The “for the enjoyment of the people” meme has its analog in the current “worship experience” meme of some “contemporary” or “seeker” worship models. The notion that worship competes with compelling entertainment– such as rock concerts– may be correct on one level, but misses the point on another. Where it is correct is in noting that rock concerts ARE a form of ritual practice, and a very compelling one. What is misses is that the purpose of THAT ritual practice is fundamentally different, and often substantially at odds with the ritual practice of a Christian community. Both can generate an undeniable sense of “religious connection” which could be measured down to the neurons. But the purpose of the former is often that “high” in itself, while the flow of Christian worship does not end at the high (communion)… but the dismissal… the sending out to live as disciples and missionaries of the one we have encountered together in Word and Sacrament.

Peace in Christ…

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Taylor Burton-Edwards

February 10, 2009

Jonhyz….

Yes. Point well made.

We can’t draw any (or at least not many) straight lines between the varieties of ritual practice described in the Bible and what is practiced today. For that matter, we can’t even recover from the biblical materials themselves a complete ritual text or description for ANY ritual action of those early communities. The closest we might get to that would be the description of the Yom Kippur in Leviticus. But even there, what we have is much more in the character of rubrics (commentary on ritual action) than a “complete script.”

It gets even more “fun” if you look at what we know of early Christian ritual texts and rubrics. The best liturgical scholars will tell you that we just don’t know how accurately what has survived from that period describes actual practice, or to what degree it represents ideal practice (what folks wish would be done). And the variety in that material as well indicates a significant diversity– and sometimes incompatible divergence– of practice and theology.

And of course, we also see a similar tension in current practice, don’t we? The United Methodist Church does have official ritual texts and rubrics, plus Disciplinary language that speaks of “expecting” congregations to use them, ordination vows that indicate those ordained will, and constitutional language that states that ONLY General Conference (not pastors, not committees, not conferences, not anyone else) can establish official ritual for the church. But does that mean that actual United Methodist congregations, in reality, really follow what is “official”? No. Clearly it does not. And there are no systems in place at the current time– none– to ensure that they will or even support worship leaders who try to against those who don’t want any “official” ritual texts or practices to establish what is done in a particular congregation.

What I think we can recover, fairly adequately, from both scripture and the practices of the church over time, is what we have in fact recovered and that United Methodists and many other denominations have offered to their congregations– a basic pattern and core practices, an underlying set of practices for various rites of the church and some elaboration, based on historical models open to contemporary contexts, of how that pattern of worship might be lived out well and faithfully from place to place. While we simply cannot put too much stock in specific words and acts, we can, with some reliability, document that and how these patterns and practices have historic and biblical foundations and warrant. These are, as Gordon Lathrop puts it– a “strong center.” With a strong center such as these, very wide horizons are both possible and desirable.

The challenge comes when even the well-documented and widely accepted (ecumenically, that is) basic pattern and sets of core practices are either ignored, unknown, or intentionally laid aside for other agendas– and that with both impunity and praise.

There is a core. There are foundations, or if that word is problematic in a post-modern context, perhaps “touchstones” works better. May we all find ways to remember and faithfully embody both in worship where we find ourselves.

Peace in Christ…

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jonhyz

February 10, 2009

just another thought, why do we equate the biblical concept of worship with “worship” today – is it because it simply has the same terminology?

my guess is over the years, the word “worship” morphed from:

worship (biblical concept) -> public worship of God -> worship service -> worship music -> worship (short form of worship music)

what i fear is that we are equating worship (music) with the biblical concept of worship – which music, or even a christian gathering like a worship service CANNOT hope to encompass.

SIMPLY because we use the same term for both things. what do you think?

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1. doroteos2
  
  February 10, 2009
  
  It is fascinating to reflect on the evolving role of music in worship. Music has an ancient history of association with worship and praise, but it is only in the modern era that music shifted from a means-to-an-end to being — for many — an end in itself. Choirs originally served an important function, teaching and leading congregational singing in semi-, non- and illiterate cultures (replacing the role of cantor in many settings). It is only in more recent times that the primary function of a choir is to perform music for the congregation. There is nothing wrong with choirs offering praise in song on behalf of a congregation (though it begs the question of why the congregation can’t lift its collective voice in praise as well…), but even this motivation can become convoluted. There are churches (YOU know who you are) held captive by “professional artists” — many receiving large salaries, some volunteer — who call the shots musically, and who aren’t as concerned with theological integrity as long as they can deliver an ‘excellent performance.’ Many are of a mind that no one — including the pastor — should be able to tell them what to play and/or sing. But if liturgy — both historically and etymologically — is “the work of the people,” much of our modern worship reflects a shift from participative to representative liturgy — worship done for us rather than by us.
  Music is a powerful source of spiritual edification and inspiration. It deserves a central place in our worship celebrations, but it is every bit as important to make sure that our theology of music is as clearly understood and integrated as a theology of worship.
  
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Taylor Burton-Edwards

February 9, 2009

To the documents Dan Benedict and Dan Dick lifted up, I might also add “Worship: The Gifts of God from the People of God” (Cokesbury 2008, The Guidelines Series)– in part because of its exploration of the possibilities for embodying the basic pattern– and Gilbert, Perdew et al, “The Work of the People” (Alban, 2006)– which is (in my view) the most helpful comprehensive guide for the theology and practice of worship based on the ecumenical and ancient patterns currently in print.

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Lee Stevenson

February 9, 2009

I learned in seminary that worship is the sun in the solar system of the church: ie. all that we do radiates from our worship of God. One definition that was given for worship was: Celebrating God’s mighty deeds of salvation culminating in Jesus Christ.

I also think that music nor music style should be how we define worship. Music and music style should refelct the culture of the congregation.

It is important as well for the congregation and leaders to understand worship as a verb and that we all participate not just those up front. At this current appointment I have had people say to me, “good program”. What a program? That was not Lee’s dog and pony show!

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Daniel Benedict

February 9, 2009

it occurs to me that there is little accountability for how or “what” we worship in the UMC. that we have official ritual texts (see Book of Discipline) and General Conference recommended statements of understanding regard the theology and practice of the sacraments seems to get little attention when it comes to our episcopal leaders and the superintendents (with apologies to those who do call pastors and congregations to account). Who in the leadership of the church with appointive and superintending responsibility is asking: “Why do you worship the way you do? How does our ‘liturgy’ (see the ordination questions) shape your practice? have you led your people, especially you congregation’s leaders, in a study of By Water and the Spirit and This Holy Mystery? Do you engage the people is reflection on worship so as to improve it and to live into the meaning of gathering, proclaiming and responding, thanksgiving and communion and sending forth?”

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Dick Turner

February 9, 2009

A layman’s theology of worship – For me worship is best described in the words of the doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow.” The scripture lessons (lectionary) are an account of how God has blessed God’s people in the past. Most often God blessed them in the experiences of their daily lives, not during a worship service. It is the remembrance of these blessings in word, in song and in sacrament which is the heart of our worship experience.

In our worship, we remember God the Father, the source of blessing. We remember Jesus, the personification of God’s blessing. And we remember the Holy Spirit, the presence of God‘s blessing. This is why we pray during worship. It is a time for remembering and asking for God‘s blessing; not because God might forget us and our needs, but because we might forget God. And in our forgetting we might become separated from the Source of Blessing. We need to remember the “blessed assurance” that God’s “amazing grace” is sufficient to meet all our human needs. That is why we sing these beloved hymns. Grace is another word for God’s blessing. When we forget God and become separated from God, then we need to acknowledge (confess) our separation (sin), pray for help to do better (repentance) and prepare ourselves to receive God‘s blessing (absolution).

A worship service is a shared faith community experience. Often we share each other’s joys and woes (sometimes even during the prelude if no other time is provided.) Our worship, our rituals and our traditions are not magic formulas. They are simply ways of remembering. We worship only God; not the bible, not our songs, not the building and its furnishings, and not our various worship styles. We worship God both in the pulpit and in the pew. We worship God in spirit and in truth. We remember God’s blessings during worship and receive God’s blessings when we go out in the world. “Praise God from whom all blessings flow“.

Dick Turner

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