I was grateful to see the varied, vigorous and, I think, fruitful response to the posting on “Authentic Worship Leading is Like Authentic Preaching.” I was not altogether surprised to see discussion centered around my adaptation of Lloyd-Jones’ characteristic #5: “The worship leader must be serious, never light or superficial.” Being serious and yet “lively” (#6) and “warm” (#8) is indeed a delicate balance.
As it relates to preachers, as Lloyd-Jones points out, we must remember that the preacher is dealing with “the most serious matter that men and women can ever consider,” namely, God and the eternal state of their souls. So, too, again, I think the same could be said of the worship leader: he is dealing, so to speak, with the most serious matter that men and women can ever consider, namely, God and, in a very real sense, the eternal state of their worshipping souls.
On the seriousness-engendering nature of this stunning realization, I remember a wonderful quote I read a number of years ago from Annie Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk:
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return” (pp. 52-53).
While I whole-heartedly agree that we as worship leaders must always avoid putting on an air of somberness or austerity, posing for God-entranced earnestness, we must also remember with what – or, rather – with Whom we’re dealing. When it comes to worship, I suspect what our churches these days really need is less cheerfulness and more crash helmets.
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As I read this posting, I couldn’t help but think of the accounts we read in Scripture of those who encountered God one on One. In almost every case we are told that the immediate raction of the person in that situation was that of falling on one’s face and worshipping God. Definitely a “crash helmet” response.
And though we now live in the post-Cross world in which we, as His children, can come boldly before the throne–the One we encounter is the same awesome God that Abraham and Moses and Joshua and Isaiah fell before in worship. As a worship leader that very fact sobers me and compels me to consider seriously my role in leading God’s people in worship.
Yet at the same time I realize that God has chosen to use each of us–with our individual personalities and gifts and history–to serve Him for His glory. That frees each of us to be ourselves as we lead in worship while all the time considering the enormous privilege and responsibilty we have to bring people before the God of heaven and earth.
And what a good reminder to “remember with what-or, rather-with Whom we’re dealing.” It is the Worshipped that is to be our focus with the desire that the worshipper encounter God and grab for the closest crash helmet. May we see that as an every-Sunday reality at Calvary.
I admit that I often forget the implications about what I’m hearing, singing and saying at church. More often than I’d like to admit.
I think that means that I have a distorted and inflated view of myself and not enough fear of the God I will one day stand face to face with and give an account to, for every idle word and deeds that I never bothered to apologize for.
I also wonder – maybe if I spent more of the worship service really focusing on these hard but essential truths, that maybe I would also have a deeper and more genuine joy as I really come to grips with my true and lost condition, apart from the grace of God and sacrifice of Christ.
Ah, cheerfulness! It gets a bad rap!:-) The wonderful truth of the gospel is that it frees those under the bad shepherd of the post-modern world to know that we do not have to drag our feets and hang our heads as ones accused, as an enemy of God, that our Creator does love us and wants to walk in harmony with Him as we grow in Christ, even though we are horribly imperfect. Since this beautiful Hope of Salvation spurs us towards spiritual growth, as you pointed out in your recent sermon, I think cheerfulness (and concomitant accountability) should often be a part of our regular gathering. We have the assurance of salvation! Our Father loves us! The Spirit is Our Helper!…. so don’t live defeated lives you ding-dongs:-)!
So, I think the positive air of cheerfulness is an intrinsic part of the spiritual gift of encouragement, and should be a regular part of service (pulpit included, no?) Having said that, unconscious mindless cheerfulness can be a disservice. I think about upbeat worship songs that get me to singing things that just aren’t true, such as when I find myself singing things such as ” I always follow you” or “I pray to you every morning” or something like that. It’s upbeat, it’s cheerful, but you know, it’s a lie. Worse, it encourages me to think that well, God won’t mind the sin if he knows that my heart really sings for Him. Riiight….
So if I can make a football analogy, you don’t want the cheerleaders to run the football team, but you don’t want the referees either, since they’ll just remind you of all your idiotic mistakes. But this is coming from someone who didn’t mind Rick Warren’s Hawaiian shirts on Sunday mornings..
I’ve been chewing on this . . . what are the implications of Jesus saying that the worshipers he appreciates are those that worship in spirit and in truth?
I wholeheartedly agree with the sense of awe that should overwhelm our worship. It’s interesting, though, for me to observe what different people think “awe” *looks* like. And I don’t mean just in a superficial sense… how does the worship leader express awe/wonder/fear/joy/etc. to the congregation, and how does the congregation also express that in a worship service?
This is an area where I think we need to deal with contextualization: the eternal truths of God’s work are immutable, but the time/place/culture in which we live is not. In early Biblical times, grief was reasonably expressed by tearing one’s clothes and sitting in an ash heap; today, that would be looked at as lunacy, but there ARE ways to express the same level of grief in a way that communicates the same information in a currently relevant way.
The contextualization of a worship service, though, is tricky. The awe of Christian worship is (or should be) absolutely unique… there is no comparison in secular or even other religious arenas to being offered a personal relationship with a God who chose to live and die among us and for us.
So what does the “crash helmet” actually look like? It’s not the *ultimate* question in worship, but it is an important one. And, fortunately, I think that there are many many many possible answers. I’d just suggest that some of the tests that I use are:
+ Does the service ultimately focus on God, or on the content of the service (e.g. does the musicianship cause people to think about the music, or does it inspire them to focus upwards)?
+ Does the service have a horizontal component; does it allow the congregation to do things *together* in honoring God as opposed to being a group of individuals who happen to be in the same room? (I sometimes use congregational prayers to this end?)
+ Would a non-Christian who attends the service feel like that are being graciously ushered into the presence of God, or would they feel like they are an outsider looking at an impenetrable religious rite? (i.e. can they understand all the language and engage with the service content, even if they’re not yet ready to buy into it?)
And no, this is not an exhaustive list, just a for-the-sake-of-a-blog-comment list.
I have been in many worship services (at Calvary, as well as other places) that I think fit this description, yet look wildly different. Some have been very somber in tone, some very celebratory. I’ve experienced this with a single guitar, or with a full-on rock band. I even think that Rick Warren’s Hawaiian shirts can be part of such a service (though someone should direct that man to a tailor!).
The question, in my mind, is not style… it is content and whether or not the service actually takes you somewhere, whether or not it leads you into the presence of God.
Where worship services fall short is when they are prepared with the intent of simply getting everyone on the same page and excited about *being in church*. I think that this is a good feature of a service, but it is hardly sufficient in and of itself.
The crash helmet analogy is good in this regard… as a worship leader, am I trying to usher people to a place that is dangerous? Danger is good, when we know that we are working with an immovable safety net. Risk of exposing our innermost selves to God and to our neighbor is possible, but it is only advisable within the context of an assured relationship with the creator of the universe… not matter how bad the crash, our God is there! As the famous C.S. Lewis description of Aslan states, He is not safe, but He is good.
Now what if you do not have that assurance? Well, that is why I try to make sure that there is at least one basic summary of the gospel in each service, and why I most highly value teaching that ultimately points every passage and every application back to Jesus. It is a crucial reminder to “mature” Christians that their foundation is found in Christ (not their current godly behaviors) and it explains to non-Christians how we can dare to approach the God of the universe with such freedom, and invites them in.
Sorry, I think the comment has not gotten twice as long as the original blog post (Todd, that is a compliment that it engenders such thought!).
So, one final note to AlexG. You are correct that many songs include lyrics that are not true of us (this past week, for example, had “Every day, it’s you I live for / Every day, I follow after you”). If you read the Psalms, though, there are a number of them where they what I’ll call the “O my soul” psalms… where the psalmist is essentially preaching to their own heart about the things that he knows to be true but needs further encouragement to make true in his life. Well, that’s how I view these songs: we are singing to God stating, essentially, “This *should* be true of my life, I know You are worthy of it, and I want it to be true even though it is not now”. I find these songs to be extremely valuable in a congregational setting, because we are also singing to one another… encouraging each other, and declaring something we can hold one another accountable to. I try to encourage people to sing with that thought in mind. You are right, though, that this requires mindfulness to approach it in this way. And I’m also a big fan of including corporate confession so we don’t leave the service without pondering our own brokenness the entire time! OK, done for now…
By the way, who is doing the sketches? Nice touch…
It is wonderful to see the issues of seriousness, somberness, cheerfulness, being thought about and written about so thoughtfully as it applies to preaching and worship. I thank God for you all, and encourage you for your hearts and minds will only continue to bless the kingdom, Calvary and those around us through the wise dwelling on these things that matter so much. I hope my comments are always taken in the context of that great appreciation. Thank you Pastor Todd for the blog, and thank you G-Mac for your graceful and very thoughtful response to my above comment. I see and appreciate your point about the issue of attitude leading behavior through certain worship songs, and the example of Psalms, although I still wrestle with it. But just in these beginning days of this blog, I get a window into the myriad decisions necessary for planning service at church, and the responsibility borne by leadership. So many thoughts to consider, so much mindfulness to mind! No wonder we all need the Spirit so:-) !
What does it mean to worship the Father in spirit and in truth? What a great question. I think cheerfulness does get a bad rap, but I also think reverence gets the same bad rap. For some reason, neither is considered particularly authentic. Let me offer two examples. One: It is easy to misinterpret reverence in traditional worship as insincere austerity or empty religious formality when in reality it is a manifestation of how we honor the importance of gathering in corporate worship before the throne of God. Two: It is equally easy in my view (because I’ve been guilty of it myself) to misinterpret handraising or other responses during contemporary worship as merely being overly-emotional or putting on a fake happy-face/voice when in fact it is celebrating our victory over sin and death by the blood of Christ. It is easy to be critical, easy to find excuses not to participate “in spirit and in truth.”
I think the responsibility of the worship leader is in two parts, planning and leading. As for planning, the first thing I do is read the scripture for Sunday’s sermon, the second thing I do is pray. I don’t know all the contemporary leaders personally, I imagine they all do the same. As for the leading part, it is important to consider all the things that Todd brought up as well as the things that have been added by the various bloggers. It seems to me that the most important aspect of the worship leader is that he/she is authentic, allowing the Holy Spirit to His work through the person that God has created.
Leading worship is a sobering thing, one person planning the weekly worship experience for hundreds. This 26-year old is sobered up by that every week. Part of me wants to delete this whole thing and forget blogging altogether because I’m not sure what is right and what is wrong, and it’s easy to read opinion as truth. What I know is that I’d rather be myself than anything else, and I’d like to think that God would agree with that. Lord, “Make me a servant today” and everyday.
My main concern with Sunday worship at Calvary is that many of the songs are not worship songs. They are prayer, fellowship or repentance songs. Let’s focus on songs that worship Him on Sunday mornings. If we lift our issues, regrets and problems to him throughout the week, then we can give Him an hour on Sunday that is focused primarily on Him, not our unworthiness or lack of preparation.
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