How does church affect our worship?

Haven't done one of these things since before the summer holidays, and a lot has been going on since then. We've had Summer Madness, I battled through Round 2 with Oxegen, and our church had our summer outreach week, JAM.

So a little overview of these things first to set the scene for something that's been on my mind.

Summer Madness was my ninth year (I think) and my third going with a group of obnoxious sods from Orangefield. We had around thirty-five young people this time round and it was a phenomenal week of worship and teaching. I confess the last couple of years I've felt less and less impressed by the festival and worried that maybe it was just me getting older but thankfully this year reassured me. Martin Smith was a total blessing in the worship and Simon Guillebaud and Duffy Robbins proved that totally different speaking styles can be equally instructive.

JAM was also a third year affair, with 50-odd people staying for 8 days in the church building and three different programmes running every day (check out the podcasts) and the answer to prayer evident throughout the week was unbelievable. The Friday night saw a massive response among the teenagers attending where our designated prayer room couldn't cope with the number of people looking to get in.

And in hindsight there's something that's been on my mind from these two spectacular events.

Anyone who's been to Summer Madness knows that the worship is some distance away from the average Presbyterian church. The songs range from dance-based bouncy numbers all the way to the epic soaring tunes (or, "Coldplay" worship) and it's very involved. There is a lot of hand-raising, people fall on their knees, the band can play for five full minutes without anybody singing anything and the atmosphere of worship is not broken or strained. It's a wonderful experience, and usually a real highlight of the week. And at JAM there was a lot of the same thing. We had a few worship sessions where people entered in in very emotional ways. There was some crying, some response through prayer etc and a lot of hands in the air.

SO WHY DOES THIS ONLY HAPPEN IN CERTAIN PLACES?

I'm not talking about how it happens a lot only in some churches, I mean among our own people. The same people who worship like this at Summer Madness largely don't on a Sunday in a church service. This isn't a problem and I'm not saying it's something that should change, it's just interesting. It seems to imply that our worship comes from a different place in one area than from another. Does it solely have to do with the way the worship is lead? Obviously there is a vast difference between the two settings; our church doesn't boast a powerful lighting show, we don't play hour-long uninterrupted sets on a Sunday morning and we don't hand-pick our worship solely with the teenage listener in mind. But if this is true does it mean that we are too heavily influenced by what happens around our worship as opposed to the worship itself?

Or maybe it's just the place in which the worship occurs. Perhaps it is easier to feel free in the way you worship when you find yourself in a crowd of 6,000 people around your own age, who you don't know, than it is in a church building in which your family and people of different generations are standing. Here the problem presented would be that people feel pressurized in the way they choose to express their worship by those around them. Worried about what would seem appropriate to people rather than before God.

I mention this simply because I enjoyed leading worship massively at JAM, always do. It's genuinely one of my favourite things about the week, seeing people respond to God freely. If you have any feelings or general musings on the subject fire away!