I recently performed a survey within the church for a college assignment, and every answer I recieved stated that the person in question was, to some degree, not engaging with the worship in our church. By this I mean, they either did not feel free to become lost in worship, they did not feel like they were meeting with God, or they did not feel the time spent worshipping encouraged them in their Christian walk.
This is a very serious thing.
And this is not simply the young people not liking some older songs or any situation like that, these responses came from a wide variety of people, male and female, young and old. Robin Mark states:
"That [God] requires our worship, totally and without wavering, is a Biblical fact."
Our worship is the basis of everything in our Christian life. Without prayer, praise and a firm understanding of the scripture (so, everything we do on a Sunday!) nothing else can function properly. Our community outreach, our fellowship, our mission work... We cannot jump to step 2 without first taking care of step 1. Well, we can, but it will soon fall apart.
A few years ago, I attended Hillsborough Bible Week and R.T. Kendall was speaking. He suggested that if the Holy Spirit were to suddenly be removed from the Christian church in the UK, that the vast majority of churches would continue without noticing a thing. This thought genuinely scares me, that a church could be so misled in it's work that it completely neglects the influence of the very God it's serving. What if that were your church?
In a situation where people are able to say that their time in worship in their home church is not enabling them to meet with God, it is a time for radical change. To me, that is not something that can be accepted and allowed to continue OR be gradually changed over an extended period of time. The latter is often how we tend to do things. We have "special services" once in a while, where we do something a little out of the ordinary. We dip a toe in rather than plunge; and for the most part, this is the better option. A lot of the time it is a bad idea to change something and just expect the congregation to be okay with it.
But I don't think that is the case here.
I don't think we can continue going about the everyday church procedures while the foundation of it isn't as it should be.
After thinking about it a great deal over the last few weeks, I would propose 2 things. They are only my own rambling thoughts which you are more than welcome to disagree with, but for what they're worth:
1.
To those who are responsible for our services. So many of our meetings involve lengthy discussions about how long services are to be, or in particular how much time is allowed for different sections of the service. If we fall into a situation where structure is our defining factor on a Sunday then we cannot expect God to get involved. Every week when the worship team meets to pray, we ask God to move, we ask Him to be the center and the focus rather than us, and we ask that the congregation can experience Him. But we're asking Him to do these things within our constraints. Our hearts are not truly desiring those things if there is uproar every time our praise runs on a little longer than it sometimes does. We need to be less worried about the rigid layout of our services. Many of the answers I got to those questions mentioned the worship feeling suffocated, that there was no room for the Spirit to move.
2.
To those who attend our services. NOBODY can make you worship. Nobody in any position of leadership in any church in the world can force you into a time of worship. If you do not come into a Sunday service prepared to meet with God, really hungry to experience His power, then it doesn't matter how the worship is led, you won't engage the way you should. Ask yourself how often you truly prepare yourself before worship to meet with God, to allow Him into every aspect of your life and to ask Him to move.
It is important to remember that we should never seek to make worship comfortable (whether leading or experiencing). That is not the aim. God challenges through worship, He pushes us and moulds us, and a lot of the time this is uncomfortable.
If you have any thoughts on this stuff do let me know.
