So there's no real singular point to this post, I'm just kind of pouring out a load of stuff that's been in my head over the last wee while and seeing if anyone has any thoughts on it.
Something which has been on my mind quite a bit of late is the issue of how we can gather an entire congregation of people into an attitude of worship. One thing which I find a bit bothersome in my church is the rigid structure most of our services are cumbered with. We would rarely have more than two songs in a row, things are dotted with short prayers, offerings and other such bits and pieces and rather than a smooth flow it always seems very compartmentalised to me. The main reason for this is that I feel much more at home when there is half an hour or so devoted to praise, when you can get lost in it and have time to do business with God. Now, on the other hand there are people in my church who can't stand that. I've heard people say that their focus wanders if we spend too much time on one thing, or that they don't like standing for such a length of time.
For example, a few months ago I led a service slightly differently, in that we didn't pick or practise the songs beforehand. We just began to play and had an extended time of praise where we just played the songs as they came. Now, after this service several people approached myself or other members of the team and said that they had loved it, while others said they felt no sense of worship at all. Fairly polarized results!
So if a church service is meant to be a body of people coming together to worship God with one voice, what do we do? How do we get past the physical things that we like or dislike?
At the risk of sounding like a naive hippy, if we are truly in an attitude of worship, intent on focusing upon only God, then these things should be in the background. The songs we sing and the way we play them shouldn't be a decisive issue on whether or not we will feel able to worship.
After that unplanned service one of the things mentioned was that people struggled to worship because the words were not coming up on the screen fast enough (obviously because there was no list of songs). My immediate reaction to this was to ask why we are okay with the fact that people are rendered unable to worship if they are not given some words on a screen to sing? But in actual fact nothing hinders my own attitude of worship more than when people lead a song differently to the way I know it. If the tune is tweaked slightly or a different word used it totally jolts me out of any form of worship. We all have comforts in our churches which have become crutches.
It seems incredibly clear to me that we must get to a point where we are able to meet with God without relying on computers, tuners and fancy resources. People all over the world rejoice in the name of God with their voices alone as this is all they have. We have been blessed with much more but we must get out of the habit of relying on them, making them the primary element of our worship.
But how do we get there? What is the first step toward letting go of earthly things and allowing God a central place in our service?
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