When It's Time to Change Worship

In searching for a style of worship that would be sensitive to visitors, seekers, and younger generations of Christians, a pastor expressed the desire, as something new emerged, to "preserve the integrity of worship." The comment was not an afterthought for this pastor, whose integrity in ministry has often been courageous.

Clergy and laity alike recognize the challenge: how to make appropriate changes in patterns of congregational worship. Appropriateness includes several considerations, one of which is the ongoing integrity of a gathering as Christian worship. We do not want to make changes which forfeit the very nature of who we are and what we are doing.

Some preliminary considerations can clarify what the issue is not. Integrity of worship is not a choice between traditional and contemporary, between formal and informal, or between liturgical worship and anything else. Neither is it an ideal balancing or blending of those various possibilities. Traditional, contemporary, and blended services can be done with equal integrity. By the same token, any of those approaches can forfeit integrity. "Formal" and "informal" are not helpful categories, because persons have different understandings when those words are applied to worship. In any case, integrity is neither guaranteed nor surrendered by degrees of formality. And, by definition, all corporate worship is liturgical worship. Liturgy is "the public worship of God's people." To worship with integrity, however that worship is shaped, is to do liturgy with integrity.

The issue is not whether a bulletin is used, whether vestments are worn, whether creeds are recited, or whether an electronic keyboard replaces the piano or organ. Our worship can have integrity with or without any of those elements. Likewise, the arrangement of congregational seating; the use of a hymnal or a projection screen; the incorporation of drama, dance, a children's message, or choral responses — these decisions do not, in themselves, define the integrity of worship. They are not matters of indifference, of course, but must be part of a broader discussion.

Brian Wren offers a framework for understanding the attitudes which undermine our worship. "One is the lure of pragmatism (whatever gets results and draws crowds must be okay). Another is our culture's narcissism (focusing on my own feelings and emotions, instead of on God). Third, worship all too easily gets confused with entertainment (thirsting for whatever pleases and distracts us, instead of giving God our whole heart)." (Praying Twice: Music and Words of Congregational Song, p.148)

Worship is always subject to distortion by the expectations of those who plan and participate in it. No order of service has immunity. Pragmatism, narcissism, and entertainment are pervasive influences, as likely to be found in any chapel or cathedral. So integrity cannot begin with rearranging the ways of worship (which, after all, leaves us in control of the process). Integrity begins with clarifying the whys of worship, and these originate in the nature, expectations, and promises of God.

Brian Wren helps us to understand the sources of corruption, but he has not done the corresponding affirmative work: identifying the benchmarks of integrity. In a time of change we need a framework for talking about worship that does not subtly guide us toward a preferred outcome, but names the parameters within which lively discussion and creative planning can occur.

The following outline suggests four benchmarks of integrity in worship. An outline is not a formula. It can guide, but not replace, conversation within the local faith community. Neither is an outline exhaustive of the subject. It summarizes many things without elaboration. Yet an outline is useful if it helps us to ask the right questions and provides openings for discernment.

Worship should be worship.

Worship is our recognition and reverencing of the One who is worthy. Worship is faith's grace-enabled response to grace. It is an offering of loyalty — love to the God who has created us and invited us into covenant. It is the gathering of God's people before the One who has made us a people.

Because worship is worship,

• It begins at God's initiative, not ours, and is grounded in God's faithfulness, not ours.
• Its integrity lies within its own nature. It is not a means to some other end. Worship does not need to be justified by outcomes, whether pragmatic, programmatic, ecclesiastical, therapeutic, or spiritual.
• It cannot carry the full load of a congregation's life. The formation of disciples requires a broad range of practices in which people are invited and received into community, related to God, nurtured in faith, equipped for service, and sent forth in mission. Worship rehearses that process, but other settings and ministries are called for by the task of disciple-making.
• It should not render God's people passive in the very gathering in which they are most visibly God's people. It should not disempower the congregation's own praise through dependence on the latest ideas of the worship leader. A worship leader, whether ordained or not, does not stand above or apart from the gathered community. His or her gifts are part of the community's offering of itself to God.

The Theological Benchmark

Worship should be faithful to the fullness of what the church has experienced and come to believe about God.

Over time, as worship unfolds in the life of a congregation, we must honor God's transcendence and God's immanence. We must remain open to God's activity with us and for us as Father/Creator, Son/Redeemer, and Holy Spirit/Sanctifier. If God is always and only beyond us, or always and only beside us, we worship a diminished deity. Sometimes we come with fear and trembling before a God who remains Wholly Other. Sometimes we sit with complete trust at the feet of Love Incarnate. God will be who God will be!

Integrity of worship does not require that we be systematic theologians. It does require attentiveness to God. An habitual, unreflective worship, which reduces our attentiveness to God to familiar dimensions, lacks integrity.

The Anthropological Benchmark

Worship should be faithful to the fullness of our humanity.

We are commanded to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind, and strength. We love God, we worship God, with our full humanity. To come before God with overflowing hearts but distracted minds, with lively souls but indolent bodies, is an incomplete worship. To come with keen intellects but no passion, or with an energetic physical presence but a disengaged conscience, is to bring a partial self. Worship has greatest integrity when our presence before God is integral and integrated.

Yet the truth of our humanity is that we are often less than our best selves. Part of the integrity of Christian worship is that it makes a place for us in our brokenness. In worship we dare to bring our true selves before God and one another — our sinfulness, woundedness, confusion, mistrust, grief, and anger.

• Worship that is too respectable to admit those conditions is a less-than-human experience, unacquainted with the ways of the Psalmist and the Suffering Servant.
• Worship which manipulates emotions — whether of cheerfulness, fear, guilt, or enthusiasm — violates our humanity.
• Worship which narrows our thinking — reducing the mysteries of God and life to a few fundamentals, demanding belief without question — is inhuman and unloving.
• Worship which denigrates our bodies, shames our sexuality, or is silent in the face of hunger, war, and injustice, has nothing to do with the God of Israel and Jesus.
• Worship which neglects our souls through boredom, ugliness, or indifference, is worship without integrity.

The Contextual Benchmark

Worship should acknowledge the context in which it takes place.

The concern is not to make worship relevant, and therefore interesting or useful. Neither is it to set an agenda for worship based on current events. Rather, we recognize that it is always a particular people with particular joys and concerns who gather for worship. They live in a particular community with its occasions for celebration and mourning. They inhabit a moment in history which must be taken seriously. In its intercession, confession, and thanksgiving, as well as its proclamation, worship is contextualized. Again, the narratives of Israel, Jesus, and the early church are sufficient reminders: our devotion to God cannot be abstracted from the social, political, economic, and cultural setting in which we find ourselves.

At the same time, worship must not compromise the "otherness" of the church. To acknowledge a context is not to bless it.

• By declaring the Lordship of Jesus Christ, worship denies the ultimacy of other sovereigns.
• By affirming the faithfulness of God, worship declares other securities to be inadequate.
• By anticipating God's future, worship exposes the limits of progress and prosperity.
• By participating in the praise which is offered in every language, in every land, by every tribe and race, worship reveals the scandal of all dividing walls.

The local congregation is a mission outpost. Missionaries must be skilled at contextualizing the Gospel. If that does not happen in worship, it is not likely to happen anywhere else.

Conclusion

Integrity in worship begins with an awareness of the distortions which result from our expectations of worship. Integrity can be measured, though not formulated, by liturgical, theological, anthropological, and contextual benchmarks. Ultimately, integrity is a grace bestowed by God, who incorporates our stumbling words and gestures into a doxology to be perfected in the fullness of time.

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Copyright © 2004 John Middleton. All rights reserved.

John Middleton is a retired United Methodist pastor who continues to reflect on the amazing gift of life — its beauty, its sorrows, its wonderful and terrible mysteries. Often his reflections are a call to action; just as often, they are an invitation to be still. This article originally appeared in the author's regular newsletter, The Pine Tree Almanac: Encouragement for the Beloved Community (October 2004), and is published here with his kind permission. John is also a hymnwriter and some of his hymns may be found on the Discipleship Ministries worship and music website at http://www.umcworship.org. He may be reached at 41 Pine Tree Street, Lexington TN 38351-4041; telephone: 731-968-0578; e-mail: [email protected].