This is a guest post by LifePoint’s worship leader Tyler Greene.
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Over the past year at LifePoint, we’ve grown significantly in our worship. In fact, when it comes to our culture of worship, I believe we, as a church, currently find ourselves in a paradigm shift; our congregational life is evolving. We aren’t where we were six months ago, and by God’s grace, we will continue on this trajectory. Because of this, I wanted to share some relevant thoughts in order to
- Celebrate God’s work among us
- Guard us from the ever-present error
- Encourage us to keep seeking encounters with his presence
For I’m convinced that God has done much among us, but I’m equally convinced that he desires to do more. And for us here and now, the greatest enemy of “more” is perhaps the misperception that church provides entertainment for a consumer culture.
I rejoice at the fact that on the whole LifePoint Church does not see worship as a consumer event. I am inspired and encouraged by our gatherings because I truly believe that Christ is supremely treasured and the Holy Spirit is invited to take the leading role in our worship experiences. However this does not mean that we are immune to our culture’s broken understanding of what a worship gathering is supposed to be. We always need to be on guard against a consumeristic understanding of church. The world is too enticing and Satan is too crafty for us to neglect this. As a church body, we are called to relentlessly defend our experience of worship.
When it comes to our worship gatherings, God has called LifePoint to be a community of participants. To give clarity to what I mean here, I beckon upon an analogy that worship pastor Isaac Wardell uses to drive this point home. Wardell talks about the worship gatherings of the church by using the comparison of a concert hall versus a banquet hall. When we enter into a concert hall, we enter as passive observers who have come to have our expectations met with a good performance. On the other hand, when we enter into a banquet hall, we enter into a community gathering, ready to participate and share an experience together.
In the Bible, the gathering of the church is more like a banquet hall than a concert hall. In his book Rhythms of Grace, worship pastor Mike Cosper articulates this well by saying, “The church comes together with the expectation of participating by giving and receiving. There’s an expectation that members gather with work to do.” The New Testament includes a wide variety of ways this kind of experience is carried out—praying with and for the community (Acts 2:42; 1 Cor. 14:16; 1 Tim. 2:1), reading the Scriptures aloud (Col. 4:15; 1 Thess. 5:27; 1 Tim. 4:13; 2 Pet. 3:15-16), preaching from the Scriptures (Luke 4:20; 1 Tim. 4:13; 1 Tim. 3:15-17, 4:2), serving the Lord’s Supper (Acts 2:42, 20:7), singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (1 Cor. 14:15; Eph. 5:19; Col. 3:15-16; Rev. 5:9-13), giving tithes and offerings to resource the advancement of the gospel (2 Cor. 9:11-15; Phil. 4:18; Heb. 13:16), responding to praise and prayer by saying “Amen” (Rom. 1:25; 1 Cor. 14:16; Eph. 3:21), to name a few.
So the question is, How do we preserve a banquet hall culture of worship? Well firstly, we need to fully reject the notion that the worship gathering is in any way a consumerist event. Rejecting the consumeristic approach to worship isn’t a personal quest; it’s extremely corporate, for it doesn’t only require us to have our own misperceptions corrected, but to also lovingly correct those among us who continue in misperception.
Secondly, we must gauge our participation in and expression of worship according the Scriptures and not simply according to our varying backgrounds, traditions, preferences, and comfort levels. I’m not against tradition; I believe it has its place, but I also believe that nothing does more damage to the worship culture of a church than expectations and ideas that are divorced from the Bible’s teachings on the identity of a worshiping community. Therefore, we must first and foremost be students of the Word of God, so we might know what posture of heart we are to bring into our gatherings and how we are called to express that heart-posture as a congregation. By doing this we will avoid the error of perceiving our personal preferences as dogma.
Thirdly, we should arrive prayerfully and expectantly, allowing God to be sovereign over us. Coming to church this way enables us to be sensitive to the Spirit’s movement among us, making us available to be used for his good purpose. The New Testament provides several examples of people who were sensitive to the Lord’s leading and were used mightily for the glory of God. In his book Worship and the Reality of God, John Jefferson Davis reminds us of this kind of willingness when he says, “When I walk through the doors of the church, I need to change my mindset and remind myself: I am not in control; I will go where God wants to take me; this is not about “consumption,” this is not about “entertainment,” but about the praise and presence of God…”
What would it look like if we were to give ourselves fully to preserving a banquet hall culture of worship by taking these simple measures? I wholeheartedly believe it would be cataclysmic. There are two reasons why I am sure of this:
- I believe God always finishes what he starts; he began a good work among us as a worshiping community eight years ago, and he didn’t lead us this far in order for us to stay where we are.
- God always rewards the faithfulness of his people. We can be sure that, if we are faithful to pursue him together, glorious experiences of worship lie ahead.
So let’s seek to be used in order to continue what God began in us. We have been sovereignly placed here in this time and place. That wasn’t an accident; God did it for a reason. He did it so that he might do something great among, within, and through us, for the glory of his great name. So together let’s participate in celebrating what he has done and looking forward to what he will do. And all God’s people said…
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