I have struggled to connect with a meaningful worship experience. I could chalk it up to my own contemplative nature in saying that if it isn't Taize then it won't work for me. But that is hardly the case. I am beginning to understand exactly what McLaren meant by a worship industry. When I was in college at the height of my "praise and worship" phase I was becoming such a clientele buying into their product. That was part of the reason I walked away from that style of music for the most part. Don't misunderstand me, I am interested and passionate about worship. Another issue I have is that the CEO's... I mean pastors... have used their 20-30 minutes of "speaching" to become more self help motivators with a Christian slant, which I am beginning to abhor.... i.e. financial well being messages, prosperity, how to have (fill in the blank).
I think you get what I'm saying. I know that this isn't the way it is in every congregation but for the life of me I can't help but to see it as the predominant structure. This is my struggle. I don't sense that there is a degree of authenticity in most settings.
The spiritual challenge of the twenty first century is to begin an exodus out of the God-dwelling space of churches to experience God inhabiting all spaces. - Edward Hays
This is where I am coming from. It's why my spirituality has become increasingly more nature oriented. Increasingly more biblical... not self-help motivational. Increasingly more contemplative.
Let's talk, cuz I won't be able to get all of this in one post nor would I want to because it has become sickening and feels less and less like abundant life.
2 comments:
I think I know what you mean. For several years now I have really felt like the worship services I have attended and, indeed, many of the 'faith' communities with which I have interacted have left me wanting something more, something else. Everything just feels so plastic (meaning synthetic). This is the main reason that I have not been actively involved in any churches or other religious communities for a while.
Unfortunately, I have also not found an alternative method of spiritual fulfillment. I have moments now and then, but I no longer have a discipline, as I once felt that I had. I know that my faith must find renewal and growth out in the world. This is the greatest challenge I am facing at this point in my life, and it is one that I sense that humanity at large will increasingly come to face as well. In a world so connected my technology, and so full of people of various faiths, how will we as a species evolve spiritually as it becomes more and more difficult for us to live in the cocoons that we have sheltered ourselves in up until now?
Okay, you've got me hooked with this discussion because I dropped in on your blog when I should have been typing up next week's bulletin (irony, anyone?)
My cheap thoughts: I think that what we call worship is a radical ***hybrid***. Could be called a syncretization or a bastardization or adaptation or heresy or whatever you want, but they're all hybrids IMHO. "Christian Worship" is the mix of both religious principles/teachings and the norms of the culture/subculture the leaders and/or community are connected with. The earliest Jewish Christians continue to meet in the synagogue until they leave or get kicked out. By my reading of Corinthians some of those believers who came from an idolatry/feasting/orgy background had a hard time not overeating and getting drunk in church... hey, it wasn't a problem when we were idol-worshippers, right? What's the diff w/ this Jesus thing? By the time of Constantine, "worship" looks damn near exactly like an Imerial enthronement ceremony complete with banners (a political and military long-distance communication tool) and robes and processions and on and on. As I understand it once the church got aligned with the state, church "services" looked a lot like state processions. Once you hit the medieval times in europe, the church is tremendously an arm of the state and a tool of the larger culture to the point that: 1. Family crests of the wealthy landowners were displayed on the chancel, 2. Significant battles Spain won were memorialized by carving them painstakingly into the choir seats, 3. Special rowed "boxed seats" were developed for the rich to sit to the front of the church (that's where we get pews from), and so on. I have seen this with my own eyes in Ireland, Spain, and Turkey.
So to me it's no suprise that in a culture that is strongly influeced by business and psychology that our leaders are expected to act like CEO's and give feelgood messages. This is just the direction lots of churches went following the builder generation's love of program and institution.
My question to anyone who would raise concerns about the cultural models that church has followed would be:
1. To what extent is a "pure" Christian worship experience possible, and to what extent can it legitimately be shaped by cultural/subcultural forces? When does adaptation, conscious or unconscious, cross the line?
2. Are my concerns about the hybridization itself, or am I simply unable to connect culturally with the cultural/subcultural influences that have shaped the worship experience? (For me, I have one foot firmly planted in my experience of "church" and one foot that dangles somewhere else because of my personal sensibilities, so I feel like I fit in a churchy setting really well... half the time.)
3. To what extent does my desire for a Christian worship gathering to "speak my cultural language" actually make me play unwittingly into the hands of our larger cultural values of specialized marketing? Or, another way, to what extent will we accept worship as a cross-cultural experience?
Food for thought - let me know if you think I'm crazy - would love to hear any responses.
On another topic, I've been thinking of a rockin' book title: Forgiving the Church. I'll write as soon as I figure out how to fulfill the title : )
Back to my bulletins
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