The fallacy of "getting something out of worship"

In Worship, her 1936 classic, Evelyn Underhill drew a decisive distinction between private prayer and corporate worship. Prayer is an asking, Underhill argued, worship an offering. In prayer we petition God's mercy for our own sin and misery even as we beseech His interceding grace for the sins and miseries of others. In worship, by contrast, we seek to give God honor and praise for His unsurpassable worth: His worth-ship.

Like all sharp differentiations, this one is overdrawn. Surely gratitude to God is an essential part of prayer, even as confession of sin and seeking God's pardon are intrinsic to worship. Yet Underhill is right that the essence of worship lies in its impracticality, its needlessness, even its wastefulness. We do not engage in it to gain any obvious "good" but to grant all glory and blessing to God.

Traditional worship usually fails to offer God the adoration He is due. Rather than placing us actively in the presence of the Holy One, it often turns us into passive observers of a pathetic spectacle: hymns sung with neither conviction nor energy, ill-worded litanies listlessly recited, confessions enumerating the political sins of others and sermons that substitute storytelling for biblical and doctrinal proclamation. Many churches are seeking to rectify such failures in traditional worship and to increase the dwindling number of worshipers by resorting to "user-friendly" methods. Rockband "praise teams," jeans and T-shirts as the preferred method of dress, sermonettes devoted to human-interest topics, and videos and other multimedia presentations having to do with practical problems are the means of worship designed to "reach people where they are," to enable the unchurched to overcome their allergy to institutional religion, to win over the young who have not been nurtured in traditional hymnody and preaching, and thus to save dying churches from their moribund condition.

Despite their much-touted success, most contemporary forms of worship are, I believe, premised on a deadly fallacy: the notion that the value of worship depends on our "getting something out of it." Christian faith is indeed meant to benefit human beings, to transmute our wretchedness into a life of joy and service. But the slow process of our liberation and transformation in Christ, insofar as it is meant to serve humanity, occurs not in worship but through the various ministries of outreach. There the church seeks to meet people's needs, serving them where they are. Weekly study groups, prayer meetings, summer camps and weekend retreats, community service and work projects, Meals on Wheels and Habitat for Humanity, skits and mimes, puppets, and even the trite repetitions of so-called praise music, can all be used for outreach. If we neglect to engage in outreach and to school believers in the rudiments of the faith, we have denied our Lord's commission to take the gospel to all the world.

The things we do in outreach are not, however, the things we should do in worship. Because it should express the glory of God, worship should minister to people where they ought to be. There we seek not to have our needs satisfied but to have them redefined in light of the Cross and the resurrection.

One of our most insistent human needs, for example, is the desire for happiness. Yet worship that turns our attention away from our own desires and to the glorification of God teaches us that we are meant not to be happy but joyful. Happiness depends on our outward circumstances, while joy springs from a right relationship to both God and neighbor even amid miserable conditions. In worship we celebrate and participate in this restored relation, which is our redemption. Discussing our marriages, watching film clips about Nicaragua, or seeing skits about overcoming depression are not acts of worship. Such devices belong to other occasions. In worship we need hymns that have dignity, confessions and prayers that have depth, sermons that edify rather than gratify the whole service thus magnifying and glorifying Jesus Christ. As S0ren Kierkegaard said so sharply about the church in his own day, anything less makes a fool of God.

Can worship become selfish?

It also makes fools of us. There are the fools whom the psalmist describes as consciously declaring that there is no God, and these are the fools who unconsciously worship God as if He were not God. A deep atheism lurks in contemporary worship. When we cease to believe in what the old Book of Common Prayer called our "bounden duty" to give glory and honor to God, worship becomes a selfish seeking after our own good. It becomes a human-centered occasion for entertainment rather than a God-centered summons to high praise and holy living.

This is evident in the many old-line churches where an aggressive informality now reigns. Its unconscious ritualism contains its own rigidly stylized features: the pastor or priest's call to worship by way of a friendly "good morning," the frontal hugs (during the exchange of peace) that would bring sexual harassment charges in other settings, the vigorous applause that follows the choir or soloist's performance, the raucous laughter evoked by the preacher's one-liners.

Similarly, the current mania for "dressing down" for worship openly flouts Jesus' parable of the wedding garment, which teaches us that we are not meant to dress like boors at the wedding banquet of the King. The command to cast the dressed-down man into outer darkness (Matt. 3:13) makes clear the connection between garments and God. Casual dress reflects the notion that these people have an easy regard for God. Such a casual relation to God is worse than no relation at all. It is a terrible dis-relation because it deceives us about the most fundamental matters: the nature and character of the triune God. There is nothing comfortable about His redemption of the world's evil. Worship should reflect our own deep discomfiture with sin, even as it enables us to declare the joy of salvation. Though worship need not be somber and morose, neither should it be silly. If wit and irony are present, they should be theological rather than trivializing. As G. K. Chesterton liked to say, nothing is worth believing that we cannot treat with great gaiety.

Can life before God be frivolous?

By contrast, to have the choir wave its greeting to the congregation---as the once-staid Presbyterians now do---is to make our life before God seem a frivolous business. Such carelessness about holy things makes both the manner and the matter of our worship gimmicky, faddish, and tacky. It's church lite, a dumbing down of worship that is all the more deadly for seeming so soothing. This new nonchalance in worship reveals our secret unbelief: our conviction that the maker and redeemer of the cosmos is a friendly fellow rather like ourselves in short, a false god whom we have made in our own likeness.

"What all these changes add up to," Peter Berger observes about such contemporary styles of worship, "is the statement that nothing extraordinary is going on, that what is happening is a gathering of ordinary people enjoying the experience of community." Berger applies the scalding phrase "the triumph of triviality" to the new insouciance in worship.¹

At the risk of committing my own alliterative sin, I would call to the new nonchalance about worship a sacerdotalizing of the sentimental. Flannery O'Connor once declared that sentimentality is to religion what pornography is to art. They both commit sacrilege against truth by seeking shortcuts to the real thing. Sentimental Christianity denies the hard road of the Cross, the rocky path we must tread if we are to work out our redemption in fear and trembling. Pornographic art disconnects sex, O'Connor argues, from its true procreative and communicative purposes, making it an experience for its own sake.

Can worship be sentimental?

Sentimentality is an excess of emotion built on a false estimate of its object, C. S. Lewis observes. True sentiment, by contrast, esteems things properly, loves them rightly, orders them truly. To modify what Lewis says about great works of art, real worship should instill "just sentiments" toward God and the world: "to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likable, disgusting, and hateful." ² We must be trained in true sentiments, Lewis argued: They do not come naturally. Proper worship is one of the chief means for schooling Christians in the unsentimental love of God.

Much of popular worship, even in traditional churches, promotes a dreadful sentimentalism in faith. I am not the first to wonder whether "In the Garden" and "Love Lifted Me" are unintentionally sexual hymns. I recently witnessed a more direct link between the sentimental and pornographic in contemporary worship. Some of my students had invited me to attend one of their Friday evening worship services. As these earnest evangelists belted out the banal lyrics and bouncy tunes of their praise songs, one young man began to gyrate his hips in a sexually suggestive way. An embarrassed student leaned over to whisper his apology to me. I told him that such pelvis-pumping in church revealed an honest consistency with the mood of the music and the atmosphere of the service. Their thoroughgoing sentimentality unconsciously prompted a pornographic response.

Paul may have been concerned about such sentimentality when he warned against holding believers back in a childish faith, keeping them mere "babes in Christ" (1 Cor. 3:1, 2). Even at its best, contemporary worship often encourages a perpetual and sentimental adolescence in faith. It may attract people into the church by giving them the milk of initial outreach, but it fails to make them mature Christians who have learned to feed on the solid food of worship. Against the popular argument that our old-line churches will die if we don't make our methods of worship contemporary, I contend that we may well attract quantity while sacrificing quality. The stunning numerical growth of the anti-traditional churches may prove to be cancerous. The hard truth is that the church's first duty is to grant God true honor and praise through authentic worship, even if this means that Christ's flock will remain quite small by worldly standards.

Yet vertical and horizontal growth are not always mutually exclusive. I believe that most people stay away from church because they are underwhelmed by its message and ministry. We challenge them too little in the deep things of the Spirit. The great preponderance of people come to church not in order to feel good about themselves but, as the Westminster Shorter Catechism describes the chief end of human existence, "to glorify God and enjoy Him forever." This is the proper order of things. We seek first the kingdom and righteousness of God in worship. Our own benefit is but the by-product, not the avowed intent. We will restore life to the church's worship when we cease marketing it as a user-friendly product. When we have been both formed and transformed by true worship, we will seek not to "get something out of it" but to honor God by offering Him what the Book of Common Prayer calls "a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving."