For a day in your courts is better

            than a thousand elsewhere.

I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God

            than dwell in the tents of wickedness.

                        (Psalm 84:10)

 

Worship is the point of life.[1] It is the single activity that we know unites human life from its origin to its end. Life began in the Garden of Eden in communion with God (cf. Gen 2 & 3).  The final vision of the new heavens and new earth describes a remade Garden of Eden (Rev 21 & 22). This final garden has changed, of course. Heaven (God’s throne-room) and earth (the creational stage) have fused; sin and death have been undone; and the believers have been resurrected. Yet the continuity is clear: we were made to worship God, and he will ultimately make it so (despite our best efforts to mess it up in the meantime). 

 

Now we live in between that lost past and the expected future – confident in our hope through Christ but still repenting. This series on worship seeks to understand the gospel-shaped form of worship. So it’s important to set out from the beginning some of the myths about worship that cloud our discussion. Though this list is not exhaustive, below are several myths which have been lodged pretty stubbornly in the imaginations of many Christians.

 

Myth #1: True worship must be an authentic expression of ourselves.

Authenticity is a sacred word in many circles. The problem is that we are never really authentic. In worship, in particular, we say and sing things that we do not mean. Do you mean every word you’ve ever said or sung in worship? No. Rather, as we will see, we become more like what we really are in Christ by worshipping God. We don’t enter worship as authentic people; but through confession, praise, the preaching of the Word of God, and partaking of the sacraments, we become more and more transformed into the image of Christ – our real identity.

 

Myth #2: The best worship is liturgical.

Some people think well-structured worship is the best worship. Yet giving people good words to speak does not guarantee anything. The Spirit must be present.  So, unsurprisingly, heavily liturgical traditions have often been a breeding ground for nominalism.  We will see there are good reasons to worship liturgically, but not because it is somehow the answer to our biggest problems.

 

Myth #3: The best worship is spontaneous.

In contrast to liturgical worship, some believe spontaneity to be the best criteria for worship. (Often this myth works in tandem with #1.) Yet the apostle Paul makes it clear that worship ought to be orderly. We’ll see that there is room for the spontaneous, but again our biggest problems in worship are not solved by spontaneity – especially if it works against orderliness in worship.

 

Myth #4: Worship music should be exactly like what we hear on the radio.

Many want the music in a service to be exactly like their favorite band. There are a myriad of problems with this assumption. First, it means that music sounds like whatever the music leader likes – not necessarily at all like the tastes of the congregation or even the minister. Second, various musical styles are difficult to weave together. Third, often many think that this music will be appealing to non-Christians, though the evidence suggests the opposite.[2] Fourth, this position is naïve about the variety of connotations and complications involved in different musical styles.[3] Fifth, Christian music almost always lags behind, so it is not uncommon to feel like one has stepped a decade (or more) backwards in a “contemporary” worship service. Sixth and most importantly, Scripture has a complex view of relevance, and so this simple claim is far too reductionistic. These comments are not meant to imply a traditionalism, but simply to point out the flaws of this myth.

 

Myth #5: Worship music should be completely different than what we hear on the radio.

Naturally, some believe that worship is some wholly different experience from the rest of our lives. In my own tradition (Presbyterianism), this view has been dominant. However, while Scripture certainly regulates worship in a unique way, there is no reason to believe that worship is necessarily completely different than anything else we know in life. There is no reason to believe that the musical idiom ought to be so foreign as to be virtually incomprehensible to the congregation. Moreover, such a reduction (again, as we will see) fails to take into account the issues of relevance we will discover.

 

Myth #6: There used to be a time when worship was more pure.

This myth (often associated with #5) has any number of variations. For some reason or another – some more coherent than others – some claim that a specific time and place found the purest form of worship. But even the apostolic church of the first century had its problems – as we know throughout the New Testament correspondence. We need to find help by understanding Christian history of worship. We even gain some unity with those who have gone before, I believe, by sharing songs and liturgical elements which they have passed on to us. However, the church has never and will never produce a perfect form of worship because worship is perfected by the Spirit, not its form.

 

There are surely other myths that we blindly follow. But these few examples give us a window into the questions that we face as we proceed in this series to explain the theological shape of worship.

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