A recent visitor to our church’s Sunday morning gathering told me “we really enjoyed the service.” At which point I felt the urge to puke. I understand this is most often the nicest and best of things people can say to a pastor after a church worship gathering. Yet it belies the problem of Sunday morning worship in our day. Sunday morning worship is a spectacle,it too often distances us from God as a spectator event.
I believe despite all the missional protestations, that the Sunday gathering is essential to the Mission of God’s people in the world. Yet I agree, that the worst thing that can happen is this gathering becomes “attractional,” an event for spectators. When someone says they enjoy something it belies the reality that that person has now become a user, a consumer, someone who has put the object at his or her disposal for his or her enjoyment. Continental philosopher/cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek argues this same idea. Zizek argues that when we say “I enjoy my religion” this implies that I don’t take it TOO seriously. For we really don’t want to take it too seriously (this is what the fundamentalists do according to Zizek). We keep it at a distance so to appear to be a Christian with all of it comforts and accoutrements yet not requiring any great disruption to a comfortable way of life. This distance, between the subject and the Symbolic Order, is what allows the subject’s Christianity (or religion) to be subsumed by the existing order. Nothing will change. Zizek calls it “decaffeinated belief,” “belief without belief.” In many ways, the same dynamic happens in our worship, leading to what we might call decaffeinated worship, worship without worship.
One of my D.Min students (at Northern) writes about the problem of decaffeinated belief in his thesis proposal. He says that many of his denomination’s pastors
…agree that a growing number of worshipers are talking or sitting through the congregational singing writing notes during the special music, showing up 10-15 minutes late, not worried about interrupting anything or anyone. One pastor shared that a congregant stopped attending worship opting to stay home and worship with a church on television. When asked about this, the congregant responded, “Why does it matter where I watch the service?” Another pastor commented that people treat everything in the service as if it were a movie preview and it is not until the feature presentation (the sermon) that people really start paying attention. Or in other churches with a more contemporary style of worship a pastor stated, “Once the ‘concert’ is over, they just settle in waiting for a sermon.”
Another phenomenon in (this denomination’s churches) is an exodus of long time worshipers from (this denominations’) congregations to newer non-denominational church plants in their communities. When asked why they are leaving blank churches, they report “the music is better, their pastor is funnier, their drama is better, etc etc. at their new church.” They are right. One of these church plants advertises that they have 3 professional rock bands leading their services. These bands rotate their tour schedules with their worship leading schedules. Another church has some really funny skits and a very gifted pastor who could have been a stand-up comedian. People are not leaving for theological reasons. They are not leaving for churches that are more missional; they are leaving because the churches are more ‘relevant.’
All of the above is nothing new. Yet this D.Min student of mine (I’m privileged to be working with some real excellent projects this year) describes from on the ground accounts the problem of the attractional inertia surrounding the Sunday morning worship gathering. It is one of the reasosn why several missional writers and pastors reject the Sunday worship service in toto. It simply passifies Christians into passive consumers (to use an overused word).
I think this is a mistake. For the missional church communities require a regular practice for the shaping and forming of a people into the Life with God, the Mission of God. Missional people do not grow on trees. If then we would see people formed into the Missio Dei we must order our worship so as to be encountered by the living God. We must learn how to preach not as information but as proclamation and invite people into the Mission. The real presence at the Table must be the center of our gathering, our lives and our community. If we would see people formed into the Missio Dei, our gatherings must take on liturgical shape, a way of inviting people into the prayers, confessions and affirmations of the alive relationship we have with the living God of Mission. We must learn how to listen, interpret Scripture for what God is doing among us and in the world, hear God and then respond to God. This should be the character of our Sunday morning gatherings.
This kind of gathering should be both easier and harder to plan than any kind of programming approach we have hitherto been used to. It should be simpler and less focused on excellence of performance. It should not cost near as much in time, resourses and planning. It should be able to be done in a living room with three to thirty people or in a larger sanctuary with 200. Yet this kind of gathering takes more discernment of the Spirit, theological wisdom, historical sensitivity than we have been used to in the protestant church of our evangelical past (we haven’t paid attention to theology of worship in evangelical church). This way can lead us out of the wilderness of decaffeinated worship.
Has anyone else experienced the decaffeinated worship problem (even) in his or her missional gatherings? What simple tings have you done to unwind the passivity?
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On another note – the Seeding Missional Communities Learning Commons Non/Conference is ON!! in Ft Wayne this Saturday, Jan 3rd. Looks like we have quite a group coming. Looking forward to seeing everyone. There’s still time to come. Here’s a link on the conference, and my e-mail is fitchest@gmail.com if you’re coming.
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“I believe despite all the missional protestations, that the Sunday gathering is essential to the Mission of God’s people in the world.”
Interesting comment. I don’t know any genuine missional advocate who would offer any “protestations” on the importance and essential nature of the Sunday gathering. All those I know have always advocated that, among other objectives, a missional church will gather for the purpose of worship, encouragement, supplemental teaching, training, and to seek God’s presence and to be realigned with God’s missionary purpose.
As to your main point that we must not reject the Sunday gathering in toto, you’re spot-on and it is great to see you call attention to this. Part of the reshaping of our gatherings should be to encourage and allow maximum participation of every person outside of the normal programmatic approach. The model of I Corinthians 14:26-32 would seem to be a good starting place.
Looking forward to hearing simple things others have done to unwind the passivity.
I like the direction you suggest. I’m sure this has been said many times but attractional has become distractional to Jesus as Christ and Lord. I’m not sure the church is suppose to try and be attractional. It seems a bit like being married and flirting. Don’t we believe Jesus is attractive enough in the power and the beauty of the gospel lived out in worship and loving God and one another?
We certainly have at our community. I remember one Sunday our worship pastor complaining after the service that while he was desperately trying to get the congregation to engage in worship, he looked out and saw a young lady squirting ketchup onto her McDonald’s hashbrown. Clearly, there is a problem.
Yet for us, the solution to the reduction of worship to a mere entertainment spectacle has not been in any kind of heavy-handedness, but rather in molding our worship gatherings into the kinds of moments that (1) are deeply interactive and (2) a true expression of the life of our community. As we’ve done so, we’ve begun to create a worship culture in which the McDonald’s spectacle is simply unthinkable. Worship is a time to encounter and be encountered by God, to be formed by the story, and to be molded for the mission of God.
And so our gatherings incorporate:
1) Consistent confessional and prayer elements such as the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Doxology as our benediction, and the 1 Corinthians 11 communion formula.
2) Interactive and reflective elements such as hand-washing and silence
3) Celebrations of the good that God is doing in and through us in the area of justice and mercy
4) Preaching that is neither “expository” or “topical”, but rather centers on the encountering of God’s imagination made possible through hearing the Scriptures
5) Communion
I think we still have a ways to go, but I’m encouraged that our worship gatherings no longer feel like a mass of disparate elements, but rather a total expression of our community’s life and love for God and commitment to his mission in which most everyone “leans in” as participants rather than spectators.
I will say that I’m not threatened when people say they “enjoy” our services. I hope that the beauty and wonder of our life together with God as a community are compelling and visible enough in our worship gatherings that those who visit for the first time take notice, and I’m suspicious that they simply don’t know what else to say when they’re talking w/ one of the pastoral staff after the service trying to express how compelling it was to them. “Enjoy” is perhaps not the word we’d most like to hear, but it is a word that often begins the journey for them into a rich life together with us as the people of God in Tulsa, OK.
Dave, You have written of the sermon being Proclamation rather than informational. What does this mean? Have you described this difference in the past? If so, would you point me to a place I can read up on it? Thanks for your posts!
Andrew … sounds great! no awesome!, Steve… google blog “expository preaching and the words “commodification of the Word” and you’ll find slot of what I’ve written. Rick, ok … I won’t call out some significant missional authors on the diminishing of the Sunday morning gathering place (Because I’m not in my office and can’t go to chapter and verse). But in my interactions wioth several missional leaders/authors, the worry about attractional has led to a talking down of the significance of the regular Sunday morning gathering as the centerpiece for the formation of a missional church body (read incarnational presense).But maybe I can calrify at a future time.
Hello, I’m a church planter in Pennsylvania and I’m curious as to what Andrew meant in his third point about “Celebrations of the good that God is doing in and through us in the area of justice and mercy”. Can you explain how you do that in practical terms? It may be something I’d like to incorporate into our gatherings.
Thanks!
Josh Grimes
Hi Josh –
It’s really two things:
1) Making sure we draw appropriate attention using every available medium to the things we’ve done together as a community to “seek the welfare of the city”, both locally and globally. So, for instance, for Thanksgiving we worked with a couple local government agencies to identify single moms in acute need and under-employed two-parent households to try and provide them with Thanksgiving dinner gift baskets the Saturday before Thanksgiving. We needed several thousand dollars and a hundred or so volunteers to pull it off, and the congregation stepped up and gave WAY more than we needed and we had twice as many volunteers as we needed. That deserved applause. More importantly, the stories that came back to us “from the field”, as it were, of the encounters that our folks had with those they delivered to were just SO compelling, so we made a video of those stories and tagged it into our worship as a celebration of what God had done. So we try to celebrate what God does in us on the corporate level as much as possible.
2) Making sure we draw attention to the “mini-stories” that we come across that really embody how we see the gospel lived out in the warp and woof of daily life. Businessmen, moms, social workers, etc., that are finding creative ways to “perform the faith” in the spaces they inhabit. If we come across a great “mini-story” of this nature, we try to tell it any way we can, because we’re concerned that when people think of “social justice” they largely think of big, clunky government programs or big, clunky outreaches that churches do on a broad scale, rather than on the small but profound acts of justice and mercy that inject life into the ordinary spaces that most people will never see. These, for us, are the mustard seeds of the kingdom of God.
Hope that helps.
AA
david, a friend of mine uses a different metaphor.. “church without sex” .. but you can see why that option is less popular for general consumption
So “missional integrity” and “enjoyment” are mutually exclusive?
Sounds like missional masochism to me.
So much for Eric Liddle:
I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run I feel His pleasure.
Hey – I’m “enjoying” the discussion. (Whoops – hope that doesn’t make you puke.)
WESTMINSTER SHORTER CATECHISM
Q. 1. What is the chief end of man?
A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy** him forever.
Q. 2. What rule hath God given to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy him?
A. The Word of God, which is contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments, is the only rule to direct us how we may glorify and enjoy** him.
** Except in church, of course.
Ah, thanks for explaining that Andrew! You articulated it very well. I think you’ve got a good thing going there that should be emulated. (I suppose that you would say not to emulate you, but rather Jesus.) One more question about your original comment because so far I’ve found it to be a most practical and helpful response. When you say “Preaching that is neither “expository” or “topical”, but rather centers on the encountering of God’s imagination made possible through hearing the Scriptures.” How do you work that out? Surely the teaching pastor (is that you?) has some sort of outline before he speaks? Perhaps this has been covered elsewhere on this blog, and if you could point me in the right direction I’d be most appreciative.
Also, I pondered the last two comments because I had the same initial thought when I read it. However, I think the point made is that people “enjoyed the service” not necessarily “enjoyed God”. Kind of like going to Starbucks because it’s cool but not liking their coffee.
Josh and Andrew – thanks for this exchange! And Bob and uh others … I was pointing a usage of the word enjoy in a specific way … made possible by todays culture of “enjoy” that is distinctly different from the way the Westminster catechesim uses the word. In fact I don’t think the Westminster writers could have ever imagined the word being used in this way.
David, I’m still struggling with your aversion to people “enjoying” their church experiences.
It seems to me that the natural sense of the word “enjoy” is to find joy or satisfaction in something. This would fit the sense in which the Westminster Catechism uses the word – and what I would understand if someone said that they enjoyed a worship service.
From your description, it seems that Zizek is attempting to redefine religious enjoyment as a kind of genial, passive, tolerance – not normally what people mean when they speak of enjoying worship.
But maybe I misunderstand…
Bob… totally cool…I think we might be talking past each other here. I am playing off zizek’s “enjoy” to say that he helps us see a perversion of the “enjoy” experience which I see happening frequently in the way we approach the worship experience … something I see as a reveral of the classic Reformation’s understanding. I frankly see the Westminster’sm enjoy as made almost impossible by the way contemporary worship is planned and presented. I hope this clarifies … DF
Dave,
Very helpful and on-target post. What I find ironic is that many exponents of “excellent religious goods and services” echo your rebuke of “decaffeinated worshipers”/consumer Christians. Here are two surprising examples:
In my college years, I attended a conference with our church college ministry’s “worship team”. The level of excellence (in everything from the visual, musical and spoken worship, and the preaching and instruction, to the coordination of the event… or rather, events) was almost literally stunning—far beyond anything “religious” I had ever experienced. Awe-inspiring would be a good description. What made the biggest impact (and what is simultaneously ironic) was the intensity of the speakers’ indignation with “decaffeinated worship” and spiritual passivity. They sternly admonished us not to leave the conference wowed by the externals, nor fooled by thinking anything external could produce spiritually-authentic results. While the media through which they communicated certainly produced a temptation to this end, nevertheless I came away with the impression that excellence and grandiosity can serve in a ministerial rather than magisterial capacity to foster genuine Christian spirituality and discipleship.
My second experience is more recent, and in progress. I attend a Chicagoland megachurch which prides itself on being “seeker hostile” rather than attractional… or at least whose pastor insists that it is. Their/our concern is not that people walk away from our gatherings having enjoyed themselves, but rather having encountered and changed by the Living God. Our pastor’s preaching ethos is such that he does not shirk from the offense of the Gospel, but rather draws it out. And yet he and our church are intent on excellence in everything—we must, because we can. Anything less than our best is cavalier and unfit for the King of Kings.
The problem I have recognized, despite the best intentions of the leaders of the two above-mentioned groups, however, is that the excellence they are able to (and so do) produce is in such stark superiority (from a consumer perspective) that churches unable to “play the same game” are at a disadvantage, and so eventually atrophy. If there is any argument against pursuing excellence to our highest ability and opportunity, this is it. But is this a strong enough argument? Or is the disparity between these contemporarily sensible leaders and those constrained by historic cultural forms unavoidably predictive of the response of the fish swimming in present cultural water (and so justifiable)?
Beloved …
I find the same problem of distancing – enjoying one’s religion – equally possible at the contemporary seeker service as the expository 55 minute preaching session. The one decries the other, yet both do the same thing. Oddly,recently, I think the people most distanced/ hardened to Scripture and the actual participation in God;s Mission in the world,can be the ones who go to gigantic so-called Bible preaching churches who, as Cartesian listners, taking notes, remain in control of the Word and ultimately a user of the excellent preaching to live their own versions of the Christian life.
“The real presence at the Table must be the center of our gathering, our lives and our community. If we would see people formed into the Missio Dei, our gatherings must take on liturgical shape, a way of inviting people into the prayers, confessions and affirmations of the alive relationship we have with the living God of Mission.”
I do indeed find the experience of the Table to be formative and renewing. (I happen to “enjoy” that, but hopefully not in the same way the aforementioned woman was enjoying her hashbrowns–but I digress.) I also find something meaningful in more “high-church” forms of worship.
But I can’t work out how these elements must be part of a gathering that forms people into incarnational witnesses of the Gospel. Why must missional Sunday morning gatherings have the Table as the “center” of their worship gathering?
And though I keep asking this question, I still don’t have a clear idea in my mind: what exactly is this “liturgical shape” that missional gatherings must take on?
Are we essentially talking about making our gatherings places of participation instead of spectating? In that case, does ANY participative element serve this purpose?
Nate, the Mission of God is a Drama (Vanhoozer et el), it is a Story (with a cap. S)… we are formed by sybmitting ourselvs to The Lord God of History and what he is doing in the world as centered in the life, deat and resuurection of Christ. In that the Table is the ultimate rehearsing (re’living) of the Story, the Mission, the ultimate recieveinga nd giving … it changes us, constitutes us… into seeing and ebing differently in the world … If that’s too theoretical, anything is too theoretical versus just doing it, entering into it and being transformed by God in and through His work in Christ as represented around the Table .. Blessings ..
Dave,
At the risk of being hopelessly pessimistic, I’m not sure any church model actually turns a majority of its members into devout disciples. There are ecclesiastical, missiological, and (let’s not forget) theological paradigms which practically guarantee that members will neither become believers nor develop into disciples, but I’m afraid all our very best efforts—most strategically and theologically on target—come very short of our goals (shared with Jesus and the apostles) of seeing every Christian mature in Christ and vitally involved in His mission.
I’m curious what research you’ve done and/or compiled and analyzed that leads you to the conclusion you have about “gigantic so-called Bible preaching churches,” and how they compare in overall effectiveness at producing Christian disciples than others (“actual” Bible preaching churches?). In any and every church, there are going to be a fair number of tares mixed in with the wheat. The bottom line is, what churches are producing the greatest number of disciples per capita (since the Church’s part in the missio Dei is, after all, making disciples, period)? “Reveal” was the best attempt anyone has made recently at quantifying the data. What are your data, other than anecdotal?
P.S. Lest I sound reductionistically pragmatic (I’m not), let me affirm that every part of our ecclesiology and missiology must be biblically rigorous. We can’t just adopt “whatever works”, for God is not going to bless unbiblical means of accomplishing His goals. Nevertheless, most issues up for debate in present missiological conversations are not matters of what is or is not “biblical” (not to downplay the historic differences in understanding of ecclesiological and missiological passages between differing denominational traditions. I just do not see these occupying the lime light of such contemporary discussions), even though definitions between what “biblical” means are varied.
I’m way late to this, but I’ll share what we’re doing right now in a church plant. Essentially, we’re not doing away with our largest gathering (which is still quite small, but we’re making it the lowest priority communal practice that we pursue. The highest priority (which we repeat often) is finding a partner or two with whom to work a set of disciplines likely to take us in the direction of Christ. For us, God has made the 12 steps the one the most used, which I would definitely recommend, especially initially, in terms of producing much greater fruit of the Spirit and leading to mission.
We’re also seeking a lot of other wisdom from AA on this spectator issue in our meetings. AA groups provide much more venues for its people to “practice” their faith–to give and receive–compared to churches who prioritize a meeting in which most are pure spectators. We’re seeking to let our meetings be more places of practicing than places of watching. And we’re prioritizing the meetings (of two or three) where this practicing can happen the most.
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