Quote from Forum Archives on October 31, 2003, 4:01 pm

Posted by: weeks <weeks@...>

I STRONGLY recommend everyone on this list read this article. It was
written by John Fischer, a pillar in the Christian music community and is
about "Worship Wars". Deeply insightful...very deeply insightful.
Changed my thoughts completely on how I approach this.

www.fischtank.com/articlesdetail.cfm?articleid=9

Here's the text for those who can't link to it:

***

What to Do About the Worship Wars
In our concern over music, are we fighting the wrong battles?
Jennifer feels she is really worshiping when two or three of her favorite
praise songs are strung together, each one taking her higher than the one
before. Robert’s passion for Christ soars on the third verse of “And Can
It Be?” Tanya doesn’t feel like she is really reaching God until the
decibel level reaches sonic boom proportions. Vincent will tell you that
God gets through to him only in the silence. Irene thinks angels sing in
the organ pipes.

How are all these worshipers going to be fulfilled in the same church?
Not very easily. Having been a Jesus music pioneer in the ’60s, I have
watched with interest and concern as the music we spawned in the Jesus
movement moved into the church. I have been a Christian long enough to
have grown up with the more traditional fare of “Crown Him With Many
Crowns” for Sunday morning and “In My Heart There Rings a Melody” Sunday
night. So I know why hymns are so important to worship, and I also know
why music that’s more contemporary is so important to worship.

Three Churches

I can think of three churches I have visited in the past nine months that
typify many others in transition.

Gary is the worship leader of a growing Bible church in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa. Much of the transition to a more contemporary worship happened
before he got there, so he feels his job has been easy — to establish
what the church had already decided they wanted: a careful blend of
traditional and contemporary worship into one service. Still, not
everyone is pleased all the time, and Gary notes how free people are with
their opinions. “Once in awhile we have the youth worship team lead
worship in the main service, and we definitely hear about the electric
guitars.” He was quick to point out that a united leadership is very
important to any transition.

United leadership is the very thing that Terry’s church in Rapid City,
S.D., is lacking, and the ensuing confusion is having its effect on
numbers and attitudes. This is a church that went to two services due to
size demand, watched them each grow into two different styles of worship,
built a larger building because of the growth, and is now losing members
trying to put the two back together again. Humpty Dumpty was doing better
when he was in pieces on the ground.

And then there’s a church in Lubbock, Texas, that has spawned what can
only be considered a new church in its own basement. Candles,
contemporary music, and a coffeehouse setting, complete with a full range
of flavored lattes, set it apart from the traditional service upstairs.
It’s an upstairs/downstairs church.

In Search of an Experience

Never before, at least in my lifetime, has worship been more important to
Christians; and never before has it been so complicated and tentative, as
people shuffle from church to church seeking the right blend of worship
experience for their families in what seems like an endless zero-sum
game.

Statistics show that larger churches are not necessarily growing by
converts; they are just better at more popular forms of worship,
siphoning off the attendance from smaller churches that simply can’t keep
up. Even what used to be the all-important sermon may at times seem more
an adjunct to praise and worship. Many people go to church today more to
experience God than they go to hear about Him, and they feel that they
experience God mostly in the music.

Nothing I know captures this shift better than the titles of two popular
books about searching for God: Francis Schaeffer’s landmark philosophical
work of the late ‘60s, The God Who Is There, and Bill Hybels’ recent,
equally significant offering, The God You’re Looking For. Three decade
ago, it was enough to reason God’s existence. If faith could be shown to
be rational, people would believe. But today people are saying, “So what
if God is there? Is He here? Can I meet Him? Can I encounter Him in my
life … and in my music?”

Charismatic and African American churches have always had enthusiastic
worship as a vital part of their services. While many of the more
conservative churches were preaching discipleship and exegeting scripture
30 years ago, these churches were speaking in tongues, dancing in the
aisles, and singing in the Spirit. Conservatives found these
manifestations highly suspect and passed this behavior off as ultra-
emotionalism.

Now many of these same churches are sharing in 30 minutes of contemporary
worship music, even tolerating a few upraised hands and swaying in the
pew — and counting on emotion to revitalize their services. Almost
everyone coming to church now, regardless of denomination, is expecting
some kind of emotional experience, and that experience they define as
worship.

The good thing about this shift is that it seems more people are willing
to assume God is there. This assumption reflects a general spiritual
hunger in our society. Spiritual themes are now common even in popular
culture, and church attendance is up. The bad thing is that each person
now becomes the sole and final authority as to what worship is. In
effect, “’Worship’ is whatever connects with me. What I like and
understand is what ministers to me.”

It should come as no surprise, then, that conflicts over worship styles
are now called worship wars. People are bound to take changes personally
if they affect their worship experience. This is not just a function of
personal preference, this is sacred ground being tread upon: a person’s
corporate experience with God.

How Far and How Fast?

Well, how much do you ask people to change and how fast? According to
Charles Finney’s Lectures on Revival of 1835, it took some churches a
century to adapt to Isaac Watts. “People in numerous congregations
continue to walk out of church if a psalm or hymn is taught from a new
book. And if Watts’ psalms were adopted, they would split and form a new
congregation rather than tolerate such innovation.”

Measure that against a comment I picked up from a Buster website that
stated: “There seems to have been an explosion of Baby Boomer churches
all over the Western world. They are fairly much all the same. Everyone
wears very clean and neat casual clothes (no suits). There is always a
worship band that performs a hybrid folk-rock ‘70s style music, usually
misnamed ‘contemporary.’” This young writer went on to assume he would
not find “Tahitian, alternative, rap or truly contemporary pop music”
either. I think not.

Suddenly it all looks very relative, doesn’t it? How far back do you want
to go? How far forward can you stretch? It soon becomes clear that in
trying to please everyone, you run the real risk of pleasing no one at
all.

In my experiences traveling the country, I have come to the conclusion
that there is no way any one church can meet such a broad band of
expectation. But I am beginning to believe that God is interested in
using the conflicts that have arisen over styles of worship to help teach
His church deeper truths: that there is a way of winning the worship wars
that has nothing to do with the “blended or separate service?” question.

It has everything to do with getting a bigger idea of what worship is and
a more mature understanding of what the church is and what it is here to
do.

Your Worship Is Too Small

God is after a life of worship for each one of us. It’s what Paul calls
our “service of worship” — presenting ourselves to Him continually as
living sacrifices, transformed in our thinking and awake to His will in
the world (Rom. 12:2?). Unfortunately we tend to turn this service of
worship (which takes up our whole life) into a worship service (which
takes up about an hour a week). It puts a lot of weight to bear on 30
minutes of music if that will be a person’s sole worship experience for
the week. No wonder people are fighting so hard for their music.

We worship because we are worshipers. We were created with this big
cavity in our souls that can’t be filled with anything but God, and
filling ourselves with God on a continual basis is the most fulfilling
thing we can do. It is what we were made for.

True worship incorporates our minds in understanding, our strength in
service, our souls in wonder, and our spirits in praise. It does not take
a song to do this. It takes my mind on God and my whole being focused in
His direction.

I also believe it is possible to do all this while doing everything else
we normally do — in fact, this is what gives everything else meaning.
This is what Paul meant when he said to do everything we do to the glory
of God (Col. 3:17?). I never have read any qualifiers on that in my
Bible, so it must be possible to do.

It’s our life, not a worship service, that will make us worshipers. We
don’t go to church to worship; we go to church because we are already
worshipers. And if someone is a true worshiper, which means their whole
life is an act of worship, then what happens for 30 minutes of music once
a week is a small thing indeed.

I often hear people say they think they need to give God more of their
time: longer quiet time, more prayer, more Bible reading. All well and
good, but I’m not sure God wants more of my time as much as He wants more
of my attention. It’s not this time over here for God, this time over
there for work, this time for play, and this time for me. It’s the whole
thing for God.

If I’ve lived a week like this and I get to church with my fellow
believers filling up a room, they can sing in French and play sitars and
it won’t matter to me. I’ll be so happy just to be there and join my
voice, however timid or strong it might be, with others who believe.

Redefining the Battle

The church must win the worship wars or lose its effectiveness in the
world. That’s why I believe this battle needs to be redefined. The war is
not between those who want traditional worship and those who want
contemporary worship. The real war is with the enemy who would do us in
by dividing us and rendering us ineffective by our bickering and
fighting.

Paul has one goal for the church, “that the body of Christ may be built
up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son
of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness
of Christ. Then we will no longer be infants …” (Eph. 4:12-14?). Does
fighting over 30 minutes of music sound like “the whole measure of the
fullness of Christ”?

I believe these challenges have arisen to give the church an opportunity
to grow up — to overcome our differences with the love of Christ. It is a
challenge to put into practice the life of the Spirit in our midst.

I once met with a man who hated my music. I did so because I realized
that in reacting to his accusations against me, I had erred by speaking
ill of him. So I went to him with a confession, and he responded by
opening his heart to me in areas of struggle in his life. Our encounter
proved to both of us that our oneness in Christ and need for each other
was far more important than our feelings about music.

‘Open Your Eyes!’

I think of a scene in the early ministry of Christ when the disciples had
gone into town to get food and left Jesus alone to rest by a well. When
they returned, they “were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But
no one asked, ‘What do you want’ or ‘Why are you talking with her?’”
(John 4:27?). They tried to get Jesus to eat something, but He told them
He wasn’t hungry. “I have food to eat that you know nothing about” (v.
32?). The disciples, oblivious to the conversation between Jesus and the
woman, said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?” (v.
33?).

The scene is almost humorous. Jesus is caught up in the joy and
fulfillment of doing His Father’s will. He has just watched the life-
changing power of His truth and love transform a woman from being a five-
time loser to being loved and accepted by someone who knows everything
about her — everything she’s trying to forget but can’t. Ignoring the
disciples, Jesus looks out on the fields and sees the woman bringing the
whole town out to meet Him, their turbans gleaming in the sun like a
field white with harvest. “Open your eyes and look to the fields!” Jesus
says. “They are ripe for harvest.”

The disciples can’t see past their noses. They are focused on their own
embarrassment and judgment over finding Jesus alone with a woman, and
they are worrying over His next meal. They are looking inward; Jesus is
looking out.

This reminds me a bit of the church right now. People in the world are
dying all around us without Christ, and we are worried about what to do
with music in a worship service that is not the beginning and the end of
worship, anyway. Sometimes I wonder if Jesus even cares what kind of
music we worship with as long as we worship.

Thirty years ago a revival swept across this country that came to be
called the Jesus movement. Thousands of young people were coming to
Christ, and many of them made their way into the church. It happened so
fast and in such great numbers that churches forgot to tell these kids to
cut their hair, change into suits, and leave their guitars outside.

The churches that opened their doors to this influx had their “worship”
drastically altered. Was this a stretch for some churches? Yes. But in
every case where an adjustment was made, it was the joy and reality of
new life that won out.

I’m not saying that everything old should give way to the new. People
today can hold on as tightly to their contemporary music as others hold
on to their hymns. But a bigger understanding of worship will help us all
loosen our grip.

“Open your eyes and look to the fields! They are ripe for harvest.”

***

- James

"I will always remember the day Rene Descartes died.  We had just
finished a wonderful meal and were sitting around plotting our next move
over coffee.  The waitress came up and asked, "More Coffee?"  Descartes
replied, "I think not."   And just disappeared right before my eyes."