Kelvin Mutize wrote:
worship is all about glorifying god.its bringing honour and praise to him. On my blog i write about the reasons and origins of worship. Read it www.theworshipofgod.blogspot.com
It doesn’t take much to make me happy. When someone posts a comment on my blog I do a little dance around my room (or coffee shop), shake my bootie, and have small, short, exaltations of joy (which usually sound like flatulence). So when Kelvin Mutize posted the above comment to my post on worship, there was much dancing, shaking, and exalting.
Then I read Mutize’s comment. I have to say, I am very grateful for his time and energy to offer his thoughts, but I disagree with his comment, and even more so with his blog.
I have heard people say that we are created to praise God, and that makes me depressed – no dancing. Is the point of worship to gather around some unseen deity, and throw our hands in the air saying again and again, “you are awesome, you are awesome, you are awesome?” Does God have such a low self-esteem that we need to prop ‘him/her’ up with our praise? This seems like a weak reason to worship.
What about the individual who just had a bad day? I mean a really bad day. The kind of day when you find out that you have cancer, and then you hear that your child has been arrested for possession, and you loose your job, and then you are reminded that you are supposed to bring the brownies to the PTA meeting tonight. Are you going to go to church before hand and say, “oh God, you are just so awesome, and greater than anything I can imagine. I’m just so darn lucky to be able to praise you?” Probably not. Instead, you will probably say something like, “what the f----, God. I’ve been good, I’ve gone to church, I’ve done what I am supposed to do, and yet I’ve found myself drowning in a pile of sh—that you call life! This sucks, amen.”
Try saying that with your arms in the air to an up-beat song.
What about the church built in an urban or rural area, surrounded by poverty? Is the purpose of worship still to praise God? Shouldn’t we be praying for the poor and asking for the gumption to go out and help the poor?
I think I’ve made my point, Mr. Mutize, your approach to worship is shallow at best. Plus, just because you find single, individual verses in the Bible that supports your argument, and you print it in nice, colorful letters, doesn’t make it true (see his blog to get what I am talking about).
What is the purpose of worship? You don’t expect me to answer that question after this long rant. I’ll just offer this – perhaps worship is a time to connect with God, wherever we are, and to connect with our brothers and sisters in Christ, wherever we are. It is a time for weeping, and for laughing…
Take us out, Pete Seeger (he put the words to music after all)
7 comments:
I agree with your final paragraph, but I must also say that I'm not opposed to the kind of worship you are attacking. I think the church would be far better off worshiping in that way than it currently is which is singing song about our worshiping the Lord or singing about all the ways God gets to serve us. I don't think our worship needs to emphasize individualism and consumerism any more than our culture already does. I might actually participate in worship if all we did was sing "you are awesome." It'd certainly be a step up from where we're at.
Blake,
I have a tendency to overdo my point moving my discourse from rhetoric to polemic. We do need to praise God in worship, and upbeat songs are a great way to do that. My concern (which I think we are in agreement on) is praising God to the exclusion of all other aspects of our lives and where God is in our lives. How we leave space for the diversity of experiences and at the same time continue to worship as a community is a tricky problem that I have not yet figured out (nor hava many other people).
Just wondering - your description of "current worship" is a bit vague. Can you be a little more specific about your criticism and concerns?
I've been in many churches in many different traditions and whether they are using contemporary praise and worship with a band or a hymnal the songs are theologically terrible. One thing I like to do on Sunday while people worship is count the number of self-referential pronouns in the song we're singing while making mental notes about whether or not the pronouns are held longer in the act of singing than the pronouns and references to God. I tend to find that in our worship we spend more time singing about or emphasizing ourselves in our worship than we do God.
When we do get songs that are more about God than us they are usually more about God as a cosmic vending machine or spiritual butler. They are about what God gives us and how He helps us rather than His grandeur. I don't think worship should emphasize our end of our relationship with God and I don't think we do ourselves any favors by allowing our worship music to cast God as one whose only purpose is to do our bidding and make us comfortable and spiritual. I think we need to get away from self-serving worship and start looking more at His grandeur and who He shows Himself to be.
Yup, we don't want worship to be self-serving, and on the other hand we don't want it to be completely focused on the awsomeness of God; as always we are looking for a balance. Clearly the majority of church have not found a balance.
This is just a thought: what if we were to worship the Trinity? In that sense we would praise God the father and creater who is greater than anything we can imagine, we would offer our thanks to Christ for our redemption, we would look to follow Christ in our life, and finally we would pray for an empowerment of the Holy Spirit wherever we are in life. I haven't really given this much thought, so the idea is still a little rough. Thanks for the discussion.
worship is way beyond what we think of or even imagine,
my prayer is that God may allow us to understand what worship is and its meaning to us
Looking at the Hebrew and Greek formations of the word worship, onw will find a lot of meaning and understanding of what
worship is all about. Worship isnt just singing but a daily lifestyle that offers glory to God.
May God increase our understanding and revelation of Worship, because worship is the heart of God i pray that it may be our hearts as well
Kelvin,
I appreciate your effort to show the complexities to the word "worship," and how those complexities should affect our daily lives. This way we can make the whole thing very vague and avoid the actual liturgical grammer found in a worship service.
If worship is "the heart of God," then different styles can still capture "true" worship.
Post a Comment