Pulled this out of a recent post from Greg Boyd’s blog. It bears repeating, as I am continually coming to terms with what disciplines I need to embrace in my life, and why I need to embrace them:

“…each act of violence we engage in, however small, dulls our capacity to experience and appreciate the sacredness of life, while each act of self-sacrificial love, however small, increases our capacity to experience and appreciate this sacredness. This, I believe, is the true meaning of ethics. It's not that we are tallying up an account of good deeds verses bad deeds, as though God were some sort of ethical ledger-keeper. Rather, the importance of ethics is that each one of our behaviors (which, remember, includes each of our thoughts) moves us forward in becoming a certain kind of person. God wants us to experience abundant life, and each act we engage in either increases, or diminishes, our capacity to do this.”

Here’s the link to the post, which is really a movie review/reflection.

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We’ve been going through a four-part series on worship at our church that has really helped re-engage and reorient me on what worship is, corporately and individually. It’s been incredibly refreshing and liberating for me, as a refugee from the worship industry (highlight in the video I linked to a couple weeks ago). I’ve posted a bit about this before—about how my participation in the machinery of church worship music (where musical performance is treated as consumable product and marketing evangelism tool) led to my thorough disillusionment with it. As I left the mega-church consumer mentality outright, I also dropped out of “doing” worship music formally (as a church musician) and, instead, chose to redefine what worship is and means—its role in the life of a Christ follower and as part of His church. I was burnt out on worship, true. But I also needed to strip off what I used to believe about it so that I could rediscover it authentically for myself. I’m still in that process today.

What the recent teaching series has solidified for me the most has been two powerful principles. One is the spiritual warfare element of all acts of worship (verbal, physical, musical, service, giving, etc.). This reaches back into my Pentecostal roots, but has been given a refreshing theological currency in my recent learning. Two is the importance of diversity in worship expression, and the triumph of creative beauty in all expressions of worship over consumerist and individualistic style preferences. I have learned to embrace “the other” in the body of Christ through sharing in their unique and creative ways of worshipping.

Instead of indulging my musical taste and aesthetic preferences, I have traveled farther down the road of true worship. Subsequently, I don’t “consume” worship music like I do music entertainment. I don’t collect it. I don’t keep it on my iPod. I’m not saying that doing that is bad—just that I don’t want to do that right now. It bothers me to treat it like a product. Instead, I am learning to worship better and more often.

All this is to set up a few select quotes and a link to a lengthy article on this topic published on the Allelon site, written by Sally Morgenthaller, author of the book, Worship Evangelism. Her journey through the evangelical church worship landscape over the past two decades captures some of my issues with worship music in the church today.

Morganthaller recounts a shift in her perspective that began when she met with a colleague and he mentioned issues he had with her book. He explained that churches had produced what he called a "worship-driven subculture” constituting “a sizeable part of the contemporary church that had just been waiting for an excuse not to do the hard work of real outreach. An excuse not to get their hands dirty.”

As Morgenthaller visited more churches, she started to understand his concerns: “Too many times, I came away with an unnamed, uneasy feeling. Something was not quite right. The worship felt disconnected from real life. Then there were the services when the pathology my friend talked about came right over the platform and hit me in the face. It was unabashed self-absorption, a worship culture that screamed, ‘It's all about us’ so loudly that I wondered how any visitor could stand to endure the rest of the hour.”

“By 2002 a few pastors of praise and worship churches began admitting to me that they weren't making much of a dent in the surrounding non-Christian population, even though their services were packed and they were known for the best worship production in town. …when I visited their congregations, it wasn't hard to see that the biggest barrier to reaching the unchurched had little to do with worship technique or style. It had to do with isolation and the faux-worship that isolation inevitably creates.”

“In 2001 a worship-driven congregation in my area finally did a survey as to who they were really reaching, and they were shocked. They'd thought their congregation was at least 50 percent unchurched. The real number was 3 percent.”

Read the whole thing here.

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