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Deconstructing Worship

Seriously, when was the last time you heard someone say something positive about their church’s worship music?

I don’t blame them. There’s no surer way to get myself in a deep funk (and I don’t mean the musical kind) than to watch some church’s live stream on Sunday afternoon after my own worship leading is over. 

And sometimes, the service that depresses me is my own. Everybody has bad days, for sure. The fact of the matter is, worship leading is a tough job. You never, ever make everyone happy. And if you make pleasing everyone your goal, you will be certain never to please God.

That is just one of the many problems with trying to lead worship in an evangelical church. 

The problem often is that some of us really don’t get worship at all. Sure, some services suffer from untalented or unqualified personnel. But many of our services betray the fact that when it comes to worship, we’ve completely missed the point.

One problem is churches often approach worship not primarily based on Scriptural content, but on human preference and musical style. While this shouldn’t be the case, we do have to admit that style and human preferences matter. They simply shouldn’t be ALL that matter!

So that’s another problem – balancing the priority of Scriptural fidelity with the human desire for music we enjoy.

Styles in popular music continually change, and this naturally affects the music in our churches. Songs are an important part of worship – they are the tools we give the congregation to worship with. Just as the wrong tool can create disfunction with a household chore, the wrong songs can make it difficult for a congregation to effectively enter into worship. 

A Gregorian chant might have worked very well several hundred years ago, but today’s congregation will be hard-pressed to sing along with you in Latin. Likewise, the latest Christian R&B song may have scriptural lyrics, but a predominantly senior adult congregation will be giving you some passionate feedback at the end of the service.

So musical style does indeed matter. BUT…it should not matter most. 

Got it? Yeah, it’s quite the balancing act.

The seniors complain we’re not doing enough hymns, so we create a “traditional service” to make them happy. We make the other service the “contemporary service”, and most of the young adults gravitate to it. 

Everybody’s happy, right?

Not really. These services also divide the congregation along generational lines and inhibit healthy fellowship between those generations. They disconnect seniors from the new life that new worship songs represent – the “new wineskins” of what God is doing now in the church. They also separate the young adults from hundreds of years of tradition. Their kids don’t hear the songs that sustained their grandparents through seasons of struggle and tragedy. Their worship lacks gravitas and foundation: it’s only as good as the latest disposable pop anthem.

Drastically separating worship styles undercuts one of the important strengths of a multi-generational church. It disconnects seniors from the enthusiasm of young adults, while disconnecting young adults from the wisdom and experience of seniors. A congregation given inherent balance by God is divided into two separate UNbalanced congregations, each tipping dangerously in opposite directions.

If not “traditional” and “contemporary” services, what do we do?

Well, of course the answer must then be a “blended service”, where we will do BOTH hymns and new worship choruses in hopes this will make everybody happy. The reality is they often make both sides even more dissatisfied. 

In most blended services, we choose a quota of hymns that are given new contemporary arrangements. Often, these arrangements make those beloved hymns mostly unsingable for seniors. Likewise, the new worship chorus arrangements are homogenized to sound like the “Muzac” one might hear in an elevator or dentist’s office. Those church orchestras, usually consisting of a bunch of high school level woodwind and brass players, drain all the life and power out of what were guitar-based songs.

Remembering hearing “Stairway To Heaven” played by Mantovani’s stringed orchestra? Exciting stuff, right?

This is about where most church pastors throw up their hands, throw in the towel and just settle for whatever they’ve been doing. Or they overreact and fire the worship leader in hopes that some new person will be the magical hire that make everyone happy.

Good luck with that. But maybe what we need is to step back a minute and remind ourselves what really matters in worship.

What matters is God. What He wants. What pleases Him. What draws His presence. We must put Him first and make sure he stays there in our hearts. Because when style is our chief focus, man is the one on the throne of worship. Not God.

In deconstructing our worship, we need to ask ourselves some tough questions about our church’s worship:

Is our worship man-centered, or God-centered?

  • Do we really believe Kierkegaard’s example for Biblical worship, in that we view God as the true audience, and those on the platform merely the prompters for the congregation’s performance? Or have we switched places and put people as the audience, the worship leaders as the performers, and God is left outside doing parking lot ministry?

Does our worship give the congregation tools (songs) they can easily use to engage in worship?

  • Are the songs not only Scriptural but also easy to sing? Do we introduce new songs in a way people can easily learn them? Do we show respect to seniors by incorporating hymns from their past?

Does our worship represent the full gamut of human emotion, or just one safe emotionless plane?

  • Will people experience joy, lament, passion, and desire during our services? Or will we just stick to the medium-tempo, dispassionate but Scriptural centerground? If we do, can we expect people from other worship backgrounds (and ethnicities) to feel included in our services?

Is the congregation included in worship and encouraged to participate, or are they given a free pass to spectate on the sidelines? 

  • Do we actively encourage people to sing, to clap, to life hands, and other Biblical expressions of worship during our services? Are their seasons of prayer where they can express their need for intercession from brothers and sisters in the congregation? Or should they have just stayed home and watched the livestream?

I believe most churches I know need to start asking these questions and “deconstructing” their worship. They need to put the man-centered questions of style aside for a while, and first make sure our hearts are in the right place and God is in His right place.

Frankly, it’s not OK that we’re about to lose several hundred year’s worth of hymns. They are an important part of our spiritual heritage. Many hymns need to be preserved so we can remember who we are and from where we came. But it’s also not ok to ignore God’s command to “sing to the Lord a NEW song”. And it’s not OK that prayer is relegated to a perfunctory task, often delivered devoid of purpose or passion.

Our worship needs to reflect not only the God of Scripture but also the people gathered to worship Him. We need to incorporate a variety of musical styles, as opposed to everything sounding the same in a service. We should be using different instrumentation to create different moods. And passion must be an essential ingredient of our worship. 

If we aren’t hungering and thirsting after God, we should not expect Him to be drawn to our services.

In fact, we may not be the only ones dissatisfied with our worship today…

“I can’t stand your religious meetings.  I’m fed up with your conferences and conventions.  I want nothing to do with your religion projects, your pretentious slogans and goals.  I’m sick of your fund-raising schemes, your public relations and image making.  I’ve had all I can take of your noisy ego-music.  When was the last time you sang to me?” – Amos 5:21 and following (The Message)

Maybe we’re dissatisfied because His Spirit is within us, and He’s dissatisfied too. So let’s allow Him to tip over the tables of our temples if He chooses. It may stir up some dust in the process, but God’s presence in our worship will be more than worth the trouble.

Because if God’s presence isn’t there, is it really worship? That’s the most important question of all.

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Copyright © 2024 by David Gipson. All rights reserved.

Our dream house was a 120-year old 3-story Victorian home. It was just a few blocks away from one of the loveliest parks in the city and the same distance from the church I pastored. I could literally walk to work, and did so on many mornings. How convenient!

Unlike the other brick houses that lined the streets nearby, this one was painted light yellow and stood apart from the rest. Plaster reliefs of baby angels wrapped around the base of the house. They represented the children of the original owners, making the structure even more unique. It also had a three-car garage at the back of it. Few houses in this older section of town had one as large, and many people resorted to parking on the street. But not us! On just an average salary, we had bought one of the nicest places to live in the area. 

I had always dreamed of owning a Victorian home. I had performed the role of Prof. Henry Higgins from the musical My Fair Lady right before we moved to our new city. So I was primed to live the life of the English gentleman, sipping tea in my beautiful old house. I loved the old wood, the stained glass windows, and our “penthouse suite” for my wife and me on the top floor. We’d be sequestered away from the noise of our little girls playing below us. It all seemed so ideal.

But it turned out to be anything but ideal. Our “Golden House”, as our little girls came to call it, was not so golden. In fact, our dream house almost killed us, quite literally. 

One afternoon I got a call at the church. It was Dawn, my wife, and she was sobbing hysterically. Finally I was able to make out enough of her words to understand what was happening.

“I fell…come home!”

Almost 20 years ago, my wife had been in a bad car accident that crushed her right leg. That ankle couldn’t turn at all. So as I ran the 5 blocks to my home, I knew what had happened.

When I got to the house, I found Dawn in the basement. She was headed to the washer and drier there, and had misjudged a step going down. She hit the concrete floor hard.

After getting her to the hospital, thankfully we learned nothing had been broken. However, that would be just the first of several falls for Dawn down those steps. We eventually moved the washer and drier up to the second floor, which helped a little. But the bottom line was a three-story house with narrow stairways were not meant for a woman who had challenges with mobility.

I also learned having your bedroom on the third-floor is not a good idea for a chubby guy in his mid-50s. There were a few days I wondered if I’d still be alive by the time I reached the top floor. Though I began on the stairway to the bedroom, I might end up on the stairway to heaven…

Then there was the city. Dawn and I always loved culture, restaurants, theater and all the things a great city has to offer. So living there, we felt like kids in a candy store. There was always some new restaurant to explore, always a show playing somewhere, and interesting people living all around us. It seemed ideal.

Except for crime. And taxes. Many cities are big on those, and ours was no exception. We had both in abundance.

One of our regular nightly diversions was watching the notifications on our community’s “Next Door App” alert us to all the recent shootings and hold-ups around us. One of us would hear gunshots, and I’d watch for the posts to pop up. I’d then calculate how close it was to our home. Many were within just a few blocks, some just down the street. 

We would occasionally get notices of some tax we hadn’t paid. Usually, we neglected to pay because the city had neglected to ever send a bill. Then one day, you get a notice you’re being sent to a collections agency, even though you still hadn’t received a bill yourself. 

Once we got a bill for trash pick-up. We were confused because we paid a refuse bill on time every month. But a lady on the phone informed us what we had paid was in fact only the garbage bill. There was completely different bill that was a tax for just having trash pick up available to us in the city. This bill was paying for the “possibility” our trash might be picked up. No kidding.

I’m sure they’re still probably working on a way to collect a tax on our taxes. 

All of this added together was a painful lesson on the difference between perception and reality. After we first moved to that city and were still living in an apartment, I walked down those very streets and fantasized about how wonderful living there would be. When we found the Golden House, we rejoiced and basically cried out, “Here, take our money” to the realtor. 

But the view from the outside of a situation is always much different from the inside. Nothing is ever quite what you expect…with houses, or with life.

The problem with so many of the things we want is it’s too often based on an illusion. We think a thing, a person, or a situation will bring happiness. But happiness is never found in those things outside of us.

Real happiness only happens from the inside out.

There’s an old fashioned Bible word for this foolishness: covetousness. The prohibition against coveting is actually the 10th and final commandment. It’s easily skimmed over in favor of the more R-rated commandments against murder or adultery. Simply wanting your neighbors stuff as opposed to stealing it or killing for it seems like no big deal in comparison.

But coveting is like a powerful drug. The addict never gets enough. Once he gets that one thing he’s obsessed over, he’s disappointed to realize it doesn’t fulfill his needs and he moves on to something more. The new car he’d wanted all his life now sits in the garage most days. She can’t even remember why she bought that purse now. That’s how coveting works: whatever you get, it’s never enough. You’re always left wanting something else, and even more addicted to your desires.

Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart rejoiced in all my labor; And this was my reward from all my labor. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled; And indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun. - Ecclesiastes 2:10-11

Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. - Luke 12:15

There was nothing wrong with us wanting a house. But it was very wrong of me to think that it would bring us so much happiness on its own. The ideal life and fulfillment I was expecting from a house was unreasonable. 

That kind of happiness only comes from God’s address, not mine.

Inevitably, we become like kids on the day after Christmas. We’ve opened every package, played with every toy, and we’re already bored with them. The newness wore off in a day, all because we were expecting too much from them to begin with.

Most homes stop being dream houses the minute we walk into them. Reality inevitably sets in, and the “house porn” on the realtor’s website is now just a bunch of plaster and dry wall. 

We finally made it out of our dream house before it killed us. No, we didn't run screaming from it in the middle of the night like in the Shining or the Amityville Horror. When we left, it did take quite a bite out of our finances, and we had to sell for quite a bit less than we'd paid. But the wound was worth it for the lesson we learned.

We’re in a new place now, in a much smaller city. We’re renting a little one-story house we’re hoping to buy soon. We're in a little neighborhood where we hardly ever lock our front door. It's pretty boring compared to city life, but that’s just fine with me.

I’ve discovered what really makes a “dream house”. The dream is not the house, it’s the people you put in it. Regardless of the size or location, those people are what makes life worthwhile. 

Everything else is just a dream. And all that glitters is not a golden house.

Our dream house was a 120-year old 3-story Victorian home. It was just a few blocks away from one of the loveliest parks in the city and the same distance from the church I pastored. I could literally walk to work, and did so on many mornings. How convenient!

Unlike the other brick houses that lined the streets nearby, this one was painted light yellow and stood apart from the rest. Plaster reliefs of baby angels wrapped around the base of the house. They represented the children of the original owners, making the structure even more unique. It also had a three-car garage at the back of it. Few houses in this older section of town had one as large, and many people resorted to parking on the street. But not us! On just an average salary, we had bought one of the nicest places to live in the area. 

I had always dreamed of owning a Victorian home. I had performed the role of Prof. Henry Higgins from the musical My Fair Lady right before we moved to our new city. So I was primed to live the life of the English gentleman, sipping tea in my beautiful old house. I loved the old wood, the stained glass windows, and our “penthouse suite” for my wife and me on the top floor. We’d be sequestered away from the noise of our little girls playing below us. It all seemed so ideal.

But it turned out to be anything but ideal. Our “Golden House”, as our little girls came to call it, was not so golden. In fact, our dream house almost killed us, quite literally. 

One afternoon I got a call at the church. It was Dawn, my wife, and she was sobbing hysterically. Finally I was able to make out enough of her words to understand what was happening.

“I fell…come home!”

Almost 20 years ago, my wife had been in a bad car accident that crushed her right leg. That ankle couldn’t turn at all. So as I ran the 5 blocks to my home, I knew what had happened.

When I got to the house, I found Dawn in the basement. She was headed to the washer and drier there, and had misjudged a step going down. She hit the concrete floor hard.

After getting her to the hospital, thankfully we learned nothing had been broken. However, that would be just the first of several falls for Dawn down those steps. We eventually moved the washer and drier up to the second floor, which helped a little. But the bottom line was a three-story house with narrow stairways were not meant for a woman who had challenges with mobility.

I also learned having your bedroom on the third-floor is not a good idea for a chubby guy in his mid-50s. There were a few days I wondered if I’d still be alive by the time I reached the top floor. Though I began on the stairway to the bedroom, I might end up on the stairway to heaven…

Then there was the city. Dawn and I always loved culture, restaurants, theater and all the things a great city has to offer. So living there, we felt like kids in a candy store. There was always some new restaurant to explore, always a show playing somewhere, and interesting people living all around us. It seemed ideal.

Except for crime. And taxes. Many cities are big on those, and ours was no exception. We had both in abundance.

One of our regular nightly diversions was watching the notifications on our community’s “Next Door App” alert us to all the recent shootings and hold-ups around us. One of us would hear gunshots, and I’d watch for the posts to pop up. I’d then calculate how close it was to our home. Many were within just a few blocks, some just down the street. 

We would occasionally get notices of some tax we hadn’t paid. Usually, we neglected to pay because the city had neglected to ever send a bill. Then one day, you get a notice you’re being sent to a collections agency, even though you still hadn’t received a bill yourself. 

Once we got a bill for trash pick-up. We were confused because we paid a refuse bill on time every month. But a lady on the phone informed us what we had paid was in fact only the garbage bill. There was completely different bill that was a tax for just having trash pick up available to us in the city. This bill was paying for the “possibility” our trash might be picked up. No kidding.

I’m sure they’re still probably working on a way to collect a tax on our taxes. 

All of this added together was a painful lesson on the difference between perception and reality. After we first moved to that city and were still living in an apartment, I walked down those very streets and fantasized about how wonderful living there would be. When we found the Golden House, we rejoiced and basically cried out, “Here, take our money” to the realtor. 

But the view from the outside of a situation is always much different from the inside. Nothing is ever quite what you expect…with houses, or with life.

The problem with so many of the things we want is it’s too often based on an illusion. We think a thing, a person, or a situation will bring happiness. But happiness is never found in those things outside of us.

Real happiness only happens from the inside out.

There’s an old fashioned Bible word for this foolishness: covetousness. The prohibition against coveting is actually the 10th and final commandment. It’s easily skimmed over in favor of the more R-rated commandments against murder or adultery. Simply wanting your neighbors stuff as opposed to stealing it or killing for it seems like no big deal in comparison.

But coveting is like a powerful drug. The addict never gets enough. Once he gets that one thing he’s obsessed over, he’s disappointed to realize it doesn’t fulfill his needs and he moves on to something more. The new car he’d wanted all his life now sits in the garage most days. She can’t even remember why she bought that purse now. That’s how coveting works: whatever you get, it’s never enough. You’re always left wanting something else, and even more addicted to your desires.

Whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I did not withhold my heart from any pleasure, for my heart rejoiced in all my labor; And this was my reward from all my labor. Then I looked on all the works that my hands had done and on the labor in which I had toiled; And indeed all was vanity and grasping for the wind. There was no profit under the sun. - Ecclesiastes 2:10-11

Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness, for one's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions. - Luke 12:15

There was nothing wrong with us wanting a house. But it was very wrong of me to think that it would bring us so much happiness on its own. The ideal life and fulfillment I was expecting from a house was unreasonable. 

That kind of happiness only comes from God’s address, not mine.

Inevitably, we become like kids on the day after Christmas. We’ve opened every package, played with every toy, and we’re already bored with them. The newness wore off in a day, all because we were expecting too much from them to begin with.

Most homes stop being dream houses the minute we walk into them. Reality inevitably sets in, and the “house porn” on the realtor’s website is now just a bunch of plaster and dry wall. 

We finally made it out of our dream house before it killed us. No, we didn't run screaming from it in the middle of the night like in the Shining or the Amityville Horror. When we left, it did take quite a bite out of our finances, and we had to sell for quite a bit less than we'd paid. But the wound was worth it for the lesson we learned.

We’re in a new place now, in a much smaller city. We’re renting a little one-story house we’re hoping to buy soon. We're in a little neighborhood where we hardly ever lock our front door. It's pretty boring compared to city life, but that’s just fine with me.

I’ve discovered what really makes a “dream house”. The dream is not the house, it’s the people you put in it. Regardless of the size or location, those people are what makes life worthwhile. 

Everything else is just a dream. And all that glitters is not a golden house.