Dear Pneuma,

I need to vent about worship. I am pissed this morning. I am feeling extremely agitated about the fact that my church is failing in worship. I am agitated that worship can be seen as a throw together business, with the idea that we should just "get it done."

I am pissed because I attend seminars, read books, and work with musicians, clergy, lay speakers, altar guild members, and ushers that circle continually around a vision of a declining membership and a church that has become irrelevant to the life of the world, yet, when it comes to confronting the reality of dead worship in our own home church, we look somewhere else for the answers.

I am pissed. I see, again and again, opportunities to change ignored in order to keep the boat from tipping, to cost less, to fit into a daily schedule, or to avoid making mistakes. Do we even believe in God? Do we believe, in any part of our beings, that God is present in worship? What if God is there, but we are not? What if we are bringing our world's fears, expectations and prejudices into the ways we "plan" worship? To quote Tex Sample, "We put God' story into the world's story, when what we should be doing is putting the world's story into God's story."

I think, our goal as worship leaders should be to invite the Holy to be with us. It should be time of passionate devotion, of vulnerable asking, of angry questions, of joyous exaltation, of aching loss, and blushing fulfillment as we come together in a body of believers, knowing our God yearns to be there with us. We, as worship leaders, as midwives of the birthing process (Jorge Lockwood), can create an atmosphere of comfort, care and demand that brings those exchanges to life.

Worship is corporate practice of discerning the Divine, different than prayer because of the power and scope of need, offering, and devotion within a body of believers. Worship is a time to become a one made of many instead of a place where the many are reduced to the preferences of any one. It is a sacrifice of time, made to be together with God.

Our God needs that time with us. We need that time with our God. It seems to me that when we create worship with this intent, we will hear our God, and our God will hear us. It seems to me, that when the Holy touches our time, we will seek time to touch the Holy. It seems to me that worship will become something we need, not something we plan, organize, direct, or DO.

When worship becomes business, when worship becomes a repeated template of activity leading to an offering of money, when worship becomes something, as a body, that we just attend, our God is better served outside the house of worship.

So, here is my rant:
If worship is dead: bury it.
If worship is dying: love it, and let it go.
If worship is being born: midwife it free.
If worship is becoming: embrace its being, whatever form it takes.

Worship is not "the first thing people see when the come in and that last thing they see as they leave." It is not the "first impression" we make on our prospective customers. Worship has nothing to do with the business of the church. The church's business comes from the practices of worship. Worship is Holy Time. Worship is conversation with God across the kitchen table. Worship is an opportunity to bring our fingerpaintings to God and see them hung with care on the refrigerator.

So what are we doing with our organs and pianos? What are we doing with our choirs, our gold offering plates, and our Eucharist liturgies? What are we doing with drums, guitars, and clapping hands? What are we doing when we read a prayer? What are we doing when we offer a bulletin? What are we doing when we sing a song? If we don't know, maybe we should find out, and if we don't mean it, we had better not do it.

So, New Pact with myself: I will not support conversations that reduce worship to a series of actions devoid of power. I will not engage in worship practices that are dead. I will challenge any concept that God is bound by the shape of a space, the number of people worshipping, or the stylistic expressions of an art form.

Last, Pneuma, let me express this: maybe, when we American Christians decide to take worship seriously enough to laugh at it, to laugh at ourselves, and to put business aside so that worship can happen, we will find that worship is where God happens, and where God happens, people will come.

Thank you SO much for being there.
Love Always, Cobalt Dreams