Category Archives: Worship

30-minute worship

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While driving from Dallas to Austin recently, I saw a banner with that phrase on it — 30-minute worship. My reaction was, Really? So who’s this targeting? People who just can’t be bothered to give more than 30 minutes out of their busy life to Jesus on Sunday morning?

I’m pretty sure Jesus didn’t respond to a “30-minute cross” banner on his way to Golgotha.

If that’s offensive, I assure you I don’t mean it to be, but I would like us to take a look at our priorities.

  • We hurry home from an after-dinner rush to the supermarket so we don’t miss the beginning of Survivor.
  • We have our child at school 20 minutes early for her kindergarten “holiday program” so we can sit in the front row.
  • We quietly slink out of Sunday morning worship so we can beat the _____ (insert name of denomination) to Smok-E-Mo’s Barbecue and still make it home in time for the Cowboys kickoff.
  • After a late Saturday night, we just can’t get it going the next morning, so we totally skip Bible class and arrive at worship 10 minutes late. We only miss a couple of songs.
  • We’re on time for Sunday morning worship, but have some things to take care of, so we make a hasty exit after communion. At least we were there for the most important part.

Do I sound cynical in the least? Please feel free to kick me if you’ve never experienced (or been guilty of) any of this.

What are we “here” for, anyway? I don’t agree 100% with Rick Warren, but I do agree with him that our purpose on earth is to give praise, honor, and glory to the One Who put us here. Period. That’s why God created us.

I understand there are times when there are business trips on Sunday and there are airplanes to catch. Been there. I also understand that there are other things that take us away from worship, and these just can’t be avoided. Most of the time though, isn’t is because of a choice we make? We choose to be on time and to participate fully in the things that truly matter to us.

  • We choose to hit the snooze 3 or 4 times, and end up being late to worship.
  • We choose to be in our easy chair when Survivor (or Gray’s Anatomy, or whatever it is that you can’t miss) comes on the tube, and we don’t miss a second of the action.
  • We choose to have our 10-year-old son at his soccer game 15 minutes early so he can be a “starter”.
  • Anyone who’s ever had a child knows infants (and kids of all ages) have schedules of their own, but many times when we’re late, isn’t it because we simply failed to plan far enough ahead to get ourselves and our kids there in time for Bible class?

We can just as easily choose to make worship a priority in our lives. If it takes a full 60 or 90 or 120 minutes of our precious Sunday morning, day-off, day-of-rest time, then so be it. What are we here for anyway? How long was Jesus on the cross? (Hint: It was between 5 hours and 7 hours — Mark 15:25, 33-34.) I don’t think showing up on time and staying until the last “Amen” is too much to ask.

iPods, PDAs, and iPhones — Bring them to worship or leave them at home?

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Tim Challies wrote last Saturday in a Crosswalk.com blog that he’s witnessing a disturbing trend: Christians coming to worship not with a traditional paper & ink Bible, but an electronic Bible on an iPod, smart phone, or other such device. He encourages his readers not only to not bring an electronic Bible to worship, but to not do their daily Bible reading with one either.

Challies quotes two “gurus of the technological age”, Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman, to support his thesis. He argues, supported by quotes from McLuhan, that you can’t separate the medium and the message. “The medium is the message,” McLuhan says. Challies claims it’s folly to discount this fact, and also puts into this category singing hymns from a PowerPoint image instead of from a printed book, and listening to sermons online instead of listening in a pew.

I don’t get it, but then I’m one of the ones in our congregation (yes, there are more than just me) who follows the Bible class teacher as he reads from Scripture, I search cross-references, and I even look up Greek words on the Bible that’s loaded onto my iPhone. What’s wrong with that? So I really don’t get the “medium is the message” argument. When it comes to God’s Word, the Message is the message. That Message is the same no matter what the medium. Challies argues that when reading the Bible electronically, sure, we read the same words, but “in a way that influences us toward a different worldview, a different way of understanding the reality of those words.”

I still don’t get it.

There’s another reason I like my iPhone Bible in Bible class. Let’s say the teacher is answering someone’s question, and he says, “Paul says ‘the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing’, but I don’t know where that’s found.” Maybe I’d like to know where that verse is recorded. It’s a lot easier to do a search on my electronic Bible than it is to use the mini-concordance in the back of my NIV Study Bible to find it.

Maybe I’m just deluded and sheltered in my own little iPhone thought-cloud. Maybe there’s more to this that I don’t get, and maybe I really shouldn’t be bringing my iPhone to Bible class and worship. (At least I’m one of the “good guys” who turns the ringer off during services.)

Let me know what you think.

Is our worship too casual?

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It’s 10 AM on Sunday morning. (Maybe your services don’t start at 10 AM, but humor me here.)

Worship is about to start. How will you know when it does?

  1. The song/worship leader begins to sing a song.
  2. Someone in the audience spontaneously begins to sing a song, and the congregation follows.
  3. An elder gets up to make announcements, and says, “Good morning!” Then he repeats his greeting if the congregation doesn’t reciprocate loud enough.
  4. As congregants enter the auditorium, they see a scripture displayed on the screen. At 10 AM, a man goes to the podium, greets the congregation, reads scripture, and says a few words to help the assembly prepare for the next hour in the presence of Holy God.

J. Randal Matheny, a missionary in Brazil, writes one of the blogs I read daily. He suggests we’ve become too casual in our approach to worship. He observes…

…kids are text-messaging during worship. Elders must move them to repent (parents, to discipline), and repent themselves for not taking action.
…Praise teams, praise music and contemporary worship have not elevated our sense of the divine presence in worship, but coarsened our spirits to be titillated by sensual and visual stimulation. We miss seeing the Invisible.

We need to prepare for worship — not just appear at the appointed time (or 10 minutes late; after all, what do we miss? A couple songs?), but to recognize that we’re being “ushered into the Lord’s presence”, as Matheny writes.

He also believes it’s shameful to “start a song to quieten people down”. I think I’d agree with that, if that were truly the reason. I’ve been a member of more than one congregation though, where we did begin services that way, and the reason wasn’t to quiet people down. The song was chosen specifically to help us remember that we are indeed sinners in the presence of a Mighty God, and were assembled to worship Him. What’s wrong with that?

“We miss seeing the Invisible.” Indeed!

Now to the King eternal, immortal, invisible, the only God, be honor and glory for ever and ever. Amen. (1 Timothy 1:17)

If that’s what’s on your heart when you begin worship — great! If not, why not?

Matheny observes, “Our worship, also, has been sanitized. The blood and gore of the cross have been mopped up.” I agree. The cross was a horrendous way to die! It was painful. It was humiliating.

You’ve seen The Passion of the Christ. If you thought Gibson went overboard; if you thought he made the scenes from the scourging through the crucifixion needlessly gory, I’d like to suggest you don’t have a real sense of how terrible a sentence it was to be sentenced to death at the hands of the Romans. If anything, Mel Gibson sugar-coated it.

Here’s the crux of the matter, according to Matheny:

The main issue, probably, is emotional burnout. We’ve thrilled ourselves to death. Worship doesn’t send a shiver up our legs. So it’s ho-hum, ho-hum, to dreary church we go.

That’s right. We’ve become tired of worship. It does take 1-2 hours out of our weekend, after all. Why be bothered? In fact, I know of people who have admitted to attending worship (not to mention never attending Bible class) only on Sunday morning “because that’s all that’s required”. Ouch. Let’s reverse that. What if Jesus did “all that was required”? Not a single one of us would have a hope of eternity in heaven. Jesus, yes, did what was required in order for us to have a hope of eternal life, but He didn’t do only what was required for Him to remain Holy God. He already had that stature, and nothing can change that.

What was required? Nothing. What was necessary in order for His younger brothers & sisters to have a hope of eternal life with Him? Exactly what he did. He, the perfect, spotless Lamb of God, gave His life so that I, the ugly, blemished-all-over black sheep sinner, might live with Him forever.

Hallelujah!