I’ve mentioned several times over the years how I’ve struggled with (and have now reached a point where I’m pretty tired of) “doing” church like most Americans do.
What I mean by that is I have a hard time with how most American worship services are structured and how the different aspects function.
As I wrote in my last piece, I tend to have a somewhat visceral reaction anymore to the worship service formula that emulates the rough equivalent of a rock concert combined with a TED Talk – a worship “performance” and a motivational speech for a sermon.
My reaction doesn’t really change all that much whether we’re talking about worship in a white or African American context.
I want to dig a bit deeper into what I’m talking about here, because I’m pretty confident most of my readers have no idea what I’m sideways about and why I’m seemingly finding problems where none, on the surface, appear to exist.
Let’s look at contemporary worship music, the “rock concert” aspect in most megachurches and smaller churches that attempt to emulate them, or gospel music in a lot of primarily African American churches.
First, I happen to love both rock and gospel music, so I have no issues with musical taste. I listen to rock almost exclusively on my own, and I deeply appreciate the history from which gospels and spiritual songs stem, many of the older songs originating from the emotions and experiences tied up with slavery.
My issue is with that last part of my statement – emotions. Both rock and gospel music are, generally, structured to elicit emotional reactions from people.
It may or may not be a coincidence, but I wonder if one of the reasons rock music began to become the primary styling of what is today labeled contemporary worship music is precisely because people noticed how audiences at secular rock concerts often appeared to be having religious experiences with the music, with eyes closed and arms waving.
I don’t have a problem with that in and of itself. But I think that can, potentially, become a problem when in the context of a church worship service.
Let’s go back to the beginnings of the evangelical movement within Christianity, roughly in the 1600s to 1700s, even especially within the context of the ministry of my own spiritual father (beyond folks in the Bible), John Wesley.
One of the main emphases of Wesley’s ministry was Christian experience – he famously had what he called a “heartwarming” experience, a moment where he felt a special confirmation of sorts in his heart that God deeply loved him, a moment that lit him on fire to spread the Gospel.
This focus on experience spread over the decades among evangelicals, even to the point that some specific groups within the broad cluster of Christian families that labeled themselves as “evangelical” claimed that, if a person did not have some sort of deeply emotional experience of conversion, they weren’t really a Christian at all!
There’s nothing wrong with experience, but if we begin to worship it, that’s a problem. And I think that’s where we’ve been in the American church for a while.
Think about it. Especially starting in the 1800s, the emphasis among evangelicals in America was on the necessity of powerful religious experiences. Look at the example of the rise of the Mormon movement.
I mean no disrespect at all to the Mormon friends I have or Mormons in general – those that I’ve crossed paths with are among the best people I’ve met anywhere.
But if we’re strictly talking theology and matters of belief, I see several serious flaws with their church.
I befriended a Mormon coworker in my late 20s whom I dialogued with on matters of faith, so much so that I conducted a lot of research on the history of the Mormon movement, Joseph Smith, and their beliefs.
I laid out my observations like this: Joseph Smith had been convicted of essentially being a con artist; he claimed to have found gold tablets that had the Book of Mormon written on them, tablets only he could look at and that conveniently disappeared after he translated them; he claimed to have found the Book of Abraham on some Egyptian papyri he bought off a traveling curiosity show, papyri he claimed to have translated but (because we still have facsimiles of these papyri) Egyptologists can now definitively say he made up (they’re in reality common funeral records) – how in the world can you believe this guy?
My friend had a seminal response: “David, I prayed to God about whether the Book of Mormon is true, and I know what I felt.”
I know what I felt. Experience.
And that isn’t an isolated example – my friend said the key point of conversion for most Mormon missionaries is when they gift someone a copy of the Book of Mormon and ask them to do just that, pray to God about whether it’s true or not. Evidently there are a large number of people who do report a religious experience that follows.
I told my friend I didn’t doubt that he had an experience, but had he ever thought to question the deeper meaning of what that experience might have been – whether it was actually an affirmation, or whether it was a good idea for him to let a feeling trump his brain, or whether it was possible the experience didn’t come from God but came from another spiritual (or physical) source?
He reiterated, “I know what I felt.”
That’s a problem. Experience is subjective, and it can be misleading. Our experiences don’t happen in vacuums – every experience is interpreted by our brain; our brains give meaning to our experiences.
And I promise I’m not trying to bash Mormons, because they are simply products of the same kind of logic that consumed evangelicals as a whole in the 19th Century and that has stuck with most of them to this day – chasing religious experience at the cost of everything else and justifying all sorts of beliefs in the name of experience.
This concerns me a great deal in contemporary Christian worship. I have several times been in a room where peoples’ emotions have been raised by the effect of rock music (and this is tricky – the Holy Spirit can indeed use music to touch people, but alternatively, it’s also very easy for people to be only moved by music and claim it’s the Holy Spirit: who can *actually* tell the difference?) and church leaders have used the moment of the emotional / spiritual high to speak all sorts of foolish and incorrect theological ideas into peoples’ hearts.
A common refrain in such moments is, “The Holy Spirit is here! The Spirit is moving!” Well, invariably, yes, because the Holy Spirit indwells every believer at all times, so the Spirit is always present, but how can we parse out a *special* moment of the Spirit’s presence versus an emotional high that almost any rock concert fan can attest to with zero religious meaning? We can’t.
Nonetheless, I’ve seen church leaders too frequently make the exact same mistake my Mormon friend did – “I feel the Spirit here, so that affirms what we believe!”
In other words, “I know what I felt, so I must be right.”
This is a major problem within the American (and by extension, worldwide evangelical) church. We’re too obsessed with religious experience at the expense of nearly everything else.
Let’s bring it back to worship services. This is why I don’t care for the desperately-trying-to-evoke-deep-emotions tenor of contemporary and gospel music and thus the setup of most American church services.
I’m uncomfortable with what feels like the emotional and spiritual manipulation that’s implicit in these spaces.
And I think a large number of the unchurched American population is, too.
Evangelicals have a stigma associated with them (for a large number of reasons, primary among them their frequently blatant political hypocrisy). The stereotype of seeing people in a trance with their eyes closed and arms raised to be followed within the hour by being the rudest people to wait staff in local restaurants has taken a toll.
If the church is going to find new life in a post-Christian society, which out of necessity will entail reaching large numbers of people who don’t come from a Christian background but do carry cultural baggage associated with Christian stereotypes, I think it will have to shed its idolatry of religious experience and find other ways to worship.
I feel my hunch is affirmed when looking at worship in cultures outside the American / evangelical context – look at the expressions of Orthodox and Roman Catholic worship services, who combined make up by far the vast majority of Christians worldwide.
I’ve been deeply blessed by my experiences worshiping within a Greek Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox setting. They are very heavily liturgical and emphasize a lot of participation by the congregation. They include singing, even hearty singing, but not of a soaring anthem variety that is intending emotional ecstasy as its end goal.
There is a very reverent and holy vibe throughout worship, which acts as a conduit to the divine without appealing to emotion.
My suspicion is that, if there is going to be any version of a healthy future for the Western American church, it lays along the path of adopting these robust and ancient worship practices.
At the very least, it’s past time for a reckoning with its fixation on religious experience.
David S. Wisener 