The maintenance of Divine worship

Okay, you all welcome.
Thank you for–thank you for being here this evening.
We are–if you–well,
if you can’t see the screen,
it won’t really matter probably.
There will be some–there will be some slides and a couple of quotes that you could read
along with but you’ll be fine either way.
First of all,
thank you to those who brought food this evening and again,
excellent meal and we appreciate that very much.
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Tonight,
tonight we–maybe.
Tonight we move on to the third divine end,
the maintenance of divine worship,
the third end of the church.
And we’re going to work through these words.
Again, we’re going to probably move backwards.
I think that helps set the tone a little bit so we begin with worship.
The word worship means to elevate,
to revere,
to praise or serve.
Literally,
in Hebrew it means to bow down,
to venerate and worship comes pretty natural to people.
We are kind of wired to worship something.
We have a tendency to want to worship or to look at something beyond ourselves.
You see this in stories in the Old Testament like the golden calf.
We see it in the New Testament,
Paul in Athens when he’s wandering around all the idols
and there’s an idol to an unknown God in case the people had missed one,
they built one for mystery God.
We worship money,
worship fame, we worship praise,
we worship control, we worship success,
all kinds of things.
So worship is, I think, a fairly common concept to us.
If I asked you what it means to worship,
what would you say?
Praise God.
To praise some–okay.
Sunday morning.
To praise Sunday morning,
sure. So then,
because we are wired to worship,
this second word,
divine,
the maintenance of divine worship.
In other words, the church is to be about not just worship in general,
but a very specific kind of worship.
This is the word that defines our worship.
Worship must keep its proper object.
We must keep God as the focus of our worship.
So here’s the quote.
Worship is more than paying homage.
To worship is to join the cosmos in praising God.
To praise is to call forth the promise and presence of the divine.
We live for the sake of a song.
We praise for the privilege of being.
Worship is the climax of living.
There is no knowledge without love,
no truth without praise.
Praise is man’s response to the never-ending beginning.
So we must keep the divine as the focus of worship.
And this is no small task in the human tradition,
even in the church.
We are often tempted to evaluate worship by things like attendance,
music, preaching,
style,
people.
And what we say of worship,
how we talk about worship often comes down to that idea of our opinion of it,
our experience of it.
And when we do that,
there is a tendency to make worship about what we receive rather than what we give.
And there is a tendency to make worship about our reception of it and perception of it
rather than what we offer to God through it.
So God must be the referent.
Worship should engage, it should teach, it should inspire, comfort,
challenge, and I would argue even entertain.
But it must not be about any of those things.
We struggle because our wire is toward worship,
not to make it about us.
That’s the struggle of humans in church.
We want to worship something and we’re always sort of trying to put ourself in the place of the thing being worshiped.
So Philip Yancey said,
“The church exists not primarily to provide entertainment or encourage vulnerability or build self-esteem or facilitate friendships,
but to worship God.
And if it fails in that,
it fails, period.”
Another author said,
“If worship is to flourish,
churches must constantly critique what they do in the name of worship,
but they must do so for the right reasons.”
When worship reforms are driven by a desire to grow a congregation rather than improve it,
the church itself turns into a theater.
It may draw a crowd,
but to no serious purpose.
So we have struggled in America with the idea that big is successful.
So if we get a lot of people coming to church,
the idea is we must be doing it right.
Well, that’s not necessarily a safe assumption.
Fifty thousand people go to the Super Bowl.
God has nothing to do with it.
Concerts,
plays,
theater, movies,
getting a crowd is not unimportant,
but it’s not primary.
And for this reason,
a case has been made that this end,
the maintenance of divine worship,
should really be first.
At least a case can be made that it really undergirds all the other ends.
Our mission,
the preservation of truth,
the promotion of social justice,
all of those things are an outflow of worship.
Our worship life defines how we practice those missions.
Our worship life
engages and gives us a marching plan for all the rest of the stuff the church tries to do.
I don’t know if I think it should be end number one or not,
but I can see the point.
So worship we get,
divine we get.
The third word I think is the interesting one or actually the first word,
maintenance of all the words in the sixth grade ends.
And I think they’re all exceptionally well written and very thoughtful.
This is probably the word that has gotten the most pushback.
People have suggested this should say preserve,
protect, continue.
Maintain has a kind of mechanical feel to it.
Maintenance doesn’t have that sense of creation,
but more of this kind of
doing what you’ve done,
continuance.
But if you think about it,
maintain means to keep something working.
To repair as needed,
to replace parts as needed.
To maintain is to evaluate,
to fix,
to change, to freshen, to keep up with.
It’s more than just continue
because it includes this renovation when things are needed.
If you’re maintaining your house,
you’re changing things in your house.
If you’re maintaining your car,
you’re changing the oil,
you’re doing things to it.
Maintaining your computer,
all of that has some sense of newness to it.
It’s more than just doing what we’ve always done and try to keep it running.
It’s more than bailing wiring it back together.
It is to improve it,
to keep it up.
And this, of course, is where the challenge comes in, the maintaining part.
You may know this,
but the word liturgy,
which we talk about as what we do in church,
literally means the work of the people.
It’s two words mashed together.
Ergon is work.
The work of the people is liturgy.
Maintenance is work.
It’s something that we work on.
It’s something we make an effort to do.
Worship is something we put some work into.
And it’s a public work.
But, and this is the important part to remember,
it is the work of amateurs.
Some of you have heard this story before,
but one of my favorite worship stories is from a professor.
He used to be at Princeton.
His name is Tom Long.
And he remembers, he starts a sermon by remembering that when he was young,
he and his brother on Mother’s Day would try to make breakfast in bed for their mom.
And if you can imagine two young boys in the kitchen,
disaster.
There’s stuff all over.
There’s burnt toast.
There’s runny eggs.
There’s everything you don’t want in breakfast coming into your bed with you.
And what he remembers is they would serve his mother this plate of what he now realizes was probably a little better than slop.
And she would eat it and fuss over how good it was because it wasn’t about the thing itself.
And then he goes on in a way that I’m jealous of.
He says, worship is always the work of amateurs in the kitchen.
There are no professional worshipers.
We’re in there trying to get things done.
We’re trying to do things right.
And we never quite get it right.
And yet the idea is God receives it in grace and in love because he loves his kids.
He loves the fact that we bring it
to him.
So this is where the church maybe has struggled to be gracious enough.
This tension that exists in maintenance between experimenting and playing on the one hand and continuing and keeping and passing down on the other hand.
And this is where sort of the worship wars have been fought, you know,
traditional worship and contemporary worship.
This is where the elements of worship have been argued over.
And interestingly enough, that includes some things that would surprise you.
The King James Bible,
the fights that happened when that left the church,
hymns,
wearing suits,
children’s sermons,
which were considered inappropriate when they started,
wearing hats,
especially for women, head coverings and musical instruments.
In our era, the arguments have been over things like bands and removing pulpits and hanging screens.
Get out of this for a second.
I want to show you just here quickly.
So looking for some of these pictures,
I went to Google,
went to the image search,
typed in worship.
I just want you to notice how far we go down before we get anything that looks familiar to Presbyterians.
For about 500 pictures,
we have bands and lifted hands and light shows and people dancing and those people aren’t us.
It is all worship,
but it’s a different kind of worship.
And this has been the struggle of our era.
And one of the struggles for Presbyterians is that we’ve tended to be emotionally or theologically engaged in the arguments,
emotionally or theologically engaged to the elements,
committed to the elements.
So we either copied what was working in other places and I have friends that have served churches as associate pastors
where the head of staff came in and said,
we’re not doing prayer confession anymore.
It makes people feel bad.
We’re getting rid of the pulpit.
People don’t like it.
We’ve got to replace the pews with chairs.
We’ve got to get rid of the hymnals.
And on the other hand,
we have in our theological stubbornness said we’re not doing any of that.
We don’t care if it’s working for them.
Yeah, people love it, but they’re all wrong.
We have it right and they have it wrong and we do what we do and they should be doing it too.
And we’ve been a little reluctant to find space in the middle.
We either copied or tossed out and we kind of missed out.
And now we’re sort of trying to play catch up.
Now we’re trying to kind of find a way to have a new language of worship that is honoring the space in the middle between what we’ve done
and what seems to be working well and looking to find ourselves in it.
And this is where we come up with that language that I think you know that is not my favorite traditional and contemporary.
And I hate both of these words as they apply to worship.
And the idea is that this is a debate between the past and the present.
Traditional meaning what we’ve done and the implication is it’s old, it’s dry,
it doesn’t really work anymore.
And contemporary meaning it’s what people want and it’s what we should be doing,
it’s new, it’s exciting.
But notice that both of those words are about where our allegiance is,
whether it’s in the past or the present.
Neither of those words really create a space for the middle.
They in my mind are false labels.
All good worship is contemporary because it applies to us,
it lands on us now.
All good worship I would argue is traditional because it connects us to the historic story of the faith.
Not only to the New Testament but on through to the initial covenant God made with all people.
So good worship does both things at once.
It roots us in the past and connects us in the present and I don’t like that language of traditional contemporary.
Those of you around here know we’ve tried to borrow some Presbyterian language.
We talk about our church in the in the reform sense as reformed and always reforming.
We’ve tried to use these words for worship.
They’re really awkward because nobody knows what they mean.
But there’s a classic quote that says the church of God is reformed and always reforming by the word of God.
Meaning we are always connected to what we’ve been and we’re always living that out in the present.
And so we talk about our reformed and our reforming service and people go what are you saying?
And we try to explain it but it keeps us from using traditional and contemporary at least officially.
So our ongoing task then as a church is to evaluate and maintain worship in a way that honors who we’ve been and connects in the present.
And that is not an easy task.
The danger is that we on one hand are afraid of losing our identity.
We won’t be us anymore.
And on the other hand we’re afraid of losing people.
We won’t keep the kids.
They’ll go to some other church.
The trick in that I think is that it’s not quite so cut and dry because one of the things worship also does
is teaches people how to worship.
In other words there is a danger when you go out and ask people who don’t come to church what they would like to come to church.
Every once in a while I get stopped by somebody and they’ll say you know I don’t come to church but if you had it at four o’clock in the afternoon I would.
If you had it on Saturdays at two I’d be there.
And I think to myself it seems risky to me to plan something for people who aren’t already interested at all.
Like the likely outcome it seems to me is that we end up with a two o’clock Saturday afternoon service and it’s me and Michael wishing we had our Saturdays open.
Or that it works but we still don’t see the people who don’t come because now that doesn’t work either.
And so one of the things worship does is teaches us how to worship and so people who come looking for a connection but they come without tradition lack perspective.
That’s not a that’s not a criticism and that’s not an insult but they may want to recreate worship rather than maintain it because for them it’s new.
For them it’s disconnected with the past.
They may not understand that for two thousand years in every corner of the world Christians have been gathering through war through peace through flood famine disease Holocaust celebration life birth death every Sunday.
Those people have gathered in every language in every place to give themselves to God.
They’ve prayed they sang they’ve done it with pipe organs they’ve done it with tambourines they’ve banged rocks and sticks together.
They’ve joined their voices from the very beginning sometimes in hiding and they glorified God for no other reason than God is God.
We have celebrated the victory of Jesus Christ and the power of his resurrection lives have been changed and redeemed and every time we gather we connect with that.
We dive into that historic river of praise hoping that it will spill out and overflow into the world.
We come before the living God the creator the almighty we gather together and sometimes with strong voices and sometimes through tears we dare to ask thy will be done.
And we join what Paul says are the course of angels.
The song of creation that worship the only one who is worthy.
So how great thou art is not just us singing it.
It’s the cry of the church it’s the song of the church.
And if a person doesn’t understand that all that might be left for them is did I like it.
Did I like the music.
Did I like the sermon.
But that’s a poor substitute.
There’s a story about a college boy who comes home and mom drags into church and he’s educated now and maybe he’s also in a bad mood.
And maybe he’s just that kind of kid or maybe he’s pushing mom’s buttons.
But on the way home you know they’re reviewing the service and he said oh that sermon wasn’t very good.
That was boring.
Holy cow.
The music I can’t believe the music wasn’t very good the singing though whatever the litter just was hard to hear.
Mom that just wasn’t none of that was very good and mom finally had enough of it and she said well son how good were you this morning.
In other words if a worship service feels dull and dead and uninspiring the first core question we might need to ask is where was my heart this morning.
Was I listening.
Was I open was I engaged.
Now there are boring church services.
I’m not denying that.
There are also days that we struggle to get it.
So our task then is to stay connected with the past our tradition.
But to listen and learn from the present.
And to see if any of the stuff might be an improvement.
To see if there’s something we can tweak or change that helps us.
Does this help us honor God.
Either more faithfully connecting to our past or more invitationally more community connecting to people of the present.
And this will be the ongoing and never finished task of the church.
Worship is going to continue to evolve and improve in its practice but not in its purpose.
And the wonderful task of the church though incredibly difficult.
Is to adapt these methods with an unchanged mission.
To remember that ultimately it’s not about us.
There are no professional worshippers.
He ends Tom Wong ends that story of kids making breakfast for mom like this.
So every Sunday we enter the sanctuary like children filled with adoration.
Carrying our badly cooked but lovingly prepared liturgical breakfast.
On the menu are prayers of which we know not the depth.
Sermons barely finished.
Hymns haltingly sung.
The word clumsily spoken.
And yet every Sunday there is God.
Like a patient parent waiting to receive with relish and grace and kindness the burnt offerings that we bring.
We will continue in the church to be called to do what we’ve always done but not always done well.
Maintain divine worship.
We strive to offer our best knowing that it’s not about who does it but who receives it.
Then it is more about the one who it’s offered to than the ones who offer it.
And we will continue to do it haphazardly.
And we will continue at times to miss either our tradition or our present.
But week after week the church will chase this goal of maintaining worship of the God who called us to worship Him.
I probably should have started with this.
I don’t think it’s surprising anybody.
I think I have two favorite great ends.
This is one of them.
I’ll save the other one for another.
I’ll tell you that when we get to it.
But worship and ideas and conversations about worship are a passion and a struggle I think.
We live in an interesting time.
I read an article recently that suggested that really until about the mid to late 60s.
The only real change that you would discuss in church would be what hymns you were going to sing.
And then the sort of camp music thing started working its way in.
And from there it took a little while but then it was kind of Katie bar the door and everything started to change.
And within a couple decades everything was different in a lot of churches.
Again because we’re Presbyterian we are often a little late to those parties.
We take our time getting there.
But those same conversations fell down through the Presbyterian ranks as well.
I think largely settled at this point but not completely.
I think probably not a great number of Presbyterian churches are still holding out refusing to get on board with some of what has changed.
There are some.
Some of that’s out of necessity.
Just heard recently that there’s a larger Lutheran church that’s trying to figure out a way to broadcast its services to tiny Lutheran churches out in the country that can’t afford pastors.
Which means those tiny little churches are going to have to have screens and Internet and all of that stuff they likely don’t have.
But sometimes necessity has pushed us on that.
I’m at a point where I probably just babble if I keep going.
So let me stop and ask if there are questions thoughts.
What do you all make of maintaining divine worship.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Right.
So the question that maybe get there would be this.
How do you all know if you’ve worshiped.
You come to church on a Sunday.
How do you know if you’ve worshiped.
If I leave feeling different feeling different.
Okay.
Something made you think.
Okay. I know somebody who used to say after coming home from church man I could have stayed home and read the Reader’s Digest this morning.
I think when something speaks to you and I did something out of the music and every Sunday here.
Another thing I do.
Probably because I was raised with you know playing musical instruments and singing at home or music was kind of important.
But when I’m even at the organ playing I read the words and if I’m in the congregation just worshiping I read the words and think about every word I’m reading and I think a lot of people just sing songs and I know I know my husband for once he can’t sing.
So he just words.
My grandson never sings.
Well and that’s how some of as you well know that’s how some of those hymns get picked.
No but a person who can’t do music but likes the words gets a hold of them.
Sure.
Well the danger of anything you can do without thinking is that you do the Lord’s Prayer the Apostles Creed.
I mean sure.
So so how well how do you how do you know if you’ve if you’ve worshiped how do you know you come to church you leave church how do you know if it worked.
OK.
Feel OK.
OK.
Change.
Change. OK. How long it was short.
Right.
So I’m I’m smiling because this you all perfectly indicate the struggle right.
Every answer we’ve given has been about how we perceived worship.
In other words what what did we take from it an idea of feeling of this or that.
None of us naturally speak toward what we give.
I know it’s worship if I felt like I offered God praise.
That’s a vaguer kind of how do you OK.
That’s the place we start but we don’t naturally start there.
So how do we know if we worship.
And the tension is we leave a church we say we sort of evaluate.
How was music.
How was this.
How the question that we don’t always remember to answer to ask is how did we do.
How did I do this morning.
What did I add to worship in that place.
You always teach.
You always take us to a new understanding.
And to me I do feel like I’m worshiping when I’m learning more.
Sure.
Absolutely. Messages come to be in different ways to look at it.
And that’s not me how I feel.
It’s me learning.
And that’s maybe still not where you want this to be.
No no no.
It’s not.
But do you think there’s great amount of good content.
I agree.
Well I hope we do it because we think so.
I mean that doesn’t mean it always works of course.
And to Katie’s point.
Part of what worship does is sow seeds that we won’t know if it worked.
Until kids who are now coming to the children’s sermon are coming back to church some point in the future.
We hope.
Yeah.
Sure.
Yeah. And you have to.
I mean and you’re handing him running eggs.
I mean.
And you did your best.
You did it in love.
You offered it out of genuine.
This is the best I can come up with today.
So it and those other questions.
How was the music.
How was the sermon.
Those are not unimportant questions.
In fact they’re very important questions that just we have a tendency in the modern this age whatever you call it to make them the primary question.
We tend to put.
Did I like it.
Ahead of how did we do.
Did we worship this morning.
Was God pleased by what we offered.
And that that’s been a problem I think of the.
I want to be.
I want to be careful.
Not to criticize from a place of sour grapes but that has been a place that I think the main line has been concerned about the rapid growth of churches that are tending to cut ties with tradition in order to get people in our.
Our caution has been.
Just because people like it.
Doesn’t mean that you should be doing.
So whatever it is that people like is fine if we still do it well in a way.
That comes up who we are right.
This is why we.
Well.
There OK there are places that do this.
And I’m.
I’m not intentionally knocking them but this is why we don’t sing top 40 songs.
Right.
I love Bruce Springsteen.
All right.
Let’s have a Bruce Springsteen anthem next Sunday.
You know let’s do born to run.
Why are we doing born to run because people like it.
Well.
That’s not an important enough reason in the Presbyterian Church shouldn’t be for us to say yeah born to run belongs now in worship.
That means.
Yes some kind of.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No.
And I do think Mike that’s why good worship of any kind.
Has a certain I would argue that it needs a certain order it needs a certain flow so that people.
Have a sense of what to expect and have some familiarity.
This is why it’s hard when visitors come in and this is why we.
Try to put Lord’s Prayer up on the screen so that you don’t have a person sitting there going holy cow everybody in here knows this but me.
I’m an outsider.
And yet I think that’s also.
A thing that makes some of the discussion about the particulars of worship tough because if I’ve done that a thousand times.
If I did that after I lost a family member and if I did that after my child was born and if I did that with my kids.
Then it becomes easy for me.
To get attached.
To the thing itself rather than what the thing was trying to point to.
So in my mind this is what happens when people say it’s not church if there’s if we don’t play an organ.
Well why.
Now that’s nothing there’s nothing against the organ.
But there’s there’s nothing that says which required right.
And so I had those I had.
Not so much anymore but used to have when we were talking about the second service would have this conversation some guitars don’t belong in church.
People you know tell me that.
Do you think God I mean are you telling me God doesn’t like guitars.
No I know.
Well tell me why they don’t belong in church.
Well.
And.
It always came down.
I don’t like him.
OK.
There’s things I don’t like.
I mean we none of us get to do that.
That’s not whether we like something.
Is not the first question.
But we live in a world that says that’s the only question.
And when we bring that sort of consumerism to church I had within the last two months I’ve had three people in church used the same phrase.
We’re church shopping.
We’re checking you guys out.
We’re church shopping.
It’s not my favorite phrase.
You shop for shoes you shop for butter.
I shouldn’t.
I don’t.
I’m not sure shopping is the right word to use of a worship service.
Now having said that are there places I can worship more comfortably.
Yes.
I’ve been to you know churches where they want me to stand and dance and sing and I’d rather not.
The dancing part for sure.
But that’s OK.
I do my best and then I hope you know are there people who you know I have good friends who if they had to sit through our first service they go crazy.
They wouldn’t know what to do.
That’s OK.
That’s that’s why there are options.
Options.
I guess sometimes I worry in the church that we’ve put so much emphasis lately on what we do that the why we do it has maybe been secondary instead of primary.
I do I do think we’re getting a little better.
Yes ma’am.
A minister that I spoke to last year said that when we put so much focus on that kind of thing that contemporary traditional and lots of churches have gone through it that becomes more of an idol.
If we are so stuck on what it is that you want as an individual then that becomes an idol for you and that’s not a good thing.
Yeah.
I do think we attach a lot of emotion.
This is why the biggest battles in church have been over hymnals.
They got rid of my favorite hymn.
That’s never good.
I think it’s kind of like a fine line between trying to find something like trying to make the worship still about worship.
Like when you’re looking when we were looking for a church when we went to college.
So we went to the Presbyterian Church in Ames where Kelsey Leonard actually was.
Yeah.
And so we went to that church and it felt right because it was a Presbyterian Church and I knew someone there and I just didn’t feel very connected there.
I didn’t feel very like I left with very much.
So we tried a different church and it was very contemporary and it was like the kind where you throw your hand up and you know there’s thousands of people and that’s actually like where we kind of state the whole time we were there.
And I feel like it was I don’t know like a fine line between what I enjoyed and like what worship I was bringing.
I think the connection is important.
Absolutely.
I think to the extent that we feel like it’s not us it’s going to be very hard to be to worship.
I think we need to be comfortable enough that we can tell if it fits.
I just think that that is primary for people sometimes and they miss the idea that there’s more to it than that.
Well if you’re not comfortable or starting to suit you,
you may not be focused and don’t have a connection and don’t do a good job working for you.
Maybe we’re worried too much about what we’re doing and God accepts what we,
you know, maybe we’re being too self-portable because I think God honors our worship if we honestly, you know,
are focusing on Him.
So I think, I think, you know, I mean.
Yeah, well, and as a person that,
you know, has part of the task of planning worship and trying to pull it off,
I think one of the tasks we have as leaders is trying to make it to stay out of its way.
In other words,
there’s a reason,
there’s a reason I ask you if we can sing to Him because if I pick some brutal Chinese hymn, which I’ve done,
everybody looks around and goes,
oh man, what’s happening?
Now we’ve lost traction.
Now, whatever we, so we need to be able to engage to a certain extent.
That’s important.
And I don’t, I don’t in any way mean to negate the personal preference.
I just think we live in a time where that has been given a priority that makes me nervous sometimes.
Yeah, it was the exact opposite.
She went out and then the drums came in.
No, and that’s a, that’s a perfect conversation.
I asked her, why shouldn’t there be drums in church?
I don’t like them.
No, that’s not a theological conversation.
That’s an emotional conversation.
They don’t belong here.
Why?
Because they wouldn’t help me worship.
That would be a distraction for me.
That’s somehow not okay.
Yeah, Pauli.
I think one of the things for us,
when we don’t come to church,
usually we’re out of town,
but if we don’t come to church,
we’re just like we’re lost.
When we come to church,
we have such a good feeling in our heart with the music,
the people,
the message,
the fellowship.
I think we just talked about that when Gary was so ill here.
We didn’t make it to church and it was just like another week ran into another week and there was no purpose.
So we feel by coming to church,
it gives us God,
we know God is with us.
We know he’s going to carry us through the next week if we stand by him.
And I think that’s so important to know if you leave with no feeling,
no joy,
I think you shouldn’t be at church.
I shouldn’t say you shouldn’t be at church,
but you’ve lost something.
You don’t think it should fill your heart.
Yeah.
I mean, we are different enough that we’re going to swing and miss somebody.
I mean,
so,
and I’m not fishing for anything here.
Today,
this morning wasn’t a very good sermon by any,
no, I’m serious, by any reasonable standards,
like it was okay at best.
And even on an okay at best day,
somebody comes out and says,
I needed,
that was what,
right.
And so, I mean, that’s a gift, that’s an accident,
that’s,
but my point in that is I try to remember,
we all need something from church to land on us regularly to stay engaged.
We hopefully get that enough that we feel like we’re making progress and that we’re connecting.
But it is worth remembering that sometimes what doesn’t land on you might land on your neighbor.
Some day you think,
I tried, but I just really,
I don’t know what Clint was talking about this morning,
I couldn’t quite get there.
But maybe someone else heard what they needed in it.
And, you know,
we don’t, we probably don’t get that all at the same time.
It happens once in a while and you can tell when it does,
a lot of times it’s music.
And after some especially,
especially powerful piece of music,
there’s that kind of gap where even the clappers don’t know if they should clap right away.
You know, it’s that sort of,
we all just want to sit there for a second,
but that doesn’t happen all the time.
I mean, that’s really nice when it happens.
We don’t pull that off in everything that we do.
So I think it helps to know that sometimes I might not feel like I got a great deal out of it,
but I hope that someone else did.
Yeah, Lynn.
I have from a background where the lady was trained to design worship.
And part of worship,
there were several parts of worship,
was the adoration,
which is recognizing that God is the sovereign person in our lives.
The second part was the confession where we admit our feelings or whatever you want to call them, sins.
The third one is where we give whatever we give.
And then there’s the thanksgiving for all the things that we have been given and the blessing where the sinning is.
So those were the five parts of things that we were trying to put into the worship.
We didn’t expect all of those five things to speak to every single person because part of our responsibility was letting God speak back to the parishioners.
Whether it was through the adoration because maybe that’s what they needed that day.
Whether it was through the confession,
just getting something heavy off their minds.
Whether it was through,
I forgot the teaching.
There’s the teaching in there, it’s the word.
And that was always a,
the gift back from God was his word to us.
And that’s what we were trying,
all those parts of worship were always trying to help us get what God was trying to say to us.
And so if you feel like you’re not reaching everybody,
I would urge you to not feel bad about that because having come from that background,
I truly think that the worship services here,
in some respects, speak to everyone in some way or the other.
If they weren’t, if it didn’t,
we wouldn’t find it satisfying.
And for me, our worship services here are very satisfying.
Well, thank you.
And I think it seems to me a safe assumption that people who come regularly are okay with what we do.
I mean,
because generally,
if you don’t feel like it’s connecting,
you’re going to lose interest.
I mean, that’s probably the reality.
And I feel pretty good,
you know, we’re fortunate in that we have a lot of talented people that work hard at what they do.
So in an average service,
hopefully something,
I mean,
be amazed, I’m sure Jan hears all the time,
children’s sermon.
You know, oh,
you know, you think you’re talking to kids,
but adults are listening in pretty heavy.
And so what is it that day?
I don’t know.
But yeah, we do enough that hopefully there’s a point at which it connects.
But here’s what I think I know about worship.
The more I’m willing to put into it,
this is sort of to Mike’s point,
the more likely I am to take something out of it.
If I’m sitting waiting for worship to come to me,
I think I’m less likely to find it than if I’m giving myself to it.
I just feel like there’s a whole lot more chance something’s going to speak to me if I’m adding to the mix.
I do think it’s interesting,
though, the way that like a Holy Spirit or whatever it is that connect like so we went from a very contemporary service.
So when we moved home,
we tried going to that second service and I just never was feeling I don’t know.
Neither of us were really just feeling super connected,
which I think is weird because most of the people there are closer to our age, no offense.
And it’s later and we’re literally like the last people to walk into church every Sunday.
And so it would be ideal and be great.
But like, you know, like after trying a couple of services,
I just like wasn’t wasn’t leaving and thinking like,
yeah, that was it.
So but I do at 850.
Like I always do.
Yeah, I don’t know what it is that happens at 850 over the later service.
I wish it happened in the later service, to be honest.
More so for the time, I swear.
Just the time.
But like, what is it?
I don’t know what it is,
but it’s not up to me.
Sure.
But I’m not the one that decides.
Yeah. Lee. Maybe it’s in the right way.
If you were in preparation for your service today and you were in one of the communities that completely demolished,
what’s your purpose?
Yeah.
I think I would respond.
That as a as a pastor,
I think part of my purpose is always.
To try and help people.
Look for and see God at work in their lives.
While I’m while I don’t know if I would go so far as to say that changes the purpose, it certainly changes.
The message, the presentation,
the theme.
Because.
To do joy and praise on a day where half the congregation lost their house.
Is foolish.
It shows no sensitivity to who’s listening.
But I don’t
know.
I am Lee.
Would I say this?
I think I would say this.
That comfort,
joy,
hope, peace,
encouragement,
rebuke.
Those are all on the table every week,
but some weeks,
some of them,
those bells get rung louder than others.
And so in a week when a congregation loses a beloved member.
It’s a grief today.
We need to think of because that’s the communal experience we’re having on
it on a quote unquote ordinary day.
All of that sitting out there somewhere,
but it’s less contained and it’s less unified in a situation you’re describing.
I think it’s got to be.
We’ve got to be.
It’s got to be.
Hope.
It’s got to be strength.
It’s got to be.
Encouragement hang in there
because that’s.
That’s what people are.
I mean, that’s what they are bringing with them.
And if you know enough people are bringing something with them and don’t address it,
I think you missed it.
I don’t know if that answers the question.
Yeah.
Farm ground is gone for a period of time.
The businesses are gone.
The homes are gone.
The church might even be gone.
That’s got to be tough for a church or to talk about worship.
What do we do with worship in those kinds of situations?
Yes.
We say even through
struggle.
That God is bigger than those things are.
It may not feel like that that day,
but we say it because that’s what we’ve always said.
And by we, I mean the church.
So we stand on the shoulders of all of that testimony that’s before us and we proclaim God as good,
even when we’re not sure what that means in our context.
And personally, just to be real practical,
if I’m walking into the pulpit that morning with a stewardship message,
that’s got to go in the that’s got to wait.
That’s got to go in the file for later.
Right.
I mean,
and that’s only happened to me.
I can.
I can only remember.
I think three,
twice for sure.
And maybe a third time that I have.
Late after the bulletin was printed,
everything else said that I’ve got.
I have to do something different.
I have to respond to what happened in the community or the congregation.
And I’ll do what I was going to do later.
I think you think you have to do.
I mean, there are just times where you have to respond to what’s in front of you.
And I got to thinking that you probably have one of the more difficult occupations that a lot of people realize,
because no matter what you say,
it could have been somebody.
But like some other big conversation was that it’s going to mean a lot to somebody else.
So you can’t with a diversified population like what we have,
it’s going to be on top of the list all the time.
And whatever ever said it,
something will pop up a little later on.
And something that you really didn’t agree with.
And all of a sudden it occurs to you that it has to mean.
I’ve gone to church most of my life,
all my life actually.
But to be real serious about things,
I knew what was out there.
I knew the purpose out there.
But it just seemed like lately there will be certain things that will happen that I didn’t think would happen.
It did happen.
And what made it happen,
in my estimation, it was a God’s sake.
And it more just happens to me.
The more that I realize that everything that I’ve been listening to for all these years is starting to really make some meaning.
And it just, I don’t know, just,
I didn’t think anything about it.
All of a sudden after it did happen the way I was hoping that it would happen.
But I didn’t think it was going to happen.
It had to be a God’s sake.
Yeah, and I’ll say two things then we probably need to wrap up.
The first is that the idea that it works at all is a wonderful gift.
Because as you’ve said,
for the most part I couldn’t tell you what you wore to the church this morning or anything.
But I sometimes am conscious of seeing people.
And it’s a strange experience to be in the front and look out and say they just lost a loved one.
Oh, they just had a baby.
They got terrible news last week that they came in and told them they’re trying to hold their marriage together.
They just celebrated a great anniversary.
To know a little bit of the diversity that we bring with us every Sunday.
And the idea that if there’s a hundred people in church,
they may need a hundred different things out of worship.
And yet when we give ourselves to it and put our hearts into it,
we often find that though we need different things,
they land on it.
They come to us.
And worship is miraculous in that way.
And can’t be planned.
I’m not even sure you can do that on purpose.
You can try to be sensitive,
but that’s about the best you can do.
And then the last thing,
I’ll end with this.
I’m probably likely one of the only Simpsons fans in the room.
But there’s a character in
the Simpsons named Ned,
and he’s sort of the annoying evangelical Christian next door.
He lives next to Homer,
and he’s very preachy.
And what they have done with his character through the years is kind of interesting.
His wife was named Maude.
Maude died in a T-shirt accident where she was knocked off the bleachers.
And Ned went through a faith crisis.
And his two boys,
Rod and Todd, come to get him up for church after the funeral.
And he says, “I’m not going to church.”
And they start screaming and run out of the house.
And he says, “I might not go next Sunday either.
I might never go again.”
And then the next scene,
you see him.
He’s driving to church going,
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
And he gets to church,
and there’s a Christian band, a praise band.
And he’s a little skeptical of the whole thing.
But the lead singer is this lady,
and she sings this song about holding on when things are difficult
and finding faith in the darkness,
kind of Simpsons version of that.
And he goes up afterwards, and he says,
“You know, I really appreciated your music.
It spoke to me today.”
And she says, “You having a hard time,
Ned?” And he says, “I’ve had a hard time.” And she said,
“Well, maybe we could get a cup of coffee.”
And Ned says, “I’m not ready for that.”
And she says, “Well, maybe I’ll come back to your town again someday.”
And Ned says,
“Well, I’m Ned Flanders,
and this is my church,
and I’ll be here every Sunday so you know where to find me.”
And that idea of worship is,
yes,
it brings us all these things,
but it’s a commitment.
It is a thing that we do.
We do it on the Sundays.
We get up and feel great.
We do it on the Sundays.
We’re not sure what’s going on with the world.
We put ourselves in it,
and often we’re blessed by it.
And I don’t
think there’s a lot of deep spirituality in the Simpsons,
but I’ve always appreciated that scene.
This is my church,
and I’ll be here every Sunday
from a guy who doesn’t have things figured out at all.
Anyway,
a lot of rambling.
Thank you for listening.
Thanks for the conversation.
And thanks again to those who brought food.
(audience chattering)