Parking Lot – On Worship

I keep a "parking lot" pad with me most of the time - a steno pad on which I can scribble stuff that I will otherwise forget. This includes prayer requests, notes for my calendar, things I want to remember to say at meetings, and also little thoughts that occur to me while living life.

From time to time I need to clear the parking lot of those notes in the last category. Here are the leftovers after I've dealt with all the other stuff from the last couple weeks:

• Why is preaching different when experienced in person? If I hear a sermon live, it tends to affect me differently than if I download it and listen at some other time. The difference seems to lie in the fact that when the church is gathered together for worship, the experience adds up to more than just the sum of the assembled individuals. This means the praying, singing, reciting/reading, and preaching are all different than when experienced individually. This is a difference we should take seriously as we shepherd a flock.
  
• We should bring back responsive readings into our worship services. The congregational participation should go way beyond singing songs. We are too passive in our worship - we tend to be spectators or consumers. It's absurdly easy for me to be disingenuous when I sing a hymn. I can sing a whole song and not think about a single word. And so can you. How is this not hypocrisy? We need to be more interactive in our worship services - confessions, prayers, readings - like (dare I say it) the traditional liturgies of the church.
  
• There is a fallacy built into many arguments about worship music, and that is the idea that more sophisticated music is naturally more suited to worship and more glorifying to God. Therefore a Bach chorale is inherently better than Tomlin's "How Great is Our God" because the latter is "more primitive." As I was reading Jubilate II by Donald Hustad a few weeks ago, I realized that it's OK for worship music to be simpler (primitive). In fact, I will argue that it's better, because a) people can sing it, and 2) they will be less likely to be trying to impress someone. Along these lines, a guy recently said to me (something like), "I think people tend to overemphasize the art in worship music." What makes that comment compelling is that he's a regular performer at the Metropolitan Opera. He loves sophisticated, artistic music. But in worship, he simply wants to join with the saints in offering a sacrifice of praise to an awesome and gracious God. Of course, I could balance this with all sorts of qualifications, but I'm not going to. It's something we should wrestle with.