Yesterday afternoon my wife and I attended a “Christmas Eve” celebration service at the church we’ve been attending lately. It’s a very large church, with several Kansas City area locations. The church campus close to our house is very complex and very quality-minded in every respect. The sanctuary is very large and probably has seating for over two thousand people and is shaped like a huge amphitheater. Since three services were advertised, we attended the middle service that began at 4:15 pm.
When my wife suggested we arrive thirty minutes early, I thought she was being unrealistic, but a block away from the multiple parking lots I was shocked! Cars were backed up in unmoving lines with pedestrian traffic flowing through the lanes unhindered by any sort of visible organization. It was chaos! We were three miles from home, and gridlocked in traffic for almost twenty minutes before we could grab a parking space from a car that was leaving.
I was also wrong when I decided that if we sit way up against the back wall in the nosebleed section of the sanctuary, we would have fewer issues with late arrivals squeezing past our seats. Indeed, the inside of the sanctuary was at least as chaotic as the adjacent streets and parking lots, and by the time the worship team began their music I was having a mental meltdown about my attendance! But then the music began! I hadn’t seen anything yet!!
In the last eight years, my wife and I have attended three “non-denominational” Protestant churches close to our house, and one Roman Catholic church for about a month, and with the exception of the Roman Catholic church, we found the same playbook in operation.
First, the worship team comes out on stage and begins to sing the first song, which is a real head-banger! The decibels are routinely over 100 by actual measurement, and the song is very much like a cheerleading number. I suppose this is to wake the congregation up and get them involved in the performance. It is supposed to put the congregation “in the mood” to worship. The second song is usually a bit slower (it would almost have to be!), and the third and last song just might and just maybe have something to do with actual worship, but by then it’s too late. Then comes the announcements, usually focusing on us getting involved in the church by “taking the first steps”, then the offering is introduced, which in some churches can be almost as long as the following sermon, and then the sermon. This package event is then tied off with a last song, usually a repeat of one already performed, and we can then escape the building with our lives still intact.
Several readers may be wondering why we have attended so many different churches in the short time we’ve been living here, while others might think this piece is just another anti-Christian rant, but I doubt very many noticed I twice used the word ‘performance’ to describe “worship” services. This piece is not anti-Christian, although I may have penned a ‘rant’ so far, but it is my firm belief that God is not at all impressed with what should be labeled as “Performance Christianity”. God is interested in our hearts, and in our hearts of real worship. But instead, we humans have made our church services primarily about us, and we try against all reason to impress God with our loudness and zeal, while hindering the flow of God’s Holy Spirit, the only One Who we should want to impress.
Real worship occurs when our hearts are joined with God’s heart, and frankly, this isn’t going to occur when our ears are ringing with Christian “rock bands” on stage, and I have wondered for some time if we will ever find a church that knows what real worship is.
Real worship honors the holiness and sovereignty of Almighty God and puts us in intimate corporate fellowship with His Holy Spirit. The entire service should be about letting the Holy Spirit have His way, and we should be focused on getting out of His way so He can. The only way the American church can successfully compete for relevance in the secular world is to rely on the one ingredient the world does not have, and that is the person of God’s Holy Spirit. And instead of polling the audience for new members, we should employ the gifts of the Holy Spirit to bring about true, heart-rendering repentance, which up to today we have consistently avoided. The great revivalists of the past allowed the Holy Spirit to work the crowds as they spoke. Folks would fall under the power of Holy Spirit conviction, and then they would cry out for God’s Savior to save them from their sins. God did the work, and the crowds responded. None of this sovereign work of God required any “performance”…but it did require a miracle of God’s grace.
Only Jesus Christ is God’s Savior, and only the Holy Spirit has been tasked with introducing Him. It is not our job, and we need to get out of His way so He can do what only He does best.
John Miltenberger
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