I still wholeheartedly announce God's call to salvation. A sermon without a call to Christ is not a sermon. Yet the responsibility for conversion is NOT mine. My responsibility is faithfulness to God's Word. God's Word changes people, NOT ME.
Nothing less than a personal revolution took place when I understood, and began to trust, that the word of the cross is the power of God. Not me. Not the songs. Not the polish. Not the emotion.
Oh, sure, I still consider it a serious responsibility to lead worship with the best I have to offer. Releasing from my shoulders the burden of causing people to convert to Christ does not release me from the responsibility to be faithful in worship, and in my case, in the proclamation of God's Word.
I am reminded of the X-rays of women whose feet were culturally bound to remain small. Painful for the years when they were growing, the feet of those women hardened in their deformity and never truly functioned for use in daily life. Bearing personal responsibility for the salvation or damnation of souls because of my performance in worship, or lack of it, was a kind of spiritual binding which warped how I worshipped.
Understanding, realizing, exulting in the reality,
- that God alone is glorious and Sovereign in all things;
- that salvation does, in fact, belong to the Lord;
- that I am privileged with an enormous responsibility for faithfulness and endurance in gospel proclamation and Biblical teaching;
- but that I am not responsible for ultimate results:
this unbinds what heretofore had warped how I worshipped. I felt a sweetness and a glory and a freedom in worship long missing from my life. I felt it even though I did not know I had missed it.
Practically, how did worship change for me? Worship focuses on thinking about, and learning from, and understanding more deeply God FIRST.
Worship does not begin first with my feelings about worship. I did not understand until middle age how much I had made worship about me, or about the people, or about how I can control the people. My worship instincts first flexed on:
- The songs I knew I led well.
- The songs I knew the people sang well.
- The songs musically constructed to appeal to the sensuality of the people:
- percussive rhythms;
- elevated tempo or key changes;
- simple, monosyllabic repetitions intended to promote a mental weightlessness or flight into a trance.
- Images, and later videos, which bypassed reason or thought and mainlined directly to emotional persuasion.
- Sermons with anecdotes and rip-your-heart-out tear-jerking stories … again, all of it, designed to bypass reason and ignite emotions.
For years I brought all of this to my understanding of worship. Why? Because I thought it was great worship. Or at least I hoped it would be great worship. I began the planning of worship with what mattered to me and the people:
- How would the people feel?
- How can I make the people feel what I want them to feel?
- How can I make the people feel they must publicly confess Christ for salvation?
I did not realize how much of this had become a consuming burden for me. I had to feel a certain kind of feeling about worship. If that feeling was absent then, whatever it was we had been doing in that hour, it wasn’t great worship. My feelings determined … everything.
EV. RY. THING.
The reality was, as a worship leader, I was the one pulling the strings. I knew the tricks. I knew what would work. I knew if this song followed that song, and if it was sung in just the right way, with just the right tap on the emotional accelerator, and then all of this was followed by the corresponding emotional display from me … well, the people would be putty … if I did it right.
I did not realize how much of a burden my approach to worship placed upon me. I thought my approach was normal. To the degree I shuffled through pages in the Bible, I thought my approach was Biblical.
But I did do a lot of blaming when great worship did not happen. I blamed myself as a poor leader. I blamed those with whom I led worship, constantly disappointed when they did not do it right. Mostly, I blamed the people with whom I worshipped. They were mentally slow and not sufficiently “into” the worship. They were not emotionally available and responsive to where I wanted to lead them in worship.
All of the above was not good. I was in my late 30’s and early 40’s and spending no small amount of emotional energy keeping air in the emotional worship balloon. I was constantly restless and dissatisfied. I was never good enough. The people were never good enough. Worship was never good enough. It was never great.
(First post in the part of the series on Worship: Part 1of 3)
(Final post in the part of the series on Worship Part 3 of 3)