Identity Crisis

“How should we worship God?” is a question that has plagued Christians for centuries. The “Worship Wars” have been raging for centuries, and, quite frankly, they don’t appear to be stopping any time soon. 

Hundreds of years ago, the liturgy of Christendom had a reason behind it. Whether the Western Church held to the authority of God’s Word and/or Church tradition, her mind informed her emotions.

However, it has recently become popular to throw away Christian traditions and adopt the newer, “better” styles and forms of our contemporary culture. Of course, discarding traditions that are anti-biblical is fine and definitely should be done. However, getting rid of what is anti-biblical is not the problem the church is facing. By the time of the Pentecostal Vineyard Movement, “ministry was no longer seen as primarily grounded in the objective word of God in Scripture; the focus was shifted to the Spirit’s physical action on people, channeled through prayers, laying on of hands, and various deliverance methods” (GPTG 410). Nowadays, there is “a tendency to construct and evaluate worship in terms of the human subject – human experiences, feelings, and responses – rather than in terms of the divine object, God, the blessed self-revealing Trinity, and his will, word, and activity” (GPTG 407). This shift from God-focused worship to man-focused worship has had huge repercussions on the church. 

Horton is concerned with the same problem when he states, “I cannot help but observe the similarity between the practical denial of the sufficiency of Scripture (the grand narrative proclaimed by the gospel) in our day and in the medieval church” (GPTG 440). “Evangelical churches have thrived on careful exposition of the Scriptures, and lengthy sermons. But we are approaching the place where there is no intellectual content left in the sermon. So we will be driven to the power of liturgy and the communication of the gospel through the arts” (GPTG 440). 

Christianity has changed drastically since the shift from God-centered worship to man-centered worship. How can the church be saved from pleasing man rather than God? The church must come back to the ultimate authority and its ultimate end. Without glorifying God and focusing on scripture, there is no hope for Christianity, and the church will remain in an identity-crisis.