One
thing that I really picked up on during my time with RiSE this summer, is just
how devastating the fear of man is to authentic worship. I spent all summer
ministering in camps that present a “sterile” worship environment. Your parents
aren’t there. Your pastor isn’t there. The big bad “judgmental” people in your
church aren’t there, and because of that, we can all feel free to raise our
hands and sing loud praise to God with reckless abandon. The “camp worship
experience” has always been something that really irks me, but this summer
really changed my view on exactly why it is that this phenomenon grinds my
gears.
I used
to really criticize these kinds of people for “being fake” when they go to
camp. “Put enough Charismatics in a room, and even the most fundamental Baptist
will start to lift hands.” I thought that the responses that I was seeing were
a result of peer pressure that was coming from the environment. We worship
differently at camp, so I naturally thought that the problem was the way we
worship at camp.
This
summer really changed that for me, particularly my first week after I got home
from my time with RiSE. During the 8 weeks that I was on the road, I grew
significantly in my ability as a worshipper. I think that worship is a skill
that we hone, and I really made good progress in that area. There’s something
about constantly being in different venues, and with different people, doing
different songs with different instrumentation that sound different through
different sound systems, and making last second changes on the fly, that really
cause the means to become very insignificant in your mind. You don’t have a “method”
to latch onto because the method is always changing. I was in a place where I
felt like I was truly worshipping more genuinely than I had in the past. That
is, until I got home. Fresh off of a great last week of tour, I walked into
church Sunday prepared and anxious to worship with a body of believers that I
was actually a part of, rather than just a guest in. I was greeted with what is
possibly one of the most dead, and lifeless worship services that I have ever
been a part of. There are a host of details that contribute to this (that I’ll
be glad to share, just not now), but the main one that I saw was just a
sickening fear on the part of those who were “leading” worship. Fear. They looked absolutely petrified.
And the worst part is, it started to get to me. I wasn’t worshipping. I was too
frustrated.
The fear of man. Everyone is so
worried about offending one of my means-driven brothers and sisters, that no
worship is actually done by those on stage. As a result, no one in the
congregation worships either because they don’t see it modeled. Then my poor
pastor had the “privilege” of getting up and preaching a beautiful exposition
of God’s word, that accomplished nothing because the climate of the church had
already been killed. It was about as effective as putting a steak dinner in
front of a corpse.
Needless to say, I see things a
little differently now. I think that what we see at camps might possibly be
what worship should look like. All the obstacles are removed. It’d be amazing
to see what that looks like if it actually happened within a long-established
community of believers instead of a group of teens who are together for a week.
