Every worship service tells a story. When we gather with our local church, we’re playing out a drama. We’re confessing some kind of identity, telling a story about who we are, how we got here, and what our ultimate hope is. Unfortunately, that story isn’t always the gospel.
If a church is all about family, you might attend a gathering that sings vaguely Christian songs and offers a vaguely Christian sermon in which the real hero is marriage itself. Marriage, in many Christian circles, is held out as the hope of the nation, the solution to all of our personal and political problems. People leave feeling, “If we can get marriage right, then life is going to really come together. Both individuals and society itself will heal.”
Sometimes, our ultimate hope is religious obedience. Here, the good news we proclaim is one that allows the opportunity to “get it right this time around.” God hasn’t extended wholesale, lavish grace; instead, through Jesus, he’s hit a cosmic reset button. Now the burden is upon us to perform up to his standards. The preaching urges us in this direction, and the songs and prayers are a series of “atta-boys”, patting ourselves on the back for our good progress.
Perhaps most heinous is the tendency towards making a celebrity our hero; the pastor who can inspire hope or the worship leader who can “take us into the throne room” with his smooth crooning and skillful strumming. These attitudes are revealed implicitly and explicitly, with literal and figurative pedestals, video screens, lights, smoke, and the lofty expectations of a congregation formed out of a culture that is used to worshiping celebrities.
These stories, told in our gatherings, shape us for life, and send us adrift toward the rocks. Good things like marriage, morality, and heroes will all ultimately disappoint us if we’re expecting them to be able to bear up our hopes for redemption.
Only one story has that power. It’s a story that the church has been telling week in and week out for centuries.
It’s worth asking ourselves how clearly we’re telling it. How easy is it to see that Jesus himself is the answer to our struggles and questions at our gatherings? Is it clear that He alone is the hero of our stories; not a pastor, not a worship leader? How does the temptation to do something “fresh” and “new” guide us away from that story? How does technology mask the story behind a flashy veneer? How do our efforts at contextualization blur the lines, implicitly holding out our culture’s functional saviors (like technology) alongside the one the Church has gathered to remember and declare?
I don’t pretend to have all the answers here, not the hubris to think that we’ve gotten it all right at Sojourn. I just think the questions are worth asking.
For more food for thought, and the inspiration for a lot of this wrestling, see James K.A. Smith’s Cultural Liturgies Series, here and here.
For more of my thoughts on telling the story of the Gospel with the gathered church, check out Rhythms of Grace: How the Church’s worship Tells the Story of the Gospel.
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These questions are worth asking. You have thoroughly presented your concern. If you claimed to have the answers, it would indicate you do not know all the questions. I have questions about questions and questions about questioning.
Questions are curious things; they tend to guide and manipulate the answers. I’m not making any claim here that you have manipulated the questions. What I wonder is how we might answer exact in the formulations of the questions. I’ll take a statement and make it a question.
You wrote: <>
My question is: What is the story?
This may seem painfully obvious, but is it?
In what manner one answers this question is insanely critical. In the “good old days” outpourings of blood and heaps of smoldering ash where too frequently the outcome as “followers of Christ” gather to seek sameness and uniformity to the question. (Is that a good thing or have we lost our passion for the answers?)
Let’s jump ahead and suppose we have satisfied the question, “what is the story?” to where do we advance next?
Ask a good story teller, and she’s remind you that telling a story means acting it out. But in what manner do we act this story out? Furthermore, who are we telling the story? Are we offering it to God? Are we presenting it to the people? And who are the people, exactly?
This goes before asking whether the story best told with fog machines or incense or illuminated by robotic lighting or candles.
Is it truer to the story if the telling is a “work of the people” (liturgy) rather than the performance of a presenter to a passive audience?
But whose liturgy? Should it be familiar and have tradition? Or should it be created anew week to week?
Some claim repetition causes familiarity that causes loss of significance. (Curiously, many of these same people would not entertain a discussion of changing the words to the Pledge or Allegiance or the Star Spangled Banner.)
Questions lead to more questions, don’t they?
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