In the early 90s, if the church wanted this guy *points thumbs at my own chest* they were going to need to up their worship game to compete.
My sister and I were splitting our time between divorced parents each weekend. My mom dragged us to church on her weeks, and perhaps because I had zero interest in being there I thought the music was awful. My dad was not a church guy, and on his weekends we’d often go to big name concerts all over L.A.
One week I’d be in church listening to what I mockingly referred to as middle-aged white people singing off key. The next week I’d be at a blues joint watching B.B. King or joining 50,000 people dancing in our seats to Billy Joel. It was a glaring contrast, and the best of the Christian music scene had yet to break into Mom’s church playlist.
I remember Amy Grant and Michael W. Smith were on the radio competing for airtime with Bryan Adams, Pearl Jam, Queen, The Black Crows, and U2, and just as most Christian movies today don’t have the reach afforded to a modern Hollywood production, the salient Christian music of that era was pretty cringeworthy. It led me to conclude that worship music – and by extension, church – was lame. Not interested.
But the church must have gotten the message because Christian music got better. Much better.
Nowadays, even secular outlets recognize that genuine worship coupled with spectacular talent exists across the musical spectrum. You can find a Christian musician in every genre as good or better than anything the secular world has to offer, and you can sometimes find them performing every Sunday morning at a sanctuary near you.
And here’s our first problem: While it’s glorious to have singers and songwriters in our camp producing top-tier creative work, the drive to maintain quality can lead to compromises that get us off mission. Performing for a crowd can replace leading it in worship. To put it another way: In our desire to appeal to the unsaved masses, we can inadvertently divorce ourselves from the Spirit that saves.
One doesn’t have to look very hard to find Christian artists bending a knee to the world. Some of them have turned away from their faith entirely, others are slowly drifting into quasi-Jesus spirituality, and still others have gone so woke that you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between them and their secular competition. Knowing this, many a congregation has leaned too heavily on the show at the expense of the substance of scripture. We wouldn’t want to turn anyone off with biblical truth, right? While the show may be dialed in with great sound and polished video production, if it’s not leading people to a deeper well of abiding then what’s the point?
Anytime the church tries to wrestle spheres of influence away from the secular world by mimicking it, trouble is probably near. Church daycare or pre-school might seem like a good “Christiany” idea until one realizes it plays into the enemy’s scheme of separating children from parents during the critical formative years of children. Church youth groups can draw a crowd with paint wars and movie nights, but how many of them are arming our young people to engage in spiritual warfare or addressing emotional heart issues and holiness?
I was once asked to speak with a church youth group on prayer. Rather than give them another sermon to endure while waiting for the post-sermon craziness, the other pastor and I decided to turn the tables on the kids. We gave them a five-minute primer on how to pray and then turned them loose in praying for their own leaders. What I learned that night was that few of those kids knew how to pray, but all were willing to do it when challenged.
This is not to say all things church need to be all things spiritual, but there needs to be an underlying principle that God may want to upturn the apple cart on any given day. Is your pastor willing to scrap the carefully coordinated itinerary that’s been on Planning Center for a month in order to follow a surprise direction God spoke to Him during the drive that morning? Has something like this ever happened to your pastor or leader? I have a third question that applies to the previous two: If not, why not?
Evil is on the march in a manner we’ve never seen in our lifetimes, openly and overtly. We must remain tuned into God’s directions and adapt accordingly. There’s too much at stake these days to play church like we did in the normal days because the enemy is desperate to find any kink in our armor. Failure to heed the daily promptings of the Holy Spirit leads to failure within the congregation with occasionally devastating results. A church that leans on a killer worship set with smoke machines and fancy lighting probably won’t notice staff members having affairs right under their noses…but God does, and He will reveal it when we learn to dismiss the peripheral agendas and center on His priorities.
Sometimes churches rely too heavily on the concert-style worship or the next big event. Sometimes they don’t invest in those things enough. Finding the balance on this is a matter of leaning on the Lord in prayer and being willing to do what He tells us. Maybe if we listen to His promptings more often, we’ll find that His people are less likely to don masks or the flags of corrupt Eastern European countries when idiots tell them to. Maybe they’ll think twice before repeating the rhetoric of communist organizations, parroting the Facebook news, or falling for the satanic messaging that’s everywhere more blatant and posing as entertainment.
And that leads us to prayer and abiding. All the drumbeats and vocalist solos in the world can’t ignite a congregation that is deficient in prayer. He designed prayer and worship to work in conjunction; they’re powerful separate, but together they’re an entirely different tool.
If you’re blessed with a congregation that understands the power and necessity of worship and prayer, count your blessings, even if the worship band doesn’t have the requisite talent to rock a gig at any bar in town. God will bring the people with giftings and talent into the light of a stage that places Him at its center, and He will give them marching orders out of churches that don’t. Plenty of worship bands that can crush it on stage are living shadow lives of compromise and speaking foolishness from the pulpit and on social media, or apologizing to the woke mafia. You can tell who they are by how much emphasis they place on prayer and how often those prayers bear fruit. Pray, worship, repeat. A church that isn’t passionate about both will never unlock the power of either.
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