However, the ambiance felt more like a Christian convention than church worship. The staging was set for performers and one pastor even entered and exited the platform through backdrop curtains. The overhead lighting, which shown brighter on the platform, actually divided the worship leaders and preacher from the congregation. While we could see them, I doubt they could see the audience beyond the first or second row of seats.
Similar to a movie theater experience, I had space for my own viewing pleasure and while others shared the same experience, it was not a shared experience.
1 comment:
Gail;
-----They may as well dim the lights. Church service has reached us through 2000 years of transformation as a very passive event. A little singing, a joint reading, communion, then everything else is pretty much sit and watch and listen. It wasn’t entirely that way in the beginning. I Corinthians 14:26-33 gives us a glimpse of what it was. Two differences stand out sharply.
-----The first is that the actions and sounds of their meetings were not choreographed to the Nth degree as are ours. Spontaneity was a large part of their mix. But neither was the service completely cast to the wind. “When you come together, each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation.” (vs. 26b) Naturally that would be something relevant to the person bringing it, something that, if not needing preparation and planning for delivery, was already prepped and ordered by just being significantly a part of the person’s experiential life. The gist of the entire paragraph is that things fell together as the service went along. And what Paul was explaining by the paragraph was a certain decorum allowing such spontaneity while barring mayhem by honor for one another’s contributing some edification.
-----The second is that there were not specified leaders week in and week out directing what to sing, what to read, and what to hear, boring the sitters unto oblivion. No wonder kids leaving home leave church. “Each one has a hymn, a lesson, a revelation, a tongue, or an interpretation.” Their service welled up from within the people coming there to worship such that the worship was both a receiving and a giving. Ephesians 5:19 corroborates this, “…addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs…” The fellowship wasn’t a quick chat or two before and after the service sandwiching a great deal of quietly sitting beside each other. The fellowship was really the more of the substance of the spiritual nutrition there. From more minds come more insights, not just in quantity, but also in variety. From more insights comes more breadth. In more breadth is more life.
-----I think it is sad our worship service has been transformed from the richness of that multifaceted event to the flat poster board it now is. No wonder so many “worship leaders” think they have to jazz and razz-matazz the crowd into some sort of emotional lather with really noisy, untalented music set to markedly juvenile lyrics. It hasn’t helped extract any dimension from the smooth, indistinct plane our worship services have become.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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