Contemporary Worship

One of the books that I am making my way through very slowly is Why Men Hate Going to Church by David Murrow. While I don’t agree with everything he has to say, I do agree enough to be able to recommend it to others. One of the photos on the book shows what is intended to be a normal “contemporary” worship service. (I know that saying contemporary doesn’t really have any true meaning, but in this case it’s about praise music) There is a woman who is standing up with her hands raised up in the air singing the song being played. Meanwhile there is a man sitting next to her looking at her strangely wondering what is going on and why he is there.

I’ve already written about my dislike of rock music in worship services, but even more important to us as the church is that I’ve never seen a praise service that I thought was done well. Everyone seems to be doing it because that is what is expected of them rather than because they have any skills at putting one on. I will now have to amend that statement because I have now seen a contemporary service done well. I still have a lot of problems with what took place, but that is for another posting.

But in looking around at the people who were attending and what was going on, the service also still reinforced my previous opinion that praise worship seems to have as its primary audience middle-aged women, or at the very least they seem to be the ones to get the most from it. At the recent service I attended all the women (the vast majority of whom were in this age group) were standing, singing loudly, clapping and raising their hands in praise.

The men meanwhile were standing there, because they knew they would look strange or would be in trouble if they remained sitting, and they were wondering what they should be doing with their hands. They were not moving to the music, they were not clapping and the majority were also not singing. I did see two men with their hands raised up, but two out of probably 500 is statistically insignificant.

This scene made me think so much of this book cover and made me wonder again about why the church is working so hard to target an audience who are already coming to church in large numbers. I was heartened to hear from Pastor Joel that it was his impression from musicians who attended a recent conference on worship music that the days of rock bands in worship is limited, but still wonder why this continues to be pushed so hard by the church

A recent article in the Christian Century on a report conducted by the United Methodist Church found that churches who switched to a contemporary service increased their average attendance by 2%. Now since the average United Methodist church has around 60 people in worship, that means that they increased attendance by 1.2 people. Is this really the thing that is going to solve all of our problems? Now across the denomination that would increase average attendance by some 20,000 people, but I’m sure that is not enough to even offset the number of people we lose to death, let alone turn the denomination around.

We need to stop looking to this as the thing that will solve all of our problems. Instead let us begin making a compelling argument to the world about the love of Christ and why they need him in their lives. That would mean that we would have to stop preaching only to ourselves and to move outside of our walls and engage with the world. I strongly believe that if we did that, that our concerns over numbers would go away, and they would go away for two reasons.

The first is that people would begin to see the church as being relevant to the world, to the problems they see and what is going on in their lives and would want to be involved in such a group. The second reason is that by doing these things I think we would become so focused on working to bringing about the Kingdom of God that we wouldn’t even think about membership because we would know that we were working on something more important.

Jesus did not say “go and make members,” instead he said “Go and make disciples,” and in the United Methodist Church we are to make disciples for the transformation of the world. We have been confused that being a disciple and being a member were one and the same thing, but they are not. You can be a member without being a disciple, and you can be a disciple without being a member, and I will take the later everyday of the week including Sunday.

To go one step further, Jesus said “Go and make disciples, baptizing in the name of the father, son and Holy Spirit.” Make disciples and then baptize them. We have this totally turned around. We baptize and hope they will become disciples. Rather than worrying about discipleship we are worried about baptism.

While this emphasis has a distinct theological element to it, most of that theology is not accepted by the Methodist church. I think now the push is still on this because the church can count baptisms and make reports about this (this is the one thing I will blame Asbury for cursing the church with) but reporting how many disciples you have made is very difficult.

I don’t know what the answer to this is, but was incredibly heartened to hear from a district superintendent from western Ohio who said that he pays no attention whatsoever to membership numbers because they are a useless statistic. Instead he wants to know how many people are worshipping and how many are taking classes.

I only wish more of the leadership would take this same position, then we could stop hearing about the decline in membership and start focusing on things that really matter. People of my generation and younger simply aren’t “joiners.” It doesn’t have any meaning in most churches anyways as few could even articulate what it means to be a member. We can’t even talk about benefits let alone responsibilities.

Does this mean we just abandon membership? No, because I do think it is important, but we should return to the old Methodist model which is that you could be involved in a society, but you were not a member until you had been taken into a class or band. And to get into those you had to display a high level of discipleship and agree to abide by the principles that went with membership and you would be held accountable. That meant there were a lot more people attending Methodist churches then there were members of Methodist churches, and that seems to me like a better and more proper situation. I would much rather see churches with 100 members, but with 500 in attendance, then 500 members with 100 in attendance. At least in the first scenario we have a shot at discipling 400 extra people and bring them to the love of Christ.