December 5, 2024

Co-missioners,

The Crossings Table Talk session this past October featured a lively discussion about Lutheran worship in the classic liturgical style. Today Marcus Felde explores the origins and theological rationale of “contemporary” worship, as it’s frequently called. Heavily featured in America’s small “e” evangelical churches, it has found a place in Lutheran circles where it’s often presented as a refreshing alternative to the stuffiness of the hidebound. Marcus would call it an unfortunate alternative, as you’re about to see.

Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community

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What Lies Beneath “Praise and Worship”?

by Marcus Felde

A few years back I was given the opportunity to review Frank Senn’s Introduction to Liturgy (Fortress, 2012). That review ended with two words, “we’re not,” as in “We’re not in trouble.” I would like today to retract those words. Because where Christian worship in America is concerned, we are in trouble. Big trouble.

Senn was a teacher of mine back at Seminex, and I admire his knowledge about worship. But I criticized him for grounding worship in nothing more compelling than God’s expectation/command to be worshiped and glorified. After praising other aspects of his book, I concluded:

My snappy ending was a careless error. Judging by Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong’s account in their 2021 book A History of Contemporary Praise & Worship, we—and by “we” I mean the church—are in a whole heap of trouble. If their report is even roughly accurate, many Christians think a lengthy musical session of praise can make a presumptively absent God become present, so that they can then worship and adore him; and he will then do amazing things among them. That’s it. That’s the foundational premise of “Praise & Worship” liturgy: if we do our bit, God will help us out. And the authors see nothing wrong with that, because it’s based on a couple Bible verses. Because who needs a hermeneutic, right?

Here is the story of how “praise & worship” became a thing. In their book it is titled “Headwater: Where Desperation and Bible met. Reg Layzell, a Pentecostal lay revivalist, was frustrated with how things were going at a revival in January 1946 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. (He had “recently retired as general manager of a company that sold machines to print names and addresses on mailing labels, envelopes, and form labels.”)

What does “praise & worship” look like? I have never witnessed it myself. But one author from the “Praise & Worship” tradition listed sixteen elements you might find in a “Praise & Worship” service—what he called a “divine order of worship”: Ministry of the singers and singing; ministry of the musicians with instruments; continual ministry before the ark (i.e., continual, praise- and music-driven access to the divine presence); ministry of recording (i.e., the recording of new songs of Praise & Worship, especially those given spontaneously in prophetic moments); thanksgiving; praise; psalms; rejoicing; clapping of hands; shouting; dancing; lifting up of hands; worship (i.e., a “bowing before the Lord, a prostration of themselves in deep adoration and devotion”); seeking God’s face; spiritual sacrifices; the ministry of saying “amen.”

People think this theory of worship is working because they see “gifts of the Spirit” taking place right then and there. Plus, lots of people come and take part, and so on. It spreads, so it must be working, right?

I don’t think so.

If Christians go to church just to “feel the presence” of God; if they think this “presence of God” is something they can conjure by going through the motions of praise even if they don’t feel like doing it; if they expect no more from God’s presence than manifestations of speaking in tongues and healings; people are being short-changed.

It can be so, so much better (as you my readers, know). We might drag ourselves to church sometimes, but what we go to receive and do receive is the blessed relief of God’s grace and forgiveness vouchsafed in Christ, which is the only antidote to the presence of God in our lives!God is always and everywhere pressing upon us creatures the demand to be as good as we were created to be and can be, and we consistently fail. We receive his gift of forgiveness and his Spirit so that we can breathe again, and we can go in peace (not dread) and serve the Lord. Worship which misses this point fails to deliver Christ. People might prefer “signs” or “wisdom,” but what we have to offer, and what worship had better be about, is the foolishness of the cross.

Until I read this article recently, I didn’t realize what I had stepped into back in 1984. After seven years as a missionary in Papua New Guinea, I received a call to a small congregation in Indiana which had developed a few peculiar worship practices. The worship chairman was accustomed to leading a sort of “warmup” with her flute before the service, singing “praise songs.” When I ended the practice, I had no idea I was impeding the progress of a certified global movement! (By 1985, according to Ruth, praise & worship “was a thing—something that was regularly taught and transmitted to others.”)

In my view, the two criteria for Lutheran theology which Melanchthon enunciates in Apology IV (magnifying Christ and bestowing his benefits on people) are also elementary principles of Christian (not merely Lutheran) worship. Aren’t they the sine qua non? Don’t they dictate, more than any historical record of what anyone has done anywhere, what it is all about?

It is one thing for Reg Layzell to get it wrong. He was desperate, well-intentioned, and unschooled. But for large swaths of Christendom to follow suit? But can we sit in the seat of the scornful if we ourselves make worship an obligation by failing to undergird it and fill it with the Gospel? What does it mean for worship to be “in accordance with the Gospel”?

According to Ruth and Hong, the praise & worship movement melded in the second half of the twentieth century with the contemporary worship movement, and the two are basically one thing now. Praise & worship became all about music—both instrumental and singing—and then it became the liturgy of a large part of Christendom. They tell this story without disapproval, but to me it is a sad one.

I invite you, friends, to think about what I have shared in the light of our common concern for the proper distinguishing between law and the Gospel. Is worship Christian if it does not escape the orb of obligation? Is the idea that “we have to go to church” all that different from “we have to sing and raise our hands to make God come and be with us”? If the blessings of eucharist—our thanks to God for what God did not have to do for us—are left on the table, can we be satisfied?

Are we in big trouble?

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Endnotes