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The author is going to explain how contemporary style worship is bad while his church tradition is good. He will use 963 words to do so, but not a single word from Scripture. Not even a verse reference.
The article is actually not about worship at all, it's about the right way to do a Sunday service. But for some reason he will never actually tell us the right way to do a Sunday service. In his mind there is a right way, but it must be a secret.
We must deem this Bad Bible Teaching.
There is one memory of my earlier years as a Christian that I’ve never been able to shake. It’s a formative memory that I actually don’t think the Lord means for me to shake, for it has often reminded me that, when it comes to the local church’s worship, the stakes are sky high.
One Sunday we were worshipping at a church that was connected to a serious tradition (Is there such a thing as an unserious tradition? What does the author mean by serious? Is that synonymous with biblical? What does serious worship look like? The author will answer none of these questions.)
but now dabbling in what some have labeled the attractional model. The leaders of that church had become convinced that to interest prospective attenders and grow the size of the congregation, they needed to make their services more appealing. They needed to remove some of the traditional elements of worship and replace them with ones they deemed fresh and attractive. (Is this really the "attractional model?" Are the churches that don't do things the way the author's church does things all attractional? Are traditional churches the only biblical churches?)
Sadly, what they deemed fresh and attractive proved to mostly just be unserious. (All churches that don't do traditional church things are attractional and now, unserious?)
Sadly, what they deemed fresh and attractive proved to mostly just be unserious. (All churches that don't do traditional church things are attractional and now, unserious?)
By the time we attended, the prayers had become perfunctory, the preaching focused on felt needs, and the music relied on bad adaptations of modern hits. (Sigh. So this one church is emblematic of attractional, unserious churches. The author attended one church he didn't like, and draws conclusions from that.)
It wasn’t all bad: Bland coffee had given way to boutique coffee but, sadly, at the same time, sound principles of worship had given way to pragmatic ones. (What are these sound principles of worship? Please explain.)
After the preacher had told us how to be better people by trying harder and after the pastor baptized a man who told the congregation he was still co-habiting with his girlfriend, the band struck up yet another badly-rhymed and badly-performed adaptation of a pop song from the 80s—a song about partying and drunkenness that they had modified to ostensibly be about Jesus. By this time I was cringing with second-hand embarrassment and constraining what I was certain was righteous anger. I whispered to my family, “This is just so dumb. I’m never coming back here.” I didn’t know how else to describe it. It was just plain dumb. And we never did return. (In the title of his article he said that Satan doesn't need heresy. But what he just described does sound like heresy.)
It struck me that day and has struck me often ever since that to harm a church, Satan does not need to make the worship services heretical. He does not need to replace truth with damnable error. He just needs to make the worship services dumb. (Perhaps the author might explain the difference between a dumb church and a church that simply differs from his preferences.)
After the preacher had told us how to be better people by trying harder and after the pastor baptized a man who told the congregation he was still co-habiting with his girlfriend, the band struck up yet another badly-rhymed and badly-performed adaptation of a pop song from the 80s—a song about partying and drunkenness that they had modified to ostensibly be about Jesus. By this time I was cringing with second-hand embarrassment and constraining what I was certain was righteous anger. I whispered to my family, “This is just so dumb. I’m never coming back here.” I didn’t know how else to describe it. It was just plain dumb. And we never did return. (In the title of his article he said that Satan doesn't need heresy. But what he just described does sound like heresy.)
It struck me that day and has struck me often ever since that to harm a church, Satan does not need to make the worship services heretical. He does not need to replace truth with damnable error. He just needs to make the worship services dumb. (Perhaps the author might explain the difference between a dumb church and a church that simply differs from his preferences.)
He just needs to make them trite and vapid. He just needs to make them unserious. And eventually, the church will diminish in strength and decline in power and lose the presence of the Holy Spirit.
It’s important to consider, then, that if Satan wants to harm your church, it is possible he will raise a heretic to the pulpit or introduce a wolf into the membership. But it is also possible he may cause the members to begin to feel embarrassed by what they consider old-fashioned patterns of worship and to ask for or demand something else. (This is automatically dumb and unserious, it seems. We are starting to think the author believes that any church that is not like his church is dumb and unserious.)
It’s important to consider, then, that if Satan wants to harm your church, it is possible he will raise a heretic to the pulpit or introduce a wolf into the membership. But it is also possible he may cause the members to begin to feel embarrassed by what they consider old-fashioned patterns of worship and to ask for or demand something else. (This is automatically dumb and unserious, it seems. We are starting to think the author believes that any church that is not like his church is dumb and unserious.)
He may cause the pastors to begin to feel sheepish about lengthy prayers, to doubt the usefulness of reading substantial passages of Scripture, to wonder if it inhibits preaching to tie the point of a sermon to the point of a text. (Apparently these are examples of what constitutes serious worship. We wonder if the author will have anything to say about the hearts of the people or the actual act of worship, as opposed to the processes of a proper church service.)
He may encourage the church to pursue what they deem fresh and attractive or what they think will draw the community around—perhaps especially in the area of music. (A not-so-subtle dig at contemporary worship music.)
He’ll slowly reshape the church from the instructions of Scripture (Ah, our first appeal to the Bible. So what are these biblical instructions about how church is to be conducted? Oh. The author will never tell us.)
to the whims of the people. (Do the preferences of the author likewise qualify as whims?)
He’ll slowly reshape the church’s worship so it slides from holy to worldly, from sacred to profane, from meaningful to dumb.
There is another church I remember from my childhood. My aunt and uncle attended a Presbyterian church that held to a strict interpretation of the Regulative Principle. (The author will never tell us the actual "regulative principle" of worship. Calvin himself wrote,
There is another church I remember from my childhood. My aunt and uncle attended a Presbyterian church that held to a strict interpretation of the Regulative Principle. (The author will never tell us the actual "regulative principle" of worship. Calvin himself wrote,
God disapproves of all modes of worship not expressly sanctioned by His Word.
Calvin, like the author, was not describing worship itself, he was describing a proper church service.)
The only elements the church permitted in worship were the elements the New Testament explicitly prescribes. The most obvious evidence of this was in their singing, for they sang only the Psalms and sang them without any musical accompaniment. I once asked my aunt why, when she visited our church, she would not sing the hymns. Her reply was, “In the Old Testament, God struck people dead for worshipping him the wrong way.” I can’t say that I ever agreed with all the convictions of those Presbyterians or the strictness of their understanding of the Regulative Principle, but I can most certainly say that I respected them. (Hmmm. The author is very unhappy with dumb unserious churches, that they are taken over by Satan, that they dishonor the Lord. But this extreme aunt, rigid and legalistic, is not particularly troubling to him. The only reason we could think of is that his aunt is closer to his preferences.)
Whatever else was true of their worship, no one could say it was unserious. (Is overly serious in any way a problem? Is mistakenly serious a possibility?)
No one could say they took their instructions from anyone but God. (!!! Now we call BS. The author has described a church on the other side of the extreme from supposed dumb and unserious churches, but happily approves.
However, such a church cannot be characterized this way. It is a toxic church that puts people in bondage like this. Again, we observe that such a church is closer to his preferences.)
And this, I think, is the key. The great question each person and each church needs to ask is simply this: Do we believe God tells his people how to worship, or do we think God leaves that to us? (If God tells us how to worship, where in the Bible do we find this information? Is it a secret?
And this, I think, is the key. The great question each person and each church needs to ask is simply this: Do we believe God tells his people how to worship, or do we think God leaves that to us? (If God tells us how to worship, where in the Bible do we find this information? Is it a secret?
We need to reiterate that the author is talking about the way a Sunday service is to be conducted. He's not talking about the actual act of worship.)
Do we need to trust that God knows how we need to worship him and that he has given us specific instructions, or can we determine that God is glad to have us worship him however we see fit? Different answers to those questions will lead churches in very different directions. (Again we see that for the author this is a matter of his traditional church practice as compared to contemporary worship services.)
The answer that was nearly universal until the rise of the attractional model (Um, no. The author's church tradition, Reformist, was established centuries ago, but what about how church services were conducted before that? Likely there was a tradition previous to that tradition, leading us all the way back to the way the first century church conducted its gatherings.
The answer that was nearly universal until the rise of the attractional model (Um, no. The author's church tradition, Reformist, was established centuries ago, but what about how church services were conducted before that? Likely there was a tradition previous to that tradition, leading us all the way back to the way the first century church conducted its gatherings.
So the question is, why is the church practice arising out of the Reformation superior to any and all other expressions of church services?)
and the answer that will serve us best in any age is this: God knows us better than we know ourselves and therefore tells us how we ought to worship. His instructions are not to be received with embarrassment or resentment and not with hesitancy or disobedience. (Please tell us, what are those instructions? Where are they in the Bible? Is it a secret?)
Rather, they are to be received with humility, awe, and wonder that God would not only permit us to worship him but tell us how to worship him in the ways that are best. This means that instead of creating ways to worship we can simply receive ways to worship and instead of trusting ourselves, we can trust him. As always, it falls to us to search his Word and then obey his Word. (Where in the Word? Is it a secret?)
It falls to us to worship him as he has commanded, for he knows best.
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