Secret option C in the worship wars, or Worship as flawless performance or communal offering?

worship
Oh my…

One church uses an organ and a choir. Another uses a rock band.

Some churches that had previously used only organ and choir start letting drums and guitars creep in. Perhaps it’s for a song here, a song there. Or we call it “blended,” where a choir leads songs written by Bach, followed by a praise band leading songs written by Chris Tomlin.

Other churches start saying they need to “expand their menu” and offer both. So they start a “contemporary” service.

Still other churches stake their claim with one form and demonize the other, either as “bar music” or “antiquated.”

But what if both options in the worship wars have led us in the same, wrong direction?

I’ve written before about why the worship wars have caused us to focus on style in worship rather than content. Here I’d like to show how they’re about more than just style.

Taken to an unhealthy extreme, the “contemporary” church can strive to put its nearest version of a concert band on stage. Likewise, the “traditional” church may look for the best, classically-trained vocalists and musicians. Both may even hire professional musicians simply for the sake of bolstering the quality of the music performance on Sunday mornings.

And so the question a lot of people are answering in their worship preferences is how they’d prefer to spend a good night out: at a U2 concert or the opera or philharmonic.

When this is our central focus in our worship “offerings,” we equate worship with a performance for people to come and consume. And as the worship wars have worn on, we’ve found “traditional” churches adding more anthems and “contemporary” churches trying to get their bands to sound more and more like the ones on the radio.

All of this conceives of worship in a totally different way than it has been conceived for the better parts of the church’s history.

What is worship? In the best parts of our history, I think we see worship as a gathering of the people of God, coming into the presence of God to offer our praise and thanksgiving, our confession and prayers. It’s a gathering of the people to hear from God and respond. For the Church’s first 1500 years, it was unquestionably a time of coming to the Table to encounter the crucified and resurrected Christ. And it was a time to be sent into the world, bearing the name of our Lord and living by his power and example.

What have the worship wars suggested that worship is? Often, these tell us that worship is a performance. Rather than the people coming to humbly offer themselves in worship, they come to hear a well-rehearsed choir sing to them. Or they hear a rock band sing songs they know from the radio. A friend observed that there’s a difference between worship songs and performance songs. And when our really good bands perform great songs like they’re done on the radio, it makes it pretty hard for a lot of people to sing.

Many will say that this exaggerates everything too much. And they’re probably right. The whole worship service comprises more than that anthem or that rock song. But these are what we’ve leaned harder and harder into the past couple of decades. The traditional churches amplified their “traditional” music by focusing on more choir performance pieces. The contemporary churches amplified their “contemporary” presentation by making it look more like a concert. Both types might do this by relying on professional singers and musicians. If those were the things these churches most amplified in the last few decades, it’s because they saw these — the performance aspects — as the most important piece of what they “offered” in worship.

And so, the problem at root: Churches began conceptualizing worship as what they — the religious service providers — offered the congregation — the religious service consumers. That’s a far cry from worship that we, the people of God, offer up to God.

For some similar thoughts on worship, see “Encounter or Entertainment?”

A tension we need to wrestle with in our worship planning: do we err on the side of flawless performance, offered to the congregation, or communal worship, offered to God?

A few years ago in my community, worship was a two-man show. As the pastor and preacher, I handled any speaking elements. Our worship pastor coordinated a band that handled the musical elements.

In the past several years, we’ve moved (repented?) from that form and become a dozens-of-men-women-and-children show. But it’s not a show; the point is that we’re all participating. There has been a small sacrifice in doing that. The more people you include — especially non-staff people who can’t dedicate the same amount of time to rehearsal/preparation, the more likely it is that something won’t go just right. The worship service may not be flawless. There may be an awkward transition here and there, something not said as well, or as powerfully, as we had hoped. (But then, I make no claims to having led worship anywhere close to flawlessly before.)

For the small sacrifice of including more people, though, I think our worship has become much more authentic. It has become much more fully an offering of what our community has to give of ourselves before God. It doesn’t attempt to limit it to only our most excellent performers. Furthermore, we’ve seen a lot of these new leaders lead various elements of our worship better – with more thought and focus – than was done before.

This doesn’t mean we don’t use some sort of discernment in asking people to lead. For the sake of the person and the community, we try not to put people in places where we haven’t seen that they’re gifted to lead. But as a Body of Christ, we believe everyone has been gifted for something, and we believe it’s neglect of the Body if we don’t make use of those gifts. We might be able to put on a better show if we simply identified the one or two most-skilled people to lead us in each aspect of our worship, but it would be a better show, not better worship.

If the worship wars asked us to focus on which performance style we prefer and formed in us a consciousness of worship as performance, perhaps secret option C is to quit asking questions about performance and start asking questions about what we, as a fully body, can do when we come to worship God. What if we focus more on offering ourselves – all of us – to God in worship and focus less on offering a flawless worship performance to the people?

Some other articles you should read:

Why we chose a church with bad music – (shaungroves.com)
Desperately seeking worship pastors – (Jonathan Powers on Seedbed.com)
“What kind of worship service do you have?” (teddyray.com)
Encounter or Entertainment? (teddyray.com)

Your church has a communication problem

communication

Follow-up now available: Some help for your church’s communication problem

If your church is like most American churches, you have a communication problem. If you surveyed active church members across the nation, I’d guess that the vast majority would list “communication” as one of their church’s greatest failings, or say that their church isn’t “transparent” enough.

My church has a communication problem. If you’re a church leader and hear that complaint/lament regularly, I can empathize with you. If you’re a member of my church, I apologize to you. We have a communication problem. I know it. I wish we didn’t. You can go somewhere else, but unless they’re not doing anything, or are a mega-church (I’ll explain that below), they probably have a communication problem, too.

I usually try to suggest solutions where there are problems, but I’m afraid my goal here is a bit less optimistic. I think the best I can do is provide more understanding of why this is such a frequent problem. And then I’ll offer some suggestions to the frustrated, under-communicated-with church member and the frustrated, regularly-blamed-for-under-communicating church-leader.

A Diagnosis – Confused Constituencies

Here’s my hypothesis: the church’s (and other social organizations’) constituencies fall into a very different category than the standard organization’s constituencies. Because of that, we have a very difficult time communicating with them the way they think they want to be communicated with.

The Church as a Family

Many complaints about “transparency” come when we frame the church in familial terms. If your church is a 15-person house church, that might be pretty legitimate. But let’s face it, in larger churches, the family analogy just doesn’t hold all the way through.

A family doesn’t have full-time employees.

I don’t know any families (in this case, ones comprising more than 15 people who don’t all live together), with a single, large combined budget.

A transparent family is one that all knows each other rather well, whereas in all but very small churches, the people don’t even all know each other’s names.

And so, when we hear complaints like, “We have a right to know all the details about [insert difficult situation/decision]. We’re a family!” it doesn’t really work. Whenever there’s a complaint about communication not working like a family’s would, we should ask whether the situation is a typical family situation. Families don’t hire and fire people. Families don’t have professional communication departments to inform them of events in the family. They call or e-mail or visit each other. If that sort of organic, non-professional communication isn’t happening in your church, it’s probably a good sign that we’re not truly dealing with a family situation.

Which takes us into the realm of the organization…

The Church as Organization

Most organizations have three primary constituents: employees, customers, and owners. There’s a relatively clear and distinct strategy for communication with each group.

Which constituency would we associate active church members with?

Customers

Some would want to consider church members like customers. But that’s not usually the reality. The decision-making expectations are different. So is the expectation for how much information is available.

If your favorite restaurant changes the menu, decides to open a second location, or decides to close on a particular day, you don’t expect to be consulted. Good businesses will let their customers know about decisions like that — usually through their marketing departments. Some might even get customer input through surveys. But the customer doesn’t typically expect to be brought into the decision-making process. Nor do customers expect to receive regular information about that business’s budgeting, staffing, or property decisions. Customers don’t expect “transparency” about all of those areas.

Church members usually expect to be brought into the decision-making process much earlier than a typical customer would. And they expect to receive more information than customers do. They’re not customers.

This is where some mega-churches may get an exception. Their size and centralized leadership structure make it clear that they’re religious service providers to their members, who are religious service consumers. Nearly all decisions are made by the staff, with only the biggest decisions going to some sort of “board” (compare to “owners”), and then communicated to the members by a marketing/communications department. Andy Stanley’s North Point Church in Atlanta is a great example of this employee-driven model.

So there’s actually a solution in this: make a more clear divide between employees, owners (i.e. church board), and customers (i.e. members). It’s much easier to communicate if the “church board” expects only to be brought in on the biggest decisions (think in terms of the most crucial 3-5 decisions of the year), the employees are fully charged with operations, and the members expect to be communicated with like customers.

Of course, I’m not advocating this. I don’t like it. But it would make communication easier.

Owners

In a small company, there are usually just a few owners. How do they get their information? Mostly through one-on-one communication with their managers. That doesn’t work unless only a handful of church members want to be treated this way.

If we look at this more like a large organization, though, we have two options:

      1. We treat members like shareholders. That probably looks like a quarterly update and annual meeting. I don’t know many who would be satisfied with that. They want to know more and know it earlier.
      2. We treat the board like owners and the rest like customers. Now we’re back to what I laid out above.

Employees

The place I see the most complaints comes when active members would probably like to be communicated with like employees. And this makes some sense in any church that relies heavily on volunteers for ministry and committee work. Those volunteers are like employees — they’re the ones making it happen — they just don’t get paid for it.

But there’s another difference: most of those volunteers have day jobs. That means they don’t spend the majority of their week immersed in the details of the church, like the actual church employees do.

If they were actual employees of the church, it wouldn’t be unusual for them to meet weekly – perhaps even daily when a crucial decision needs to be made. If they were actual employees, it wouldn’t be unusual for them to exchange rounds of e-mails every week. That’s highly unusual for volunteers, though. And it should be. Most of them have day jobs!

But the problem is that in most people’s day jobs, the other people who are needed to make a decision are also at their day jobs. And so the decision turn-around can be reasonably fast. Employees are unsurprised by multiple inter-organizational e-mails per day.

I receive 20-30 church e-mails per day and send as many. And I attend no less than 5 or 6 church meetings each week. And I spend a considerable amount of time in the office, learning about things just because I was present when they happened or because of inter-office conversation. So I know a lot about what’s happening in the church. Even with that, I occasionally learn things late and get caught by surprise. By comparison, a daily e-mail and weekly meeting is far too much for most church members (and I don’t blame them), and it still wouldn’t be enough to get them fully up to speed.

So I would argue that we can’t communicate with church members like customers. They’re more than customers. They want more information, want it earlier, and often want to be part of the decision.

We can’t communicate with church members like owners. There are far too many of them to give them the personal communication a small group of owners gets, and they want far more than what typical shareholders get.

We can’t communicate with church members like employees. They can’t handle dozens of e-mails per day and multiple meetings per week. They can’t handle the volume of information typical employees receive, nor can we produce that volume for our members without stopping a lot of the other things we’re doing.

And so our problem: churches and their members (and other social organizations) are confused about what kind of constituents their members are. The volume of information desired is often something just short of what employees receive, but that’s too much volume for the church to produce and for most people to truly be able to handle.

The Church as Pastoral, Strategic, and Social Organization

A final problem relatively unique to the church in its communication is that it serves as a pastoral, strategic, and social organization. Here’s what I mean…

As a social organization, the members of the church have relationships with each other. They talk regularly. It’s not uncommon for them to receive more church information (and occasionally misinformation) through casual conversation than through actual church communications.

So for instance, several church members notice that a family hasn’t been around for a while. They know that family had been upset by something that happened in the youth ministry a while back and now assume that’s why they left. They don’t understand why the pastor never did anything. What they don’t know is that the pastor met with that couple several times in a counseling situation, and the reason they left had to do with marital problems totally unrelated to the youth ministry problem.

But the pastor can’t say that. (S)He can’t announce it in the church newsletter each time a person leaves for reasons (s)he may fully understand, yet the church doesn’t know. Most people would generally disapprove of any sort of public announcement of their leaving when it’s not because of a move, and it would usually be inappropriate.

And yet, because of that lack of information, our social networks fill in the blanks with whatever we can most easily fit into them. There’s a legitimate lack of communication here. But it’s an appropriate one.

The church as strategic organization has another communication challenge. As a strategic organization, any significant decisions need to pass through a process. But as a social organization, a large number of people are emotionally invested in those decisions. If people learn about something in its earliest stages of the decision-making process, it may produce undue speculation, rumor, and consternation over something that will never come to fruition. If they’re not let in at those earliest stages, they’re likely to be hurt and offended for not knowing sooner.

Managing emotions and strategic decisions in a social organization makes communication particularly difficult. We’re not just dealing with formal lines of decision-making, we’re dealing with all the social and emotional aspects of this peculiar organization.

Your church has a communication problem. And it’s not as easily fixed as you might think.

Suggestions for better communication and better communication expectations

I’ve laid out many of the problems we’re dealing with in some detail. And as I said at top, I’m worried that I don’t have a great solution. I think so long as we continue operating churches as large, professional organizations, there will always be a gap between communication expectations and realities.

But I do think we can do better. I’ve realized several of my own failings in church communications, sought advice, and am trying to do better. In my following post, I’ll try to offer some resources and suggestions for the frustrated, regularly-blamed-for-under-communicating church leader. I’ll also offer some suggestions for the frustrated, under-communicated-with church member.

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A world that wants Easter but needs to see Maundy Thursday

crossWhy have so many people given up on Christ, the Church, Christianity?

Whatever their reason, I don’t believe it’s because they don’t want the promise of Easter.

The celebration of Easter is that we find life where we expected only death. Even those closest to Jesus expected to find nothing but a corpse when they went to the tomb that first Easter morning.

The promise of Easter is that we continue to find life where we expected only death.

Our world craves the promise of Easter. I believe God has created us with that craving. This is why we cry and mourn at funerals. We love life and hate death. This is why broken relationships rock our lives the way they do. We crave reconciliation. This is why so many are plagued with guilt. We crave forgiveness.

In a world that craves the promise of Easter, why have so many given up on the Christ, and the Church, that offer that promise?

Could it be because they need to see Maundy Thursday and too rarely see it?

At the Last Supper, on what we now call Maundy Thursday, we read that Jesus knew the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God. He had all things under his power. There is no higher place than the place given to Christ. And so what will he do in all his power? The “so” is startling: “so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist.” And then he proceeded to wash his disciples’ feet.

The One who at the beginning took dust from the ground and formed a man is now the one who gets up from the meal, kneels on the ground, and cleans the dust off the feet of the ones he created!

And then, shortly after Jesus gets up from washing his disciples’ feet, he says this: “A new command I give you: Love one another.” This isn’t much of a new command. “Love your neighbor as yourself,” has been around quite a while. But the next part makes it new: “As I have loved you, so you must love one another.”

That’s the mandate that Maundy Thursday is named for.

To believe that Easter’s promise is true, a world that craves that promise needs to see the Church live the mandate of Maundy Thursday.

Is the problem that the world needs more “evidence that demands a verdict,” proving Christ’s death and resurrection? Or is it that they need to understand Christ? To understand Jesus in all his divinity and all his humanity? To understand a God who humbles himself so low that he becomes obedient to death, even death on a cross?

Are his disciples today making that humility evident by loving, even as Christ loved us? Are his disciples found kneeling, a towel wrapped around their waists, or found jockeying for power and fighting for what they’re “due”?

This is why it seems so right to us that Pope Francis left the comfortable confines of a Roman Catholic cathedral to wash the feet of a young incarcerated Muslim woman. Why it seems so right to us that Pope Francis refuses to live in the palatial residences offered him and prefers public transit to a limo. How will this Pope handle the riches of Rome?

To our world: if your impression of us, the purported disciples of Christ, is that we spend more time arguing over who will be greatest than seeking to serve the least of these — I’m sorry. I know we often haven’t represented our Savior well. Where you have seen us seeking greatness and riches, you have seen a Church that has not understood – or has not chosen to actually follow – its Savior.

But let me be clear about this, too… Christ’s disciples have been falling short since the beginning. At the Last Supper – almost immediately after Jesus washes his disciples’ feet and predicts his betrayal and death – what do they do? They begin to fight over who is the greatest! We come from a long line of disciples who have misunderstood or ignored Christ’s call to be found among those who serve. But that ignorance and misbehavior has never negated the promise of Easter. If you are refusing the promise of Easter because you aren’t seeing the Church take Jesus’ new command seriously, can I plead with you to reconsider? Christ’s promises are true, whether or not you see them lived out in those who claim him. Don’t miss the perfect goodness of Christ because of his Church’s flaws and failings.

And I should be clear about this, too… We, the Church, are flawed and often fail. But we are also, many of us, seeking Christ. We’re seeking to live according to his humility, his self-giving love, his grace and truth. I hope you’ve seen at least a bit of that. Where we fall short, bear with us in our attempts to get it right, as we trust Christ bears with us.

If you have been hurt by the Church, I apologize. I’ve been hurt before, too. Admittedly, some of the times I have been hurt were because of my own pride. At its best, the Church is full of grace and truth, just as her Savior is. And there are times that truth, even presented with grace, has a bite. At her best, the Church must continue to be full of truth, and we cannot apologize for that, but where you have heard truth with no grace – or purported truth that was no truth at all – I apologize. Where you have heard a presentation of “truth” that was seeking power or status, rather than hoping for reconciliation – I apologize.

And so I plead with you again – if the promises of Easter are true, if they even may be true, don’t miss them because you haven’t seen the Church living out Christ’s new command.

To the Church: may we follow the command of our Savior. How can we be found on our knees rather than exalted? Serving our world rather than expecting to be served by it? Found among the least of these in our world rather than the greatest? How can Pope Francis’s example encourage all of us toward greater simplicity and generosity?

May our leaders be known for commonly rejecting privilege and power, wealth and prosperity, not for climbing ladders toward more power and more money. May we, as congregations, ask more questions about how we can serve the world than questions about whether we are being served properly.

May we be an Easter people – celebrating life where before there was only death – and celebrating that life best by joining our Savior on his knees and at the cross.

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