For centuries, the worship service has been the primary gathering of the Christian church — from Catholic mass, to Reformation protestant worship services, to the traditional 1950s-style worship service, to the seeker-sensitive productions of the last two decades, to the more trendy gatherings we see today in emergent churches. I find it remarkable that the worship service has survived the two largest worldview shifts to impact the Western church–the protestant Reformation, and the present transition to postmodernism and the emergent church. Our epistemologies have changed, our ecclesiology has changed, our spirituality has changed, our approach to scripture and spiritual authority has changed, but the worship service remains fundamentally the same. We have revamped almost every aspect of how we do church, but not the central gathering, which has remained essentially unchallenged since Constantine.

An Unhealthy Ethos

Having people attend a worship service as the primary way of doing church communicates that being a Christian is about passively attending to someone else’s ministry efforts. There has to be a pastor, who presents the information to be absorbed. There has to be a worship leader, who directs the praise of the church. There is little room for any involvement by the average person, save for trivial roles such as ushering, the occasional prayer or scripture reading, and, of course, paying for everything.

My father has years of training in biblical studies. In the worship service, he is given the opportunity to “serve” about three or four times a year. He might be asked to pass communion trays, lead a prayer, or read a scripture. That’s it — things a nine year old could do. In fact, children are frequently called upon to serve in these roles, supposedly as “leadership training.” He also teaches a Bible class, which is a much better use of his gifts, but this is clearly outside of the all-important worship service, and there are still relatively few ways people with other gifts can serve meaningfully in church gatherings. Where do artists fit in? Poets? Writers? There is not much room left for them in the worship service after we fit in the mandatory sermon, music, and announcements.

The pastor and worship leader (or, in my denomination, the preacher and song leader) are crucial because the unstated goal of the worship service is to facilitate a vertical interaction between the worshipper and God. In this model, instruction is sent downward, and praise is sent upward. Anything else that happens is incidental, or, as with announcements, a pragmatic necessity.

One of Many Options

Perhaps the most destructive effect of the worship service is to convince us that it’s all there is to church — there are no other legitimate gatherings. Home gatherings and small groups are great, but they don’t count as church, even in many emerging churches. The worship service is the only real church gathering. Among older churches, the attitude is “Attend church, and your life will be great.” Robert Webber, in his recent book The Younger Evangelicals, points out how many aspects of boomer-generation church life were engineered to provide therapy for life’s problems. Look at the sermon topics in a seeker-sensitive church, and you will find things such as “Prayer = tools for solving problems” and “How to have a great marriage.” Through sermons like these and uplifting worship music, the worship service promises everything we need to be successful Christians. If you want to go deeper, you can join a home Bible study or class, but that’s optional. Real church happens on the stage every Sunday.

Perhaps the modern church does not realize the diversity and beauty of the spiritual practices that the church has engaged in through the centuries. While it’s true that Catholics were holding mass a thousand years ago, they were also engaging in disciplines like Lectio Divina, meditation on the scriptures, Christ-centered meals together, and countless other disciplines that do not quickly come to mind. Unfortunately, many of these practices never went beyond monastery walls, and were not adopted by the reformers. Consequently, we find ourselves inheriting a worship service that has seen no fundamental format change in 1700 years, and there is no room for valuable practices that don’t fit the paradigm. I’m suggesting not that we do worship in a certain way, but that we free ourselves from thinking it has to be the same four or five elements every week.

We have much to learn about how to spend our time together, from both church history and current educational research. For example, if the purpose of the sermon is to inspire and educate the church, we can easily find better ways to fulfill that function. An oft-cited statistic is that we remember:
-10% of what we hear
-15% of what we see
-20% of what we see and hear
-60% of what we do
-80% of what we do actively with reflection, and
-90% of what we teach others.

In the ideal sermon setting, the pastor has a well-organized lesson, with handouts and PowerPoint slides. This is the case in most megachurches. What’s the estimated retention rate? Twenty percent. Pitiful. The sermon, basically a motivational lecture, is a lousy way to teach. Visit any secondary school, and you will find the most bored, least motivated students in classes that consist primarily of lecture. Teachers are no longer taught to lecture, so it makes no sense for pastors to educate their congregations via lecture.

Consider the “ninety percent” possibilities: people sit in small groups and teach each other what they learned from portions of a lengthy text, giving everyone an opportunity to teach, as well as hear what others got from their sections. Digging deeply in scripture is everyone’s responsibility, not the domain of a small handful of seminarians. By doing most teaching in the worship service setting, we imply that only teaching from pastors is legitimate, and that any other method of instruction or encouragement is odd at best, unorthodox at worst. We need to stop treating the worship service as the God-ordained church event.

Invented and Imposed on the Early Church

Perhaps we cling so strongly to the worship service because we think it’s biblical. All of Paul’s instructions to the Corinthians, all of the examples of church gatherings in Acts, and all the references to church gatherings throughout the New Testament are filtered through the worship-service lens. We assume that the early church did church the way we do now, with singing, a sermon, communion, and some housekeeping announcements. We assume that the “service” is a thing in itself, a special zone in space and time where the rules are different (e.g. head coverings, women speaking, etc.) than in the rest of life. This is the kind of old-testament ritual observance that Christ fulfilled and did away with in his death and resurrection. We think we have to find a pastor and a worship leader to be a church — a throwback to the priestly system of tribal Judaism, not the universal priesthood God intended the Body of Christ to be.

Do a Bible word search for “service” and see if any reference is made to a Sunday gathering. You’ll find references to helping others, making personal sacrifices, and suffering for the Kingdom of God. Likewise with “worship.” You will not find references to a formalized gathering of passive Christians who have paid top dollar to sit and absorb their spirituality for the week. We have invented the worship service, and made it the essential activity of the Christian faith. Along with this requirement has come the need for preachers, worship leaders, bands, huge buildings, and budgets to pay for it all.

In the emerging church, some trends are encouraging, but it seems that we’re swallowing the worship service paradigm relatively whole. Instead of 1950s traditional styles, we’ve developed a strange hybrid between Catholic Mass and a Willow Creek seeker service. Less emphasis is placed on performance, and more on developing community, but the sermon and the band are still pretty important in most emergent churches. Where can we go for direction? To the scriptures and their stories from the early church. To the spiritual practices of the monastics. To the group processes of the modern education world. To the wealth of latent imagination and inventiveness in Christians everywhere. Anywhere, really, that brings us closer as a church and takes us deeper into scripture and our spiritual life together. It is time for the emerging generations to show once again that church is more than an event, and to creatively develop new ways to spend our time together.

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