Does God Want Us to Fight about Worship?
Discussions about worship have produced more division among Protestant churches than anything else in the last 25 years.[1] Disagreements have mostly focused on musical questions, though the issues are broader, too. The debate has now reached a stalemate because worshippers have learned that if they don’t like their church’s services, there is always another service down the street. Such options reveal that the “worship wars” produced a noticeable crater in the soil of American Christianity.
This period was also not without many, tangible effects: the advent and spread of worship leaders, customized worship services, innovative uses of visual media in preaching, and a generation of church leaders navigating the relationship between worship and mission. “Faithfulness versus relevance,” in some circles, now occupies the theological bunker once dominated by “Law and Gospel.” Historians of American religion will have many spoils to analyze in coming decades.
A Peaceable Stalemate
When worship is framed in deeply personal and consumer categories, consensus will always be difficult to find. After all, how could unity be possible when many believers have been taught that worship is exclusively a culturally-conditioned exercise to address one’s customized spiritual profile?[2] The implied view of many may be expressed like this:
We must resign ourselves to the fact that a unified diversity is simply impossible on this side of eternity. The diverse assembly in Revelation 7:9-12 is in the future, not the present. Thus, churches will have to cater to their own congregational personality and community, letting the chips fall where they may. Many pastors have entered the fiery furnace, but emerged in flames. They fought the worship wars, suffering defeat. Even discerning laymen understand that unity as seen in the New Testament isn’t possible when the form of worship services is the single locus of Christian debate. We must agree to disagree (though we should avoid using the word disagree).
While this perspective is misguided, I’m sympathetic to it. Visible unity in the church’s worship is essential. In a highly-secularized political moment, it is seldom that people with traditional, theological convictions are heard. If our churches cannot agree upon what is supposed to happen when they gather, it rends the final slivers of the church’s credibility in a pluralistic, democratic society.
The irony is that the political nature of worship is exactly why it will always be contested turf, and thus the debate must continue even as we maintain unity. The truce that many have called for is well-intentioned, but a false truce nonetheless since it often stifles legitimate discussion about worship.
Worship as Politics
Many have said that religion and politics don’t mix. The catalog of religious conflicts in the West is sufficient to demonstrate this cliché. Yet this outlook hinges on how we define our terms. Theologian Robert Jenson explains that politics has two uses:
In a generally Aristotelian and traditional Christian theological sense, a polity is the arena of a community’s moral deliberation, whether this arena is an assembly of all citizens, an absolute ruler’s bedchamber, or something in between. ‘Politics’ then consists of the processes of such deliberation: argument and executable decision of such questions as ‘What shall we teach our children?’ or ‘What would be a just distribution of communal goods?’[3]
Jenson identifies three aspects of politics that also pertain to worship: (1) It requires a community; (2) it is deliberative; and (3) it is an ethical matter, since it deals with moral agents. However, it is difficult to see how these relate to worship because of a second understanding of politics:
But the word now carries another and almost opposite sense also: ‘politics’ is precisely what must be kept out of such communal deliberation, lest it lose its moral character. Here ‘politics’ is the manipulation of the community and the struggle to occupy positions from which this may be done, both of which efforts of course suppress politics in the former sense.[4]
Worship is political because it involves a community of Christians deliberating over the desired aims of their actions. However, when we start by assuming that differences among Christians necessarily arise from irreconcilable preferences (i.e., “politics”), dissent will always be considered divisive and ungodly. Certainly dissent can be right in substance and wrong in spirit. But this is not inherent to Christian disagreement. Otherwise, it’s difficult to appreciate Paul’s commendation of Mark later in ministry, though he questioned his maturity years earlier (e.g., 2 Tim. 4:11).
Singing or establishing service times is probably not thought of as having moral or ethical qualities. However, if lyrics and melodies are offered to the Lord of Heaven as truthful expressions about Him, why wouldn’t they be?[5] If love of neighbor involves how we spend time with them, why wouldn’t well-conceived service times have an ethical dimension? As such, issues like these should never be hastily labeled unimportant.
Politics also involves ideas about governance and authority, which is another important spiritual horizon. After all, believers have been delivered from bondage to the principalities and powers of this earthly kingdom, and ushered into the worship of King Jesus (e.g., 1 Pt. 2:9-10).[6] This citizenship produces worship with a joyful spirit and heartfelt conviction. Congregational worship becomes the main battlefield on which we celebrate and continue the refrain of how sin’s penalty has been overcome through Christ. In this chorus, Christians instruct one another as well (e.g., Col. 3:16-17).
This perspective will likely not gain adherents as long as we don’t believe that worship has much to do with discipleship. Discipleship, so it is thought, is a program, while worship is a service. These are serious errors which require biblical correction.
Worship as Discipleship
Romans 12:1-2 is a familiar passage for many Christians. One phrase is especially significant: “reasonable service” (KJV). Modern translations further elucidate this: “spiritual worship” (ESV) or “spiritual service of worship” (NASB). Taken in context, Romans 12 points to something larger than a worship service. It is all of life lived unto God’s glory.
Debates about worship have often stalled because this foundational meaning is overlooked or forgotten. Consecration, renewal, and transformation are fused with a refusal to be “conformed to this world,” with its sinful allure and trappings. Just as true worship for Israel linked offerings with spiritual authenticity (e.g., Isa. 29:13; Micah 6:6-8), the relationship between discipleship and worship is more like an isthmus than separate continents
Rethinking the relationship between worship and discipleship accomplishes two goals. First, it reveals that everyday life and congregational decisions are subject to the same Lord and same Bible. Decisions about corporate worship require collective, conscientious wisdom just as living faithfully in a fallen world does. Second, this means that unity which grows in disciples’ hearts affects the church’s worship, fostering honest dialogue while preserving a unified witness. In short, if discipleship is life-long, then corporate worship is never a settled matter. We are always reforming.[7]
Worship Wars Redux
In the excellent book Tempted and Tried, Russell Moore provides an intriguing application concerning Christ’s temptations. In the third temptation, Jesus is enticed to fall down and worship Satan in exchange for lordship over the kingdoms of the world.[8] This temptation is about forgoing humiliation in order to seize power. Moore relates this temptation to the subject of worship:
We need more worship wars, not fewer. What if the war looked like this in your congregation—the young singles petitioning the church to play more of the old classics for the sake of the elderly people, and the elderly people calling on the leadership to contemporize for the sake of the young new believers? This would signal a counting of others as more important than ourselves (Phil. 2:3), which comes from the Spirit of the humiliated, exalted King, Christ (Phil. 2:5-11).[9]
Though this application is specific to music, it illustrates a larger point. Practical decisions can be made by those committed to one another, while not curtailing future discussion about how we shall decide which songs, old or new, are most suitable for congregational worship. When our approach rests ultimately on the tastes of the majority (or the tastes of influential persons) as opposed to Scriptural reasoning, mutual love, and historical perspective, we remain locked in the selfish tendencies that cause all forms of conflict.
The problem is not that Christians sometimes disagree about worship. It is that they fight each other, resulting in false worship.[10] Worship is always worth fighting over—properly understood—because it concerns allegiances to the risen Lord and our brothers and sisters. What should be avoided is a clichéd “agreement to disagree” without a mutual commitment to ongoing, biblically-informed conversation.
Discussing the theology and values embedded in worship should stimulate our ability to preach, pray, sing, give, and listen together. When we discuss such practices, we encounter truths that might otherwise be assumed, avoided, or neglected altogether. Fostering such discussions requires open channels of communication between pastors and lay leaders, leaders and congregations, and beyond. If everyone is willing to live under God’s authority as found in His Word, and is committed to Gospel unity, then they will possess the pillars around which to construct a practical theology of worship for the 21st century.
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[1] The work of Robert Webber and Frank Senn, among others, helps to provide greater context for the various streams of this dialogue.
[2] This is certainly not the only problematic definition promulgated in Protestantism. It is simply the one to which this essay is designed to respond.
[3] Robert W. Jenson, “Eschatology,” in The Oxford Companion to Political Theology, eds. Scott & Cavanaugh (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 2004), 408.
[4] Ibid.
[5] This is perhaps further support for the psalm-singing argument of many Christians in Reformed, Lutheran, and other strongly confessional movements.
[6] There are some other significant reasons why the worship of the early Christians was profoundly political-theological, though space does not allow me to pursue them here.
[7] Sometimes the Reformation adage is read as semper reformanda (Latin).
[8] This is the order as seen in the Matthean account of the temptations.
[9] Russell D. Moore, Tempted and Tried: Temptation and the Triumph of Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2011), 150.
[10] It is worth one’s time to peruse the book of Acts and notice many of the struggles the early church had to experience and work through as it related to the acceptance of the Gentiles, the rethinking of “church” in the synagogues, and so forth.
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