The Ken Johnson Group / July 4, 2005 Featured Article

Worship Wars - are these of God or Satan?

It’s My Way Or the Highway!

It’s My Way or the church will die and I don’t care!

by Ken Johnson

Let’s blow a trumpet and shake those frozen people out of their padded pews!!!!

Paul said to the church he started in Philippi

“...But one thing I do: Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.”

Philippians 3: 13 & 14

“Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead.” I love that sentence it has so much meaning. Why is it that Christians are always behind the rest of the world? Why do we have to do worship the same way that they did 30, 40, 50 years ago? Why can’t we realize that when God created the Heavens and the earth he continued and created man and woman and gave them brains so they could be creative and create new things continually? When the first wheel was created He didn’t say that’s good now don’t create anything better than that. He allowed us freedom, He even encouraged us to continue in our creative ways. Yes, I know, sometimes we go a little to far in some of our creations, but He also gave us a brain and a conscience to know when to stop. Yes, sometimes we don’t listen to our conscience and we go overboard, but that is the reason he allows us freedom to make our own choices and to hopefully learn from our mistakes.

Why do we have different denominations and different styles of worship? I believe they are there so we can make a choice as to how we are going to worship. There are so many varieties that we can easily make a choice. Why do some churches say when they are dying that “we are not going to change our worship style even if the church dies. If people want to come to this church they will have to accept what we do and if they don’t then they need to go to another church.” Our culture has changed to become what it is today just like the cultures before us changed . There is nothing wrong with that, in fact it is very important that we change as our technology changes or our culture will die.

In the fifties (these were my years as a young person - I graduated from high school in 1959) many things began to change. The most important was the change in the culture of the young people. For the first time in history they (the youth of America) began to have a culture unto themselves. For the first time they were not tied to their mothers and fathers. They began to have a little money of their own so they could purchase things and there developed a style of music, Rock and Roll, which was youth oriented. Prior to this time the young people listened to the music of their parents, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, even Lawrence Welk and the Grand Ole Opry. This music was not bad but it was totally oriented to the adult community and not to the youth. If you look at the culture prior to the 50’s you will see that children were thought of as an appendage of their parents without any thought that they were people in their own right. It doesn’t take much thought or research to see that this newfound freedom for children has over the years created some major problems, but I think that is what we as Christians are here for, to explore and understand how to handle each situation. Granted, at the present time we are not doing a very good job of handling these youth problems. Just like the “worship wars” the Christian Church is fighting over how to handle our children with much disagreement and this also turns into “war”, but with prayer and a little common sense we will succeed.

In the 70’s our industrial society began developing many different products like different models and colors of cars, literally thousands of different kinds of light bulbs, a wide variety of magazines, and at the same time we began changing things in worship. Actually in the middle to late 60’s we began using choruses in worship which for the “worship purists” was a difficult pill to swallow. In 1968 the pastor and I at a church in Cheyenne decided to use some choruses from a Catholic Publisher and to accompany them with a lead and bass guitars. We had the players available so we began singing one chorus per Sunday. On the Wednesday morning following the first Sunday chorus’s at the men’s Bible Study, the men (all of them in their late 60’s or early 70’s) gave the pastor a petition which called for my firing because I had used a guitar in the sanctuary. The pastor took the petition, tore it up and threw it in the trash, explaining that he and I were in agreement as to the use of the instruments and why. After a number of months the congregation really began to enjoy these choruses, and every time we didn’t sing one we were always questioned. It’s amazing how people’s attitudes can change. Trust me, this doesn’t always happen, but I would have to say that in my some 40 years of Music Ministry the congregations have made the change rather than fight, and the church was always better for it.

Let’s take a trip back in history where we will find that the culture changed on a regular basis, but much slower than it is today, and each time the culture changed the worship style and music changed. Just going back to J. S. Bach we realize that just for Bach to hear another composer’s music he had to travel many miles by foot or by horse and today we can hear another persons music from thousands of miles away just by listening to the radio or a CD or even on our computers. Whether we like it or not things change much faster today than in the past and we need to be ready and able to react to that change as quickly as we possible. The only problem is that the church for the most part waits for at least a decade to make the change and by that time new things are happening in the culture and the church needs to again make more changes.

Looking at stylistic periods beginning with the Renaissance you will find that church music was either accapella or accompanied by recorders, harpsichord or even an old pump organ. During the Baroque period stringed instruments and some woodwind instruments were added. The Classical period gave us the clarinet the french horn, and the timpani. During the Romantic period the brass and a variety of percussion instruments were added. Looking at the 20th century we see a wide variety of instrumentations to numerous to go into here, but all of them were very important to the development of music in the church. During each of these changes I’m sure that there were people who complained, but each change was very important to the evolution of church music and changes today are equally important. How would you like your worship service today to be just like it was watching Lawrence Welk and Grand Ole Opry back in the late 40’s and 50’s. I’m sure that there will be a number of people, maybe 2% to 5% of your congregation at the most, who would cheer at this thought, but there would be a larger number of people, probably 95% or more, who would have no interest in that idea. I’m not badmouthing either show, but I’m saying that we have come a long way since then and we need to keep moving forward not going back.

Using drums and electric guitars and a sound system in worship gets the response from some people “it’s too loud” and sometimes it is, but you have to remember that anytime that new instruments are added there will be some positive and some negative responses, so you need to be prepared in a loving way to handle those responses. Even Beethoven had a sound problem when he had the first performance of his Third Symphony. If you remember from our discussion above the Romantic Period added percussion and brass, and after this concert the people went away saying “it’s too loud.” Realize that there were no sound systems to amplify the sound it just happened with the addition of more and “louder” instruments. Speaking of sound, I’m reminded that when people see any kind of sound equipment their minds go wild as they imagine what they are going to hear. A number of years ago I invited a piano soloist to perform at my church. He was a classical pianist and the acoustics in the sanctuary were very good so I would not normally put a microphone on the piano, but I did this time to prove a point. I actually put a regular microphone, one that needed a cable on the piano without a cable and sure enough after the concert the gentleman who complained quite often about the sound came up and said “the sound was way to loud, why did you mic the piano?” It was interesting to see his face when I took him to the mic and showed him that it was not connected. He was quite embarrassed but he never complained about the “loud” sound again.

What about taped accompaniments? For some reason in history when we went from no instruments to organ it was all right, when we evolved to adding strings and brass even timpani it was all right, but it started getting bad when we began adding guitars and a trap set and it even got worse when we began using taped accompaniments. How many of you have the resources to have an orchestra every Sunday? Probably not many so why don’t we go to step two and hire the orchestra on a tape or CD? This simple addition if done properly on a good sound system adds a new dimension to worship. I think it has been a “God send.” Sure, there might be the person who comes up after a Cantata accompanied by a tape who says “You better never use that rock music in the church again or I will have you fired” like I had one time so you need to be ready to ask the pertinent question like: What do you mean “rock” music because the tape was a full orchestra? He said that he heard a drum set on the tape and that made it “rock.” It’s interesting how people define different styles of music.

I’ve read a number of books recently by the so called worship gurus who have very definite ideas about what worship should be, and I have found that most of these people have only been minimally involved in worship or haven’t been involved in worship at all, so it is really difficult for me to listen to much of what they are saying. For the most part these people would take us back to the 30’s, 40’s, 50’s and before to a very formal worship style that tended to put people to sleep and created worshipers who were predominantly “frozen worshipers” commonly referred to as “God’s frozen chosen.” They are espousing more involvement in worship by the congregation, but the same involvement that people had in the 30’s, 40’s and 50’s which became so stilted that they memorized what was happening and could do worship in their sleep. To me that is not worship. I really feel that the parishioners should be involved to a major extent but not in the same way each Sunday. The service order should change on a regular basis so the parishioners don’t get too used to what is happening and worship in their sleep. You still need to work on the flow but that can happen in a variety of ways.

Worship time (the number of minutes) is another thing that is regularly battled over and I don’t know why except that “the service has always been one hour for as long as I have been in this church and that shouldn’t change.” I haven’t found anywhere in the Bible or in any historical writings where it gave the length of the service as one hour. If any of you know of a divine inspiration like this being written down then please let me know where that might be. It’s also important to have some time in the service where the “Lord can work” instead of rushing through just so “we can get finished on time.” Sure, trying to keep the service to one hour is good, but it’s also important to allow the Lord some time to do His extra work when it needs to be there. When some people come to church on Sunday morning they already have in mind what amount of time they are going to give the Lord, and “I’m not going to stay longer then that no matter what happens.” In a church I recently ministered in there was a gentleman who no matter what time he arrived at church (11:05, 11:10 etc.) when 12:00 noon came he stood up and put his coat on and walked out the back door. Over a period of years he really missed God speaking even after 12:00 noon. I was always disappointed that I couldn’t convince him that God had set no timetable for our community worship; it was too bad that he set a time for himself. It’s really sad that some people can’t give God more than one hour of corporate worship time a week. If we can’t give God more than one hour on Sunday how much of the rest of the week will we give to God?

Bobby Sanderson, minister of music at the First Baptist Church, Columbus, Mississippi, has written that he read an article about worship. In that article, the author said, “I wish I could get my people to stop evaluating worship and start experiencing it.” Sanderson says that he began asking himself some hard questions:

1. Is worship about God or is it about what I like?

2. Do I seek God’s presence or the comfort of being with friends and doing what is familiar?

3. When is the last time God “blind-sided” me and spoke in a way I did not expect?

4. Am I so contemporary I lose the transcendence of God?

5. Am I so traditional that I forget God’s relevance?

6. Do I see myself as part of an audience giving approval/disapproval to worship leaders?

7. Can God use what I don’t like?

8. Am I more into music than the spoken word?

9. Do I ignore the command to sing just to get to the “message”?

10. Do I leave worship with a clear sense of what I’m supposed to do?

11. Is the style of worship more important to me than the object of worship?

12. Do I love His presence as much as the songs I sing and play?

13. Can I worship Him when it’s hard work and my joy is running low?

*from “Evangel,” the weekly newsletter of the First Baptist Church, Columbus, Mississippi, October 3, 2001 (Vol. 69, No. 40)

The Timothy Report, Swan Lake Communications, Swan lake@jam.rr.com, November 11, 2001

“Worship Wars”? Why should these even happen? If we are worshiping God, if Jesus is the center of our lives then it should be obvious to us that God wants us to “unite” and not “fight.” As a church the majority of the people need to hire the Pastor that they feel is right for them and trust him/her to lead them in the right direction. Just this one thing would preclude fighting. If you don’t like the worship style then you need to find another church that uses the worship style that you prefer. It doesn’t matter whether you have gone to this church your whole life if the congregation has approved a pastor and their leadership, then you need to either go along or leave. There is nothing wrong with finding another church but there is something wrong with starting a fight over worship style or anything else for that matter. If by some chance the majority of the congregation has decided, after much prayer and soul searching, that the new pastor is not the right one, and then they need to let him/her go and hire another person.

Worship and worship wars? Worship, especially corporate worship, is very important to the Christian faith and when we go to church at worship time there are a wide variety of people there for worship each one as important as the other and we are hopefully all there for one reason and that is to worship God the Father, not to complain about what we don’t like. I believe that every time we worship, God will minister to those people that He wants to hear so we need a wide variety of music and worship experiences to meet as many needs as possible. Go to worship this week with an open mind looking for God to speak to you not worrying about what this person says or does and you will go home with an entirely differently feeling than you’ve ever had before.