Cnoc-a-Phobuill

The good ole Worship Service, staple diet of the church as we know it, the Sunday morning ritualistic event that crosses all denominations. It seems that no matter where you go, the style may be different, but at its heart it is a self perpetuating monster that gobbles up its participants. We are slaves to the religious machine, from Fundamental to Emergent, there is no escaping the slavery we have willingly become chained into.

I was at a local church just the other day, and I was shocked (dismayed) by the sheer weight of complexity to the service. There was more electronic equipment on show than in MI3, it made me wonder how we coped without it all. There were 2 laptops, 3 microphones, 1 projector, 1 OHP and various things they all plugged into an overcrowded power socket. This was worship in the heart of the Matrix.

I am sure that most churches would equal this show of electronic equipment, and I fear many would far surpass this small offering to the technology God, but my gripe is not with techie stuff, its not even with style. Though I have to agree with Jason Baeder when he says ‘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’.

But style is not the issue at stake, it is simply that we have become a people for whom servicing the service is one of our gods. Sit back and think about the Sunday event that happens in your church experience….still thinking? Right now try to work out just how much time and effort it takes to produce the service. Here are some pointers, all these are guesstimates, fill your own in. Remember that this is all for a 60 -90 minute service.

When the Sunday ends, the planning begins for the next Sunday...

1 – 4 hours of worship group practice

Sermon preparation 5 – 40 hours, all lengths I have seen quoted, one website even offered a guide to how to prepare, amongst which they stated. ‘Plan for uninterrupted prep time, get a good computer, get a good word processor, bible program, illustration database, computer dictionary, Powerpoint and join a sermon study group' plus a whole lot more crap that Jesus and the Apostles forgot to do (curse you Bill Gates, why were you not around in the 1^st Century ).

The Sunday School (childrens and adults) has to be prepared by the various teachers, so lets say 4 teachers taking 3 hours each.

Then we have the rotas, door rota, flower rota, tea and coffee rota, washing up rota, creche rota, visual presentation rota. Maybe there is a bookstall that needs manning. Notice sheets, website updates and much much more. (Think of conferences, the time involved in getting ready for those events!)

Now take all this and imagine you are in temporary premises, as lots of fellowships are, you then have the setting up and taking down of all this stuff. Mind you at least you dont have the mortgage, insurance and sky high egotistical power struggles that having a building produces.

I'm gonna stop, it just depresses me, but with all that said, can you begin to see just how much is involved in producing a 1-2 hour service. Does it not seem to be a complete burden? The church I visited recently have been doing this routine for 10 years I guess, week in week out, and it was much the same at the last church I was a member. So much effort, so much time, and all for what? Possibly it has always been this way, was this how it was in the New Testament.

Well they met Lydia by the river, Paul preached in Athens, at the jailers house, at Jason's, Jesus preached along the way and many many other examples. the point being that they did not need to prepare at all, for they were constantly in a state of preparation by the dynamic yet simple lives they led following Jesus.

This is not an advert for 'house churches' for they are normally building services shrunk into a house setting to make the attendees feel more biblical, kind of 'Honey I shrunk the church'.

My point is simple, we spend far far too much time preparing for the service, the service becomes our driving force, and less and less time just following Jesus, doing as he commanded. We have become slaves to the machine, and for the most part all we do is serve other peoples dreams and aspirations, feeding their already inflated egos.

We will never break free I fear, for deep down so few trust God, we are happy with our mechanised lives, our conformity, our mundane clinging to second, third, fourth best. We are in no way priests of the King, for we have become like Lazarus, feeding on the scraps from under the tables, living a dogs life...dare we break free, I wonder?

# posted by Dave Lynch @ 2:40 AM