Worship: Getting Out of the Way

“They would have to sing better songs for me to learn to have faith in their Redeemer; and his disciples would have to look more redeemed!” – The Priest, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nietzsche’s comment is eye opening. I cannot help but wonder, is he right? Do Christians, by our worship or by our actions actually push people away from who we worship? Are we, in our songs and our deeds, actually making it harder for people to come to know Christ?

True worship is art.

I have mixed feelings about this thing they play on the radio that they call “contemporary Christian music.” Sometimes, I have to remind myself that if the gospel is on the radio, then that’s a good thing. Other times, I think, if these Christians are singing songs about the God of the universe, shouldn’t their lyrics be a bit more…imaginative, inspiring, or insightful and shouldn’t the music be a bit… less manufactured?

I think this because I believe that our worship should reflect the God we worship. In other words, if God is as creative as the Bible tells (“The heavens declare the glory of God…”) and my experience corroborates, our worship should be art. It should move us—both lyrically and musically.

In fact, C. S. Lewis wrote that “our business is to present that which is timeless (the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow) in the particular language of our own age.” Our songs “must be timeless at its heart and wear a modern dress.”

True worship is holistic.

Worship is more than singing songs—even good songs—once a week. It is a whole lifestyle, and that requires sacrifice.

The Bible states in James 1:27, “Worship that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

In the end, leading worship is about getting out of the way. It is setting up a space for the created to interact with their Creator, the beloved to experience the love of the Father, the broken to be healed by the touch of the Great Physician. What a pity it would be if we shifted the attention onto us by playing unimaginative songs or by singing one thing and living another.

At The Well, let this always be the worshipper’s prayer: “He must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30).