Earlier this week, I wrote a pair of articles that went pretty hard against the Roman Catholic Church, and while I stand by everything I said regarding the sole authority of the Word of God and the danger in elevating the traditions of men to the level of spiritual authority, I don’t want to be someone who does nothing but “bash the other guys (Catholics).”
So, in the spirit of friendship, I’m about to say something positive about some comments the new Pope said (before he was Pope), while also bashing the other other guys (in this case a big chunk of the denominational world)…
“Certainly the [Roman Catholic] Church has recognized, over the past fifty years, that we should not be trying to create spectacle, if you will; theater, just to make people feel interested in something which, in the end, is very superficial. What liturgy should be about—what faith should be about—is coming in contact with that mystery, the mystery of God who is love, God who dwells within us, God who is indeed present in humanity, and who has revealed Himself through Jesus Christ. The way to discover God is not really through spectacle, and I think many times people have been maybe misled; people have gone looking for God in ways that, in the end, have proven to be a side-track, and not really essential in terms of discovering the mystery, if you will; the truth about who God is, and what experience living a life of faith is about.
I can’t find much to quibble with in that quote, can you? I think he’s spot on in identifying the problem with so-called “performance worship,” where a band blares loud music on a stage, as people hop around, singing bad pop songs that just replace the word “baby” with “Jesus.” In the immortal words of Hank Hill: “Can’t you see you’re not making Christianity better, you’re just making rock-and-roll worse?!” Why have so many gone down that road? Because they’re searching for something spiritual and trying to find it by worldly means. They’re looking to achieve a “feeling” and they believe (because no one has taught them otherwise) that the only way to find it is through superficial demonstrations. What they’re really looking for is attainable, but it’s not what they think it is. It’s subtler, softer, and ultimately far more satisfying than the short-term “look at me” dopamine hit a person gets when he raises his hands and starts swaying to some k-pop sounding “praise song.”
The idea that the more you “emote,” the more spiritual you are is a falsehood perpetrated by the Devil, who is more than happy to have people “feeling good” in exchange for “knowing God.” The idea that “God doesn’t care how we worship Him” is just as ludicrous, and I can cite countless examples on that point, starting with the Lord burning Nadab and Abihu into ashes because they didn’t worship Him the way He wanted (Leviticus 10). The Lord is, after all, the demander of our worship, the designer of our worship, and the destination of our worship. Of course he cares how we do it!
That said, the Catholic solution to this problem is just to swing the pendulum in the other direction. Or, to be precise, the Protestants’ swing to “religious theater” is in response to a thousand+ years of Catholic rote mundanity, etc, the chanting of words in a language the lay people do not know, and the formulaic—to the point of empty ritualism—way in which Masses have been handled for generations.
The solution, I think, is something more in the middle: Not a performance art where no one listens, no one learns, and no one grows, but also not a dry, hollow service with the same invocations, the same prayers, and the same chants are uttered. Worship to God should be real, organic, sincere, spontaneous and yet grounded in the Bible. It should be “decent and orderly” (as Paul says to the Corinthians) without being empty. It should be genuine without being self-centered. Worship, at its core, is an offering unto God that is pleasing to Him.
Anything more is unnecessary. Anything less is insufficient.
~Matthew