Worship Is All About God

Bad Ideas I Learned from Good Leaders #3

“But that’s true!” some of you are thinking. And you’re right. The statement is true. Its usage can be a bad idea.

I’ve rarely heard this statement from someone who was actually trying to make worship about God. To those of you who use it in that way, my sincere apologies. More frequently, I hear it as a church leader’s response to complaints about the worship service.

Now let me make an excursus on complaints. If you are a church leader, you are inundated with complaints. You get tired of hearing complaints. You want people to come help or just shut up. This is not unnatural.

But on the other hand, the people in the congregation have grown used to mediocre leadership by people who are overworked and tired, or who have simply turned their church activity into a dead routine, doing the same thing over and over.

So people basically give up. The habitual church goers will keep on going, because that’s what they do. The church leadership will go on doing what they do because they have always done so. Both will piously utter the line: “Worship is all about God.” They do this to tell those on the other side that they ought to do it their way.

I discussed this issue of church work in my first post in this series, Ask Them to Implement Their Own Suggestion. Some of what I suggested there applies here.

Let me suggest another view. For us, worship is all about God. For God, worship is all about us.

I came to this conclusion while doing an extended study of Leviticus. People tend to skip over Leviticus. If they’re reading the Bible in a year, they try to get through it as fast as possible and probably remember very little. But when I studied the book with the three volume Anchor Bible commentary (unfortunately out of print) written by the incredibly good scholar Jacob Milgrom, I started to learn differently. Dr. Milgrom made the comment, and I paraphrase from memory, that the tabernacle rituals taught in Leviticus were a training ground.

It was not that God is going to be injured if we fail to follow a particular ritual. God can handle many different things in worship. Both Judaism, in creating the synagogue service(s), and Christianity in creating our own worship practices now worship God in ways that are very different from those prescribed there. But God wants to accomplish something in us through our worship, and it’s defined in Leviticus, “Be holy for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44,11:45,19:2,20:7,20:26,21:9).

And for those Christians who might complain about my basing all this on Leviticus, it’s quoted in 1 Peter 1:14-16: “Like obedient children, do not be conformed to the desires that you formerly had in ignorance. Instead, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in all your conduct; for it is written, “You shall be holy, for I am holy.”

One of the things I learned from this study was that it is, in fact, very much about God, and not our desires. That applies to the church leadership, who want to keep everything under control so they don’t have any unpleasant surprises. This applies to the members, who often prefer to have things that entertain them and make them feel good, rather than things that challenge them.

The question to ask yourself is this: Is the worship service I conduct (if you’re a leader), or attend (if you’re a member) preparing me to be holy before God? If you’re place in this week after week isn’t changing, probably not. If you are simply warming the pew, probably not. But equally, if you are simply a performer entertaining the pew sitters, probably not. I don’t think God is going to accept the excuse that the people wanted to be entertained.

If you’re going to claim that worship is all about God, then take action as thought that’s the case. If it’s all about God, as God demonstrated in the words of Leviticus, the purpose is to make that holy people. That means worship has to point people to God, help people connect with God, be aware of God’s presence, understand God’s gifts and God’s grace, and let God get to work.

If the main purpose is getting the same back sides into the same pews next week, then worship is not about God.

Perhaps we ought to change that.

(Featured image generated by Jetpack AI.)