Killing Worship
I went to church today. I don’t try this often … the panic attacks I have in large crowds make it exceedingly stressful to attend even my small congregation. But today was Communion Sunday, and I really, really miss going to worship, especially on Communion Sunday. So I’ve been trying really hard to go on the first Sunday of every month. I guess, too, I’m hoping that small doses of crowds will eventually build up a sort of immunity to the terrors.
And usually I find Communion soothing and helpful. But today’s service was one huge disappointment from beginning to end. It was mostly the fault of the music. I couldn’t tell you what the sermon was about, because, by the time we got to that part, I was so upset I was concentrating on breathing and not freaking out, so I wasn’t able to think of anything else, much less listen to the pastor.
It was the fault of the music. I’m a musical sort of person—and, quite frankly, music in the church is destroying my desire to be part of a local congregation.
Some background is in order, so you’ll know where I’m coming from. I grew up singing all kinds of songs. Praise and worship, camp meeting songs, hymns old and new. I love songs. I collect them the way other people collect stamps. When I was about 12, my church had a contest for hymn memorization. Any kid who memorized the first and last verses of 50 hymns was given a personalized hymnal. As far as I know, I was the only person who did it. (Yes, I am now and always have been a geek.) I still have that hymnal. And the words to those fifty hymns and a large number of others are now permanently etched on the memory chips of my mind; and I have the advantage of perfect recall.
So here’s my problem: the old hymns are being abandoned in favour of songs that have seem to have little to do with doctrine and a lot to do with inciting emotional responses. And what few hymns do survive are being raped and disfigured by people who think that they have the right to “adjust” the wording. I present three examples, two of which were sung this morning.
The Church’s One Foundation was written by Samuel Stone in 1866. Laurence Stookey revised it in 1983. A casual comparison of the lyrics (original, revised) may make you wonder why on earth I would object. But the subtle changes do profound damage to the message of the song. For instance, instead of referring to the Church as “she,” the song references “we” and “us.” And the change from “From Heaven He came and sought her to be His holy Bride; with His own blood He bought her, and for her life He died” to “From Heaven He came and sought us that we might ever be His living servant people, by His own death set free” ruins the message of the song. Nothing like completely excising the Gospel from your hymnal.
Next consider the old camp song They’ll Know We Are Christians by Our Love. In our new hymnal supplement someone has made a few small changes to this song as well. The one that really bothered me was the change from “We’ll guard each man’s dignity and save each man’s pride” to “we’ll guard human dignity and save human pride.” There is a world of difference there. The first emphasizes the very concrete idea of each person as something that should be valued and protected. The new version values only the abstract concept of “human dignity and pride.”
Finally, look at what they’ve done to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The last verse in the original hymn setting of Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee says “…Father Love is reigning o’er us, brother love binds man to man….” The new hymnal says, “… Love Divine is reigning o’er us, Christian love binds friend to friend….” Where is my Father in there? Where’s my brother? And it’s incomplete. Christian love is supposed to bind me to both my friends and my enemies. Christian love is supposed to change my heart so that I can love even those that my non-spiritual self doesn’t like. So these little changes mean that the whole doctrinal message is shot.
What gives us the right to go back and change words written two, three, four centuries ago? Even if you aren’t a Believer, and therefore appalled by the distortion or elimination of the Gospel message, it’s an unforgivable act of violence to alter these songs. It’s an affront to the poet who wrote the words. It’s a rejection of something that doesn’t even need to be rejected. As a poet, I can tell you that each word in a piece is chosen carefully for greatest effect. And when you change a word, you alter the meaning of what I wanted to say. And then you reject my message, even as you purport to affirm it by singing or reciting my poem.
We are losing a very important ability in our culture: the ability to generalize. While generalizations can be misused, they are very important in the communication of ideas. And by taking away the generalized meanings of words, we begin to lose some of our communicative power. And then we lose our ability to universalize needs and desires. If we have always to say “Everyone has his or her opinion” or “All men are created equal,” then we lose the power and poetry of our language. And we lose our mental capacity for grouping people into one whole. No one in his right mind reads that last example to mean that only men are created equal, and women can forget it. Any intelligent, reasonably educated person knows that it includes all people–men and women. If we keep it up, we’re going to have to include disclaimers on everything we write or say: “All men, women, and children, of all racial, ethnic, or cultural groups, including but not limited to African-Americans, Hispanics, Irish-American Catholics, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Jewish-Americans, Japanese-Americans, and Native Americans, are created equal.” Kind of loses something there, doesn’t it?
But the bigger point is this—and it’s what destroyed my Communion Sunday and left me feeling lost and miserable instead of rested and refreshed in my spirit:
It’s not supposed to be about us. Worship is supposed to be about God. It’s supposed to focus on who He is and what He has done. It’s supposed to get our minds off our sorry little selves and bring them to the throne of something bigger and of infinitely more value. It’s supposed to remind us that we are not God, but that we are a creation. A beloved and precious creation—valued enough that the Maker Himself was willing to die to save it—but a creation nonetheless.
And that is what I am finding in so many churches these days. It’s not about God anymore. I can’t find Him. Oh, I hear His name bandied about, and ostensibly we are praying to Him and talking about Him. But more often the songs have been altered to emphasize the people, not the Creator. Sermons focus on what we need to be doing, rather than on what God has done; and what lessons there are about what the Saints should be doing to further God’s Kingdom are so watered-down and non-confrontational that they are worse than no sermon at all. (Or, worse, the sermons are self-congratulatory paeans of praise to the generous and sacrificial spirit of the congregation. Those ones make me physically sick.)
Worship is supposed to be focused on praising God for who He is. Ever read the Psalms? The Lord’s Prayer? The songs of Miriam and Deborah? The Magnificat? That’s worship. It’s all about God.
I am dismayed and frightened. I do not know if it is me that is the problem, or if it is that the Church has assimilated the culture all too well, and now we are just a group of people who happen to believe that there is a God, without believing that there is much we have to do about it. We’re very tolerant and very non-confrontational … but Jesus said that He came to bring a sword, not peace. We run around with our WWJD bumper-stickers and bracelets, and we preach a mushy, spineless Christianity that confuses sentimentality with love, forgetting that true love demands the truth at all costs. WWJD?
If he’d been in some of the churches I’ve been in lately, I think He would grab a stick and chase the thieves out of His Father’s house. I have this horrible feeling that the wolves are somehow in charge of the sheepfold, and the sheep are getting eaten.