Sunday, October 5
Two things we could do to improve our worship:
1. Change the "I" to "we" in 90% of the music and spoken language. The individual's worship must grow out of the collective sense of worship. It hardly ever seems to work the other way.
2. Sing and talk a lot more about God and a lot less about our experience of God. While we don't want to totally disconnect from the experiential realm we need to shift the focus. We're locked in a loop where many of us think and function as though worship were about us -- our needs, our experiences, our perceptions...
It's just a matter of rebalancing the tires.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Excellent points. I agree.
Excellent thought provocation. Still, I wonder if we might throw the baby out with the bath water with such a generalized perscription - the Psalms, for instance, seem to have much 'I' and 'experiential' language in them. Hmmm. Thanks for making me think.
I'm not saying throw out all "I" language.
We need to remember, too, that the Hebrew mindset did not have the strong individualized "I" that we in the West developed during the Enlightenment. When we say "I" we understand it a bit differently than the psalmist.
Your thoughts are totally in line with where my thinking is right now (isn't that what we Christians are always looking for, people saying the same thing as us). But seriously, I really feel that there is a need to get away from the "I" worship perspective and get more of a "we" mentality in there, and of course keep the content focused on God and what He has done. Your right that we understand "I" different than the psalmist too. One of my Messianic Jewish friends used to point out to me that the typical CHristian mindset was about personal faith/relationship, where as the jewish and biblical mindset was much more community and group centered.
One other thought to throw out there that a friend and I were discussing. Words like praise and worship have no meaning in today's contemporary worship culture. people sing "give Him praise," and think that's praise. Sorry people, but you've gotta follow up a lyric about praise with actual praise or else its incomplete. Praise and worship remember things that God has done and who He has revealed Himself to us to be. Worship is not about talking about me and my worship, and its not about coming to get an emotional high (though it might be the outcome).
Post a Comment