I stopped ‘going to church’ 35 years ago, when I became involved with a Christian community near London. I wholeheartedly embraced their mantra – ‘Church is what you are, not where you go.’ As a 'new church' we did not meet on a Sunday but on a Thursday, so that weekends were free for people to enjoy time with family, friends and neighbours.
Our shared life together, living out our faith within the community and making a difference, was the reason for our existence. Public meetings were a bonus. In fact, all public meetings were scrapped during the summer months, because people were on holiday. A great idea – why do we need a meeting every week? This was a radical concept to me, having grown up in a traditional Pentecostal church where Sunday meetings were the main focus. Worship was what you did at 11am on a Sunday. Now I was learning that worship was 24/7, something that embraced the whole of our lives. How we lived was as important an expression of worship as our prayers and songs.
Since then, I have had the privilege of being involved in the modern worship movement that sprang from the birth of the 'new churches' in the latter period of the 20th century. I am grateful for the abundance of new songs and the proliferation of musicianship and creativity across so many church streams. But has this worship movement 'grown-up' and come to maturity? On the surface, perhaps; today, the church is well served with an abundance of hymn and songwriters of outstanding calibre and high standards of theology. However, we need to avoid the trap of settling here. Worship is a journey, not a destination. Great meetings and worship experiences have a place in our lives; yet so much time, money and energy can be expended on having an 'awesome time of worship' on a Sunday, that we become consumers of worship, rather than true worshippers.
Singers, songwriters and worship facilitators are not intended to be purveyors of soft-rock platitudes to the faithful. Our ultimate purpose is not to fill our churches with new songs and have better, more attractive meetings. Rather it is to continually turn the hearts of Christians outwards as well as heavenwards. Worship should embrace both the vertical (Love the Lord your God with everything you have) and the horizontal (Love your neighbour as you love yourself).
Worship and Mission Go Together
Graham Cray once said: ‘Worship without mission is self indulgent. Mission without worship is self defeating.’ If the role of our liturgy, hymns and songs is to teach the church – we are what we sing – we need content that addresses the real issues that our world and the church is facing now. Many of the hymns of the past did that and reflect the time in which they were written.
How do our current songs speak about the needs of the poor, injustice, consumerism, suffering, unanswered prayers and finding God, amidst the pressure of living in today's world? Does our sung worship focus on how we can engage with our multi-cultural/multi-faith society and connect with our communities?
We also need to ensure that the language we use is inclusive not exclusive. When my wife and I wrote 'All Heaven Declares' in 1987, no-one challenged our use of the phrase 'to reconcile man to God'. In this gender-inclusive era, lyrics like that need amending.
Our world continues to change at an incredible rate and we must keep moving, otherwise we will be living in the time-warped cosiness of our Christian ghettos, standing still and not engaging with our communities. Our worship will be nostalgic rather than prophetic! It will also be irrelevant. In Jesus Wants to Save Christians, Rob Bell wrote: “Jesus wants to save our church from the exile of irrelevance. If we have any resources, any power, any voice, any influence, any energy, we must convert them into blessing for those who have no power, no voice, no influence.”
So let's stop 'going to church' and get back to what it means to be church. Let's continually default to being true worshippers – loving God with all our hearts and loving and serving the communities where we live.
Noel Richards has been involved in the worldwide contemporary Christian worship movement since the 1970s and, together with his wife Tricia and others, has written many modern hymns and songs. Perhaps the best known of these is All Heaven Declares. He currently has 17 songs that feature in the CCLI top 500, Church Copyright listing. www.noelrichards.com
This article is taken from our new edition of Fuse Magazine; for more content like this order a copy of Fuse here.
