Brian Funderburke [Duke Div. student and Young Adult Intern at the BC] and I get together for lunch every once in a while. He is a very deep intense thinker and carer about theology, worship, God, and good stuff like that. Without a prompt from me, he commented on how the expectation in a worship service like ours (perhaps in most contemporary evangelical churches) is that in order for it to be 'true worship', one must consciously "experience" or "feel" something. Brian contends that there is more going on in worship than just our "experience" -- that we are joining in with the saints past and present in proclaiming the glories of God, that the Holy Spirit is present whether we "feel" it or not, that there is something different that happens when we gather to worship as a community than when we are worshipping alone. I gave him the visual of the field of pods from The Matrix, and how even though there is a gathered community of people, we still are worshipping in our own little pods.
While I think we must look outside ourselves and our personal experience(s) to truly measure what it means to worship, I still believe we leaders need to be aware when/if people are not connecting to God through our corporate worship gatherings. How do we balance this?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Post a Comment