Worship – Experiencing God

I am continuing my series of blogs based on ten healthy practices in healthy liberal/mainline churches. The list of practices is based on the book, Christianity for the Rest of Us by Diana Butler Bass.

When I was growing up, “church” was something you just “did.” In some traditions, the motivation was fear-based: “If you don’t go to church, God will be displeased, etc.” In other traditions, attendance at worship was an integral part of being a citizen/businessman. Others focused on spiritual (emotional?) experience without much regard for thinking. In my experience, it seemed that you had to make a choice between emotions and intellect in worship.

I must confess to you that when my family changed from attending a fundamentalist church to a more theologically liberal one, my reaction was mixed. I was strongly attracted to the more liberal bent in the new church, but it was still pretty boring. As I write to you now, I find myself wondering about what could have made my experience different. In all fairness, maybe I just wanted it to be more entertaining, but I don’t think so.

What troubles me is that I had no idea what to expect from worship or how to prepare for it. There was a lot of emphasis on solemnity and seriousness in worship, particularly in the preaching, but not much opportunity for transformation. Thank God for music, however. The sound of the organ, the beauty of the anthems, and even the experience of singing the hymns did something positive for me, but I still wonder if I could really call it transforming.

Against that backdrop of personal experience, I want to reflect on some of the ways that healthy liberal/mainline churches are approaching worship. I frame the question this way: “What is it about worship that makes it worth creating time for it in a busy schedule?”

Worship is a corporate activity, meaning that we do not worship as individuals, but as a congregation. It provides us an opportunity to see that we share in one another’s spiritual journeys. Still, there are some things that do happen to individuals. For one, worship helps us connect our inner and outer lives, and to the degree that we experience God in our midst, we are opened to moments filled with awe and wonder.

Sometimes we think that worship gives us a time of sanctuary – a time to be “out of the world.” One could argue, just as convincingly, that worship connects us with a world that is much more real than the world of accumulation, production, marketing, and addiction. Worship gives us opportunity to connect with what matters most. Worship is also an activity of mutuality rather than an experience (among many flavors) that we consume. In other words, our participation helps to shape the experience while at the same time facilitating our transformation into citizens of the realm of God.

The experience happens in many ways, which is another way of saying that there is no single correct form of worship. Because it is in a sense “alive,” it re-invents and re-imagines itself continuously over time. One of its finest features is that worship helps us to remain enchanted with creation.

We liberals tend to insist on bringing our intellect into worship with us, but the full experience requires that we bring our hearts, too. Sometimes our hearts can appreciate experiences that our heads cannot understand and might consider frivolous. With the assistance of music, the arts, beautifully constructed liturgies and rituals, and stimulating messages, we can experience God in our midst (even if we’re not quite sure what we mean by the term, “God.”

I would like to believe that worshiping together cannot be ignored any more than eating, sleeping, or breathing. But given the challenges of economic, social, and climate changes that life will inevitably hand us over the next few generations, maybe we really can’t ignore worship without seriously limiting our capacity to respond.

One final thought: Solitary “religious” experiences of awe and wonder in nature are real and valuable, but we also need to experience God in our relationships and communities if we are to thrive in what promises to be a difficult future.

Wayne Gustafson
“God is still speaking!”
The United Church__of Christ