Worship at WBC: How We Got Here

Have you ever wondered why we, as the American church, worship the way we do? Do we worship in biblical ways or practice traditions of worship that were formed by man throughout history? Colossians 2:8 says, “Be careful not to allow anyone to captivate you through an empty, deceitful philosophy that is according to human traditions and the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.”

When we think about worship it is important to “be careful” that we are not following traditions of men. As we begin, it is helpful to point out that traditions are not in and of themselves a bad thing. In fact tradition is inescapable. No matter how a church worships, if you do it more than once it is, by definition, a tradition. Also, it is impossible to worship in new ways all the time. The book of Ecclesiastes tells us that there really isn’t anything “new under the sun.” God Himself is a God of rhythm and governs over all His creation in a repetitive cycle of seasons, and as Psalm 8 says, when we “look at the stars and the moon that He has made” we realize that we too are blessed to be included in these rhythms of governing with Him.

Traditions are an active part of worshipping God, and Colossians 2:8 is not saying that all traditions are bad. The heart of the passage, and much of the book, is to make sure that our lives and traditions are centered on Jesus Christ and not the human, elemental spirits of the world.

How can we tell if our ways of worship are centered on man or Christ? One way we can do this is by researching the history behind our worship and see just how we got to this place in time and how we developed our traditions.

Mike Cosper has a nice summary of the history of Christian worship in his book, “Rhythms of Grace.” Here is an excerpt from that book.

Two thousand years is a long time. Jerusalem is a long way from North America. Somehow, in that span of years and distance, the church’s gatherings have adapted from meetings in synagogues to elaborate liturgical services in iconic cathedrals and the high-dollar productions of North American megachurches. 

Some of these changes are merely cultural, like the style of music and the manner of gathering, but some are philosophical and theological. Not all churches meet for the same reasons and expectations. It’s helpful to know a little bit of history in order to understand how we got here.

For the early church, its exclusive hope in Jesus became a catalyst for persecution, and Christians were forced to scatter. Their gatherings became more secretive in their hopes of staying alive. They had to leave the temple and synagogues, and eventually they had to go underground altogether.

Despite the best efforts of Roman emperors like Nero, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius, the church survived. It eventually even prevailed.

In 313, the emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, ending persecution against Christians and legalizing the practice of all religions throughout the empire. During his reign, Christianity spread like wildfire throughout Rome, and Christianity grew to be the most powerful and influential religion in the empire. Christians went from gasping for air under the fire of persecution to having the official religion. The church spread far and wide. Authority in the church centralized in Rome under the leadership of Gregory the Great, and thus the papacy was born, and the church became an institution in an entirely new way.

Over the generations that followed, the church became a hierarchical political power. The gospel became clouded and buried behind a church bureaucracy, a dead language, and a new priesthood. The unfettered access given to the church by Jesus was distorted, and mysticism and religiosity characterized the church for hundreds of years.

This happens over and over in church history. There’s gravitation away from the gospel, a tendency to couch it in man-made structures and hierarchies, to hide it behind cultural hedges, or to trade in the grace of Jesus for a less scandalous system of religion. It happened as early as the age of the New Testament writers, when the Judaizers infected the Galatian church. It happens now too.

It’s tempting to skip straight to the Reformation, to the efforts of men who brought the gospel and worship back to ordinary people. But first, I want to mention a couple of things about the legacy of the darker years in between. It’s easy to look at this history purely through our own post-Reformation eyes. We see power consolidation under the pope as an unfortunate affair, but in its day, it preserved the church against the momentum of Gnostic and docetic heretics, who undermined the doctrine of the Trinity. To many Protestants, the church calendar may seem like an arbitrary regulation, a testimony to authority and micromanagement from Rome, but for its authors, it was designed pastorally. The church calendar was designed to walk believers through the story of the gospel every year, from the incarnation to the ascension. If we allow historic prejudice to color our perspective too heavily, we lose sight of the brilliant, pastoral creativity that shaped some of the church’s inventions.

The error, of course, was to elevate ecclesiastical authority to equal footing with Scripture. The church calendar, as a pastoral and contextual concept for teaching people to live in the gospel story, is a great idea. As a binding regulation ordered with absolute authority, it distorts the purity of worship given to us by Jesus and the authors of the New Testament. Likewise, creeds, confessions, and orders of worship, when seen through the lenses of gospel-given freedom, represent an opportunity to connect with the past and acknowledge, as we gather with God’s people, that we’re not the first ones to discover and love the gospel. When they are mandated steps for finding acceptance by God, we end up confusing the gospel and worship. Worship is an opportunity afforded through the mercy of Jesus, who met all the requirements of the law and leaves us liberated from the burden of getting it right in order to stand in the presence of God. In the light of that fact, we need to be wary of anyone who offers us three easy (or ten complicated) steps to God’s favor and fellowship.

In those dark years, the gospel became veiled behind the trappings of religiosity and a profound distinction between clergy and laity. Worship was hierarchically controlled by religious officials, and the actions of the gathered church became more divided between the clergy and laity. More of the work was done by the priesthood, and the church itself became passive observers. Services weren’t for the sake of mutual encouragement and blessing. They were the means of salvation in and of themselves. One had to attend the service and participate in the Mass - the Catholic name for the worship gathering - to have any assurance of God’s mercy. The priest, in serving and praying over the Communion meal, or Eucharist, was facilitating “transubstantiation” - the transformation of bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus.

In the eyes of the church, the meal was itself a sacrifice, made by the priest on behalf of the people for the sake of satisfying the wrath of God. As one might imagine, church rulers became very powerful during this era. The clergy literally held salvation in their hands, and submission to the priest was an essential part of religious obedience; he took over mediating between God and men.

Imagine being a Christian in the year 1400. Worship services were in a language you didn’t speak, and your vague comprehension of the gospel would be based upon the little understanding passed on to you by others or discerned from the Mass you attended. You would passively observe the clergy as they sang (you weren’t allowed to sing), and you would listen as they read Scripture and carried out various rituals on an altar at the far end of a cathedral. At some point, they would serve the Eucharist through a mysterious set of actions that led to your only real participation in the service - taking a bite of bread and a sip of wine from the hands of a priest.

Throughout this era, voices of protest emerged. Movements sparked up seeking to bring renewal or to point to another way, but for nearly a thousand years these movements failed, ending with men and women being martyred for the sake of the gospel. Power remained consolidated and the gospel remained hidden.

In 1517, Martin Luther nailed the Ninety-Five Theses to the door of a church in Wittenberg, and a fire was lit that would transform churches the world over. The Protestant Reformation brought Scripture back to the people of God and with it restored a biblical vision of worship. As Luther once said regarding worship, “We can spare everything except the Word. We profit by nothing so much as by the Word.” The Bible was translated into the native languages of the people, and worship gathering in the new, Protestant churches were full of prayers, songs, and sermons in the vernacular. The Word was made central to the life and worship of the church, and everything else that was done in the gathering was reformed and reinterpreted in the light of God’s Word - including the Communion meal.

The gospel began to spread and revival broke out in Europe. It was a return to the life-shaping rhythms of grace that punctuated the early church’s (and Israel’s) gatherings. Instead of a mysterious fog of religion, the clarity of the gospel was stressed again as God’s people imbibed in his life-giving and soul-shaping Word.

In England, the Reformation had its own flavor. King Henry VIII had led the charge to separate English churches from Rome. After he was denied a divorce, Anglicanism was born in 1534.

Like the Roman Church, the Anglican Church had a strict hierarchy attached to the king, and it regulated the worship of local congregations with the Book of Common Prayer. Behind this was an understanding that the church was under the authority of the crown - an idea that many Christians resisted in the wake of the Reformation around the globe. The “nonconformists” fought the hierarchy and (at various times) suffered greatly for it. For them, authority was ultimately in the Bible. It was an offense to have the state (or the bishop) tell them what Scriptures to read and preach and how worship was meant to be carried out each week. Their resistance gave rise to the Free Church (free from the regulations of the crown), the Puritans (a purified church), and the Congregationalists ( a church ruled locally, autonomously, by the congregation). These movements eventually gave rise to the Presbyterians, Baptists, and many of the streams of contemporary evangelicalism.

When we look at most of the modern trends in worship (especially in North America) - from the gospel music of the Gaithers to the Passion Tours - we find their roots here, in the Free Church tradition.

A Scripture-alone approach went a long way to strip the gathered church of ceremony and tradition, allowing the glorious centrality of Jesus to shine. John Owen, one of the titans of this Reformation movement, said of Jesus in worship, “He freed them, by his teaching, from the bondage of Pharisaical, arbitrary impositions, delivering their consciences from subjection to anything in the worship of God but his own immediate authority.”

The nonconformists believed that leading gathered worship was a pastoral task. In the Anglican Church, the entire worship gathering was dictated by the Book of Common Prayer - the selected Scripture readings, the prayers, and the sermon (which was just a small homily, read from the book). The nonconformist movement spawned countless seminaries and academic institutions because they believed that the pastor should be well equipped to preach the Word of God and shepherd his people. It gave birth to the hymns of Isaac Watts, John Newton, William Cowper, and all of the great English hymn writers. These men (and women like Anne Steele) wrote with a heart for shepherding and catechizing - training people in doctrine and a biblical worldview - through the songs they sang. Their legacy continues to be heard in the music of churches all over the world hundreds of years later.

Freedom from the hierarchy was liberating, but not without consequences. Over time, as Hughes points out, “Free Church biblicism deteriorated into Free Church pragmatism.” Revivalism, led by nineteenth-century preacher Charles Finney, transformed worship from the banquet hall to the concert hall. Rather than worship being a formational process in the lives and hearts of believers over years of gathering and learning, it became an ecstatic experience driven by emotive preaching and decorated with music. The goal was a catalytic, life-changing moment. According to Hughes:

The structure of corporate worship became: (1) the preliminaries, (2) the sermon, and (3) the invitation... Singing and musical selections were made in regard to their effect rather than their content. Gospel songs (celebrating experience) often supplanted hymns to God. Scripture reading was reduced so as not to prolong the “preliminaries.” Prayers were shortened or even deleted for the same reason. As to the sermon, the careful interaction with the biblical text so treasured by the Puritans was in many instances replaced with a freewheeling extemporaneous discourse.”

For many Christians in the years since, this has been the norm. Worshiping with the gathered church is about music and preaching, with preaching taking a central (and often primary) place, while music serves as an emotional warm-up. Preaching itself has devolved from the careful exegesis of the Reformers to vaguely Christian platitudes and techniques for self-help. Elements like prayer, Scripture readings, and greeting one another are seen as peripheral, decorative, and secondary to the real purpose of the gathering. In this economy, worship is defined as music, and its value is measured in its emotional impact more than its truth content.

Historically, this idea is a big disconnect. The synagogue was a place where the people of God gathered to immerse themselves in the Word and be shaped by it. From that life-changing culture, the church emerged. Believers gathered to continually remember the gospel, to be nourished by God’s Word, and to encourage one another. During the Reformation, that vision was restored, making Scripture comprehensible and enabling the congregation to participate actively in the gathering. But revivals rewrote the script again. Worship became a momentary experience, as music and preaching led the congregation through a journey to conversion or repentance.

From there, a variety of streams and traditions developed. Driven by an emphasis on experience, whole traditions emerged from the preferences of particular congregations. Worship wars were often style wars, pitting generations against one another not because of philosophy or theology, but because of culture. Musical styles changed and evolved because experientially they worked better.

Some, recognizing a lack of clarity about the purpose of the gathering, have sought to understand the emotion-driven movement of post-revival worship in a theological framework. Many have embraced what’s sometimes called the Temple Model (or the Wimber model, given its usual attribution to John Wimber, founder of the Vineyard movement of churches). This model likens the journey of worship to a pilgrim’s journey to the temple in Jerusalem. As one worship leader describes it, “We see the ‘Temple journey’ of worship from every day life, walking towards Jerusalem, into the Temple courts and finally into the deepest place of God’s presence.”

The journey begins in the “outer gates,” where the crowd assembles rambunctiously, with celebrative and energetic music. As worship continues into the inner gates and into the temple, music becomes more intimate and the presence of God becomes more immanent. The goal of worship is to enter the Holy of Holies, where God’s presence is most profoundly known and experienced. Once there, we sing only ballads and hymns, with tears streaming down our collective face.

Directly and indirectly, much of the church has embraced this model. It’s been advocated by worship leaders like Judson Cornwall and Andy Park. It’s also present in the way we talk about worship experiences, saying of worship leaders and teams, “They really led us to the throne room,” or “They ushered into God’s presence.”

The problem with this model is twofold. First, it’s developed backwards. The theology of the Temple Model is a theological interpretation of an experience, and it is divorced from any kind of historical perspective on the gathered church. Second, it ignores most of what the New Testament teaches us about worship, the presence of God, and the temple. Instead of being led by Jesus through the inner curtain, we’re led there by a worship leader or a pastor - a pseudo-priest. God’s presence is measured in emotional impact, and it’s mediated through music and preaching, displacing Jesus from his role as our sole Mediator and worship leader.

Frankly, this isn’t far removed from the errors of Roman Catholic worship. Both revivalism and Catholicism measure the presence of God through the work of the church - the Communion service in one, music in the other. Both install a new priesthood responsible for leading the people to God and speaking for God to the people. In Catholicism, he wears vestments and doles out God’s presence in bread and wine, and in contemporary worship, using the Temple Model, he wears a fauxhawk hairstyle and an acoustic guitar.

It’s interesting, too, to see that Roman Catholic worship, by making the cathedral a place where priests serve and heaven comes to earth, is itself modeled after the temple. Somehow, both in historic Catholic worship (and, for that matter, its theological cousins in Anglo-Catholic and Orthodox churches) and in contemporary, experience- and emotion-driven worship, we are seeking to recreate a temple experience, mediated by human beings who lead us to an experience of heaven on earth that the New Testament tells us is profoundly inferior to worshiping the Father through the Son by the power of the Spirit. It’s not unlike in the book of 1 Kings, where the people of Israel have God as their King in an arrangement that makes them unique among nations. Even so, they aren’t content and they demand a human king. God gives them Saul, David, and Solomon, who despite their better achievements, are profoundly flawed. So it is with any human priest or mediator, we reject Jesus, our worship leader, and settle for Saul.

None of this is to say that worship isn’t meant to be experienced emotionally, or that the quality of experience and production in our gatherings is unimportant. Far from it. But what drives us? What do we consider the most important? What do we consider success? Do we think about our gatherings as catalytic, or cumulative? Are we looking for explosive, instantaneous impact or gradual, steady life change? Is it a concert hall or a banquet?

We come to our churches eager to hear deep truth and connect spiritually with our communities and with God. For many in North America, that quest ends at a gathering led by celebrated pseudo-priests who guide us through a fine-tuned emotional roller coaster. They lead us to “the throne room” and back, and invite us to come back next week for more of the same. Such a gathering paints a distorted picture of the kingdom of God, shaping hearts and forming identity via a heavy (if not exclusive) reliance on emotion, technology, and celebrity to do so.

But it’s not the way to gather. And that’s not to say that technology, culture, and emotions are evil. In fact, a faithful presentation of the gospel and the God of the Scriptures should result in an emotionally charged response. The Spirit of God has a tendency to do powerful things when Jesus is on display and when God’s people gather. That’s a powerful recipe for life-changing worship: gather the people of God, display the glories of Jesus, and invite the church to respond.

We have to see that there’s a difference between a service that’s compelled by a hunger to display the gospel and a service that’s compelled by a desire to stir emotions through other means. We also have to see that the church needs to be equipped for more than emotional catharsis.

•••

In conclusion, one of the things that can be taken away from Cosper’s historical summary of worship is that much of America’s popular approach to worship is largely based on the traditions of men. The main influence was Charles Finney. At the very least we should find this interesting, and hopefully this will cause us to explore our own traditions and challenge them with what the Bible says. The book of Colossians further develops this challenge for us beginning in verse 6 of chapter 2.

“Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and firm in your faith just as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness. Be careful not to allow anyone to captivate you through an empty, deceitful philosophy that is according to human traditions and the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ. For in him all the fullness of deity lives in bodily form, and you have been filled in him, who is the head over every ruler and authority. Let no one who delights in false humility and the worship of angels pass judgment on you. That person goes on at great lengths about what he has supposedly seen, but he is puffed up with empty notions by his fleshly mind. Even though they have the appearance of wisdom with their self-imposed worship and humility achieved by an unsparing treatment of the body—a
wisdom with no true value—they in reality result in fleshly indulgence.

As mentioned above, hopefully this article will challenge us to look at the strengths and weakness of our own views, traditions, and passions for worship to see if they are centered on Jesus Christ or man. This is the task of our next article called “Who We Are” as we seek to highlight the strengths of the historical traditions of worship based on the Bible. Please continue to read.