Christ @ the Center of Worship: The Difference Between Congregational Worship and a Concert

Is there a difference? Yes. There are several things to consider when it comes to congregational worship. One big thing is that, biblically and historically speaking, worship is centered on Jesus Christ in both form and content. In concerts, this is not the case. Some concerts may have songs that are centered on Christ, but the event itself is centered on the artist. You can buy their music and their T-shirt and listen to them talk and sing about their life with Christ, but the form of the event is not centered on Christ. This is not a bad thing. Concerts exist to help promote artists and music, and these things make a difference for Christ. A problem happens when we borrow the concert mentality and seek to implement it in church worship. Practically speaking, there are several things we can highlight that can help us keep Christ at the center of church worship and not borrow from the methods of concerts.

John Piper points out that when they tried to determine what the worship at the church where he pastors would look like, they concluded, “If Bethlehem is not ‘singing and making melody to the Lord with [our] heart,’ (Ephesians 5:19), it’s all over. We close up shop. This is no small commitment.”

James K. A. Smith made a similar point along with some more helpful insight:

1. If we, the congregation, can’t hear ourselves, it’s not worship. Christian worship is not a concert. In a concert (a particular “form of performance”), we often expect to be overwhelmed by sound, particularly in certain styles of music. In a concert, we come to expect that weird sort of sensory deprivation that happens from sensory overload, when the pounding of the bass on our chest and the wash of music over the crowd leaves us with the rush of a certain aural vertigo. And there’s nothing wrong with concerts! It’s just that Christian worship is not a concert. Christian worship is a collective, communal, congregational practice – and the gathered sound and harmony of a congregation singing as one is integral to the practice of worship. It is a way of “performing” the reality that, in Christ, we are one body. But that requires that we actually be able to hear ourselves, and hear our sisters and brothers singing alongside us. When the amped sound of the praise band overwhelms congregational voices, we can’t hear ourselves sing – so we lose that communal aspect of the congregation and are encouraged to effectively become “private,” passive worshipers.

2. If we, the congregation, can’t sing along, it’s not worship. In other forms of musical performance, musicians and bands will want to improvise and “be creative,” offering new renditions and exhibiting their virtuosity with all sorts of different trills and pauses and improvisations on the received tune. Again, that can be a delightful aspect of a concert, but in Christian worship it just means that we, the congregation, can’t sing along. And so your virtuosity gives rise to our passivity; your creativity simply encourages our silence. And while you may be worshiping with your creativity, the same creativity actually shuts down congregational song.

3. If the praise band, are the center of attention, it’s not worship. I know it’s generally not the fault of the praise band that we’ve put them at the front of the church. And I know worship leaders want to model worship for us to imitate. But because we’ve encouraged our leaders to basically import forms of performance from the concert venue into the sanctuary, we might not realize that we’ve also unwittingly encouraged a sense that worship leaders are the center of attention. And when the band’s performance becomes a display of their virtuosity—even with the best of intentions—it’s difficult to counter the temptation to make the praise band the focus of our attention. When the praise band goes into long riffs that they might intend as “offerings to God,” we the congregation become utterly passive, and because we’ve adopted habits of relating to music from the Grammys and the concert venue, we unwittingly make the band the center of attention. I wonder if there might be some intentional reflection on placement (to the side? leading from behind?) and performance that might help us counter these habits we bring with us to worship.

Refusing to look at our praise and worship leaders as celebrities or gifted high priests can put us on the right path for approaching church worship. Keeping the body of Christ singing in the context of the story of the gospel is also key to keeping Christ @ the center of worship.