I have been to many wonderful worship services. I like to think I’ve planned and led a few. Overall, however, I would say the quality of worship is declining because churches are increasingly uncertain what worship is actually for. But that’s only a symptom of worship’s troubles.

For most of its history, worship is the basket into which the church has placed nearly all its eggs. The popular phrase “going to church” says it all. Worship is what church is about, this saying assumes. Further, it’s an essentially passive activity. You go to worship, you attend a service, like you go to a movie or attend a graduation. You are primarily a viewer of the featured event.

With the rise of popular culture in the 20^th century, churches began to realize worship was losing its hold on people. They recognized that they needed to do a better job of “connecting with their audience.” The Catholic church substituted Latin for modern vernacular languages and Protestants gave up King James English for more modern versions. Music became more contemporary. To get people more involved, communion became more frequent. A new emphasis was placed on lay worship leadership.

All of this remained, however, within the context of worship as “spectator sport” because that’s what worship is. Even if you’re singing, reading, dancing, or giving a communion cup, you’re doing it for the congregation, the vast majority of whom walked in, took a program, found a seat, and then followed directions. Sometimes they joined in the singing or liturgy but mostly they watched and listened to what was going on up front. Which is what they expected to do when they came.

All the time I was a parish pastor, one of my primary objectives was to “improve worship.” In my last years, however, I came to realize that such efforts were putting lipstick on a pig. Better worship changed nothing. More specifically, it didn’t change people.

Since at least the 4^th century, Christianity has been largely a passive activity. That was its appeal: it was simple. Be baptized, go to church, believe a few things about God and Jesus, make some effort to be a good person, and you’re in. The church was a carrot-and-stick institution, wielding the threat of hell and dangling the promise of heaven to keep people coming. Worship was the main place that wielding and dangling took place. It was there that you got your ticket punched to eventually be admitted to the main event “upstairs.”

With the advent of the modern world, that scenario went into a long, steady decline. The carrot and stick stopped working. Worship became a feel-good act of nostalgia, supplemented with some contemporary entertainment and self-help advice. Coffee hour and potlucks became as much of a draw. Now, though, few remember or long for the church of yore, and thousands of congregations close in the US every year.

To cut to the chase, religion assumes an enormous gap exists between God and humanity. There are many explanations for why this is so (“original sin” is the most notorious), but it is religion’s job to bridge that gap for us. Worship is essentially an endless reiteration of the story of Jesus as the “gap-bridger.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, assumes that we are actually one with God, but we are blind to that reality and do not experience it. Here the culprit is our identification with an illusory separate self, created in our mind, often called the ego. This is the mask we wear, our persona (the Greek word for mask), which is actually hiding our true being. In Christian terms this is God’s own Spirit. It is our sense of “I am”: silent, imperturbable, and eternal. It is what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It is God’s own being incarnate in us.

This is why Jesus says that we must lose our life (ego) in order to find it (spirit). It is the essence of Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus, described in Galatians 2:

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Unfortunately, power brokers in the early church drained these teachings of their spiritual content and twisted them into a legalistic framework of sin and forgiveness. Jesus’ death ceased to be a metaphor and model of the ego death we must all undergo and became instead the God-required atoning death for human sin, whose benefits only the church could provide.

In the gospels, Jesus is the human face of God. Early on, official church teaching added and he is the only human face of God. But there are plenty of stories that contradict this. For example, Jesus says both that he is the light of the world and that we are the light of the world. Why do we hear so much about the first but little about the latter?

In the closing parable of Matthew, people are judged for how they treated “the Son of man” when they encountered him in the poor, sick, hungry, naked, and imprisoned. Jesus also says the kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed because it’s already here, within us and all around us. And Paul challenges his readers, “Do you not know your body is a temple of the holy Spirit?”

In its ancient and indigenous forms, worship renewed and celebrated people’s experience of the sacred in their lives and in the world. The church needs to rediscover that tradition. To do so, it will need to get rid of its carrots and sticks once and for all. It will need to drop the notion that people are coming to find God and realize instead that God arrives with every person who walks in the door.

In poetry and prose, spoken and sung, worship must find new words (and rediscover old ones) that open people’s eyes and hearts to the eternal spirit that surrounds and fills them. But just as importantly, worship must enable the most profound experience of sacred being, which is silence. For only in silence do we realize that we are not the ego’s endless chatter and thoughts. Only in silence do we recognize our true nature as boundless awareness and eternal peace. In silence, we know ourselves as God’s own spirit. Even the ancient Israelites are directed in the Psalms, “Be still and know that I am God.”

 

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