quote.: worship

The forces of the culture industries act as technologies of desire, forming and shaping us into desires that then must be satiated by the market. Global economic forces order the cities into the production of desire and ways to satiate it. Even experimental psychology reveals the complexity of human emotions that form in relation to appraisals of reality. Different emotions are formed deep within alternative interpretations of reality. Postmodern writers question whether psychological notions of well-being are not really the disguised constructions of the marketplace or society for effective adaptation to consumer life. According to all of these thinkers, the ways in which the self and its emotions are constructed socially are out of power interests residing in a given culture. In short, any illusion that we can trust our experience as innately given has been undermined by postmodernity. Our experiences and emotions are being formed by the cultures and histories we find ourselves in.

This demise of modernity sounds the alarm for contemporary worship leaders because they can no longer count on self-expression alone to produce a truthful experience of God in worship. We can no longer safely assume that truthful emotions and experiences will automatically be awakened when we sing “praise and worship” songs long enough for an emotional catharsis in Christian worship. Many worshipers after all come into worship having been shaped by a post-Christian culture. Perhaps in the past, congregants came to worship with a repertoire of emotions and experiences already formed in the church or Christian cultural influences. In the past, worship leaders could awaken or even revive emotions that were already formed in the congregation. But today, many worshipers enter the sanctuary with emotions and experiences formed in another world. In the post-Christian cultures, we can no longer assume that our people’s emotions and experiences have been formed out of a righteous past or culture that recognizes Jesus is Lord.

The Great Giveaway | David Fitch

I really do like this quote. It’s a good reminder that not everyone having a strong emotional response to worship is being formed by it into a follower of Jesus. When we come into worship with preconceptions that aren’t changed, indulging them in a worship experience doesn’t make them better. Worship was always supposed to be transformational and immersive more than merely experiential. When the Hebrew people came to worship God, it always cost them something, and they never left the same as they had come.

My frustration with this quote (and with the whole chapter on worship it’s part of) is that it doesn’t even try to address Imago Dei: what it means that we are all, to some extent, bearers of the image of God. Yes, we come into worship pre-formed by many things other than Jesus, but if it’s in Him that we live and move and have our being (as Paul said), then isn’t there something in all of us to awaken?

Tags: church, culture, western world, worship