More thoughts on church and worship

Between blogs, books, and sermons at church, I’ve found myself thinking a lot about different ways of doing/being church. Some perhaps rambling thoughts on the subject:

There are three common faith-oriented responses to the perceived (and sometimes very real) shallowness of evangelical churches. There are also of course responses that are not what I would call “faith-oriented”: staying in the church and accepting shallowness as good enough, becoming cynical and giving up on any form of church, or complaining about it but doing little or nothing about it.

The first response is to try to make incremental changes from within the church. This is the approach taken by most Christians I have known personally. They pray for revival, work to establish small group Bible studies to get people to go deeper in the Word and in obedience, try to influence worship planning to include more meaningful songs or more Scripture or time for personal prayer and reflection. This is the approach I have taken myself, whether out of conviction it is the best approach or for lack of seeing a viable alternative.

The other approaches are somewhat opposite (of each other), though both attempt to look to the early period of church history for guidance in how to do church. One is the home church movement, which sees buildings and professional church leaders as unnecessary at best and often a serious deterrent to God doing what He wants to among His people. They see how vibrant the early believers were, as we see them through the pages of the New Testament, and see that in part as a result of everyone being vitally involved in worship rather than passive spectators listening to a paid professional.

There is much to admire in this approach, and if I knew of a home church (or “organic church” as I understand some of them prefer to call it) in our area I would want to visit and see how they do it and how well it is working out. One of the problems in churches of nearly every tradition is the number of people who are just “pew-warmers,” who come on Sunday morning and listen and leave and have little other involvement in the life of the church (they may come out as spectators for other services and events such as pot luck meals).

Many “institutional” churches do talk about people using their spiritual gifts, but very few do a good job of helping people not only recognize their spiritual gifts but also use them. In an organic church, since there are no paid professionals, there is much more direct participation and interaction rather than spectatorship.

I don’t know what the worship style is like in such churches, never having been to one. What songs do they sing? Do they use any of the liturgical elements familiar to me, such as the invocation, the call to worship, or the prayer of confession? (Those elements are not typically used in most evangelical churches I have attended, but they were part of the worship I grew up with in a Congregationalist church, and they are part of the Presbyterian order of worship I came to know with my husband.) My guess is that they are seen as part of the unneeded trappings of tradition - but I have found that the traditional form is a valuable aid in worship.

That is why I also feel drawn somewhat to the other, outwardly opposite approach, which is represented by the worship of the Eastern Orthodox church. Their form of worship has been more or less unchanged (obviously there are changes in the language because they have spread to different countries and even within a country language changes over the centuries) for many centuries. According to the book I am currently reading (At the Corner of East and Now – when I finish it I’ll write a post on it), their form of worship goes back to the very earliest centuries after Jesus’ death and resurrection, and is the closest we can come to knowing how the first Christians worshipped.

There are quite a number former evangelicals who have become Orthodox. I don’t know any of them personally either, so I don’t know how much that says about the power and truth of Orthodoxy and how much about the shallowness of much evangelical worship and the common human desire for traditions that link us to people of other times and places. An internet church directory shows me that there is a church named Holy Trinity Eastern Orthodox Mission not too far out of town; perhaps sometime I’ll have to visit there.

In my search for more information on Eastern Orthodoxy in this area, I came across a website that I recognized from previous visits. I had put it in a Favorites folder somewhere, but such links are easy to lose track of, either by having too many of them or by changing computers and deciding not to copy over the bloated Favorites list from the old machine. So I hadn’t been back in a long time, and decided – now that I have a blog – adding it to my blogroll will make it easy to find again.

The entry that caught my attention (actually my search engine’s attention) was this one. It references previous posts regarding what Orthodoxy has to offer Evangelicalism – I plan to go back and read those posts. This one deals with common shortcomings in Orthodox churches – not of Orthodoxy itself but as it is sometimes practiced. (Whether these indicate a shortcoming in the tradition itself is naturally going to be an area of disagreement between Orthodox and Evangelical Christians.)

While at that blog, I found another fascinating post, on the emerging church – one which does a far better job of describing the range of thought within that (non)movement than my recent attempts. The author shows now only the diversity within the – well, the people who label themselves (or are labeled by others) as “emerging” – but shows why it is a mistake to lump them together, as critics often do.

Final thoughts (for now):
I have to resist the temptation to spend my time reading about spiritual growth as an easier substitute to doing what is needed to actually grow (which is not only harder to do but harder to know what to do). Reading comes easily to me. I enjoy intellectual pursuits, particularly in the area of theology. It requires relatively little self-discipline on my part, and no humility (rather, it may promote pride, from knowing more or better than someone else). But it feels like I am doing something spiritual, and can easily become a superficially welcome distraction. (Blogging on this subject carries a similar danger.)

My guess is that the biggest things God needs to do in my life (and I’m not entirely sure what those are, though more consistent prayer and Bible reading no doubt have a place, as without those how will I even know what the others might be?), He can do whether I am in my current evangelical church, an organic church, or an Orthodox church. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter what kind of church I go to, but trying to find the “right” church could easily become another distraction from the hard work of obedience to what God is trying to teach me.