I have been working on an article for House2House magazine on "transtions." This is a little lengthy, but I would enjoy receiving input from my blog readers on the content, flow, and overall read-ability of the article. Thanks!
Transitioning From Traditional Worship To House Church Worship
I Thought House Church Worship Would Be “Lame”After years of leading a traditional church I knew God was directing me toward something totally new: a house church network.
No problem. I loved small groups, participatory studies, relationship building. I loved everything about the house church concept except one thing: I knew that worship would be “lame” by comparison.
After all, I love to worship. I love music. I love big music and big worship. I believe worship is the key to our hearts opening to the Presence of God, hearing the voice of the Spirit, and transforming our will to surrender. I enjoy the best music, the most gifted worship leaders, and the biggest conferences.
No matter how I tried to envision worship in house church, all I could see was a small, handful of folks singing “Jesus” songs. No worship band. No inspiring worship leader. Good, maybe at best, but certainly not great!
As I was inviting people to join me in this house church “experiment” I found it difficult to bring up the subject of worship. I would brush over it quickly, “Worship will be… uh, simple, yes, but…” In a rush of words I would say, “We will build strong, supportive relationships, and we will participate together, and we will develop an awesome community, and…” I tried hard to get the focus off of worship because I was certain that their image of house church worship was as “lame” as my own.
But, today, all of that has changed. As we start new house churches I find that talking about worship has become one of my greatest passions. I love this part of house church as much, or more, than any other!
Today, I actually believe that the house church setting is the key to an explosion of worship for this generation of believers.
Much to my surprise, house church is opening up, for me and others, a deep heart-felt expression of worship and a type of participatory worship that cannot be developed in a traditional setting. What a transition this has been! Let me explain.
Good Music Does Not Produce True WorshipI love music and I love worship that is driven by music. But I began to discover that we, as Christians, have often become dependent on music to move our heart. As we gathered in our smaller settings to worship, I saw Christians who couldn’t fully turn their hearts on in worship unless there was “great” music present. This just didn’t seem right. Why did we need great music in order to experience great worship?
I began to see that we have been training ourselves to allow music to drive our worship rather than our hearts. Our worship organ, the heart, has suffered from this dependency and lost, in some ways, its ability to nakedly cry out to God.
I realized that music does move the heart! As Christians, we have become immersed in high-talent, high quality music. The kind of music that is so good that it can move our heart for us. That’s why we enjoy it and that can be the problem. We can simply allow our hearts to be moved by the enjoyment of excellent worship music and we imagine that we are deeply stirred toward God. Yes, we are moved. Yes, we feel inspired. But I would encourage us to really pay attention to what is happening. We can have “good feeling” emotions without our spirit, our deepest inner person, really entering into a deep longing toward God. I’m talking about the kind of longing that David had when he said, “My soul thirsts for you… in this parched and weary land.” That’s real worship: the spirit and heart crying out to God with intensity, seeking Him with a thirst that is not easily quenched. When that kind of worship begins to grip us, it doesn’t fade when the music dies down. The heart is driving the worship, not the music.
The truth is, in many large, music-driven worship settings, you will notice that even our most fervent worship fades along with the music. Could it be that we have replaced a heart-driven thirst for God with good, worshipful feelings inspired by good music? In a sense, without fully realizing it, our worship is sometimes… shallow… masked by the emotions that good music creates.
Participatory “Naked-Heart” Worship
We began to use our house gatherings as a greenhouse to re-learn worship that is driven by our heart longings. No, we did not eliminate music. That would be both foolish and unbiblical. Music is a powerful tool for worship.
But… we did begin experimenting with times during worship in which music became background or not-at-all. We challenged ourselves to simply express worship, from the heart, with everyone involved, by taking turns offering naked cries to our God. We coined the phrase “naked-heart worship” to express what we were after: honest and authentic worship that comes from naked hearts without externals.
We wanted to train our hearts to simply encounter the Spirit of God and reach for God. We wanted to express worship in the most raw and basic ways: speak it, read it, declare it, sing it out (without any accompaniment), say it in verse, whatever God inspired us to do. We wanted to take time, without any pre-formatted aids, to just experience Jesus-in-our-midst and express our love to Him, or our need of Him, or whatever else was truly on our heart. We wanted to take time to exercise our heart “muscle” through simple, raw, honest, authentic worship.
When we take time for this “naked-heart” worship, it’s highly participatory. We believe that each person brings a unique longing and an expression of that longing. We want to hear from as many as possible. We remind ourselves that true worship springs from each of our hearts turning toward God and interacting with His wonder.
One person may express a simple gratitude, using simple words, for something God has done. The intensity of their emotion draws the rest of us deeper into worship. Someone else may speak out an awesome description of God’s majesty and glory. We are equally moved by this heart expression. Someone else confesses a longing to draw closer to God and repents for being distant. We all identify and find ourselves asking God to draw us closer. Someone else, with untrained voice, sings out a simple worship song that many of us don’t recognize. No matter. Their love for God is stirring us even deeper.
When these expressions die down, we may then go to some music or other more familiar types of worship… But we are discovering that these times of “naked-heart” worship are re-training us to look to our own hearts, and nothing else, for the essence of our worship experiences.
Furthermore, and this is probably more important… We are discovering that worship really is something that we can take with us into our world 24/7. After all, we cannot take music with us 24/7. But we do have with us, every minute of every day, our hearts and the Spirit of God’s inspiration upon our hearts. Thus, as our hearts become trained to carry worship “nakedly”, we realize that we have the capacity for the deepest, richest, most intimate, and most powerful worship any place, any time, anywhere!
We are finding that our hearts are growing in their ability to be the Temple of the Living God everywhere that we go… that our spirits are developing a greater ability to walk intimately with God more and more of each day… that when we gather, many hearts trained in passionate, raw worship, with Jesus in our midst, what an explosion can take place.
We are still in the early stages of this experiment. We still consider music to be a key element of our worship expressions. But, we are finding that our hearts are growing in enthusiasm and love for God. Our heart-worship organs are becoming stronger because we take time together to “exercise” them. And I am finding, as a result, that I am thoroughly enjoying all facets of simple/house church worship... much more than I expected.
