Sally Morgenthaler, whose book Worship Evangelism surfaced above the waves of resources for churches adjusting to changing worship styles, is still trying to help churches stay relevant in worship style to the changing culture of their members. Speaking at forty-plus seminars a year, she is guiding churches to incorporate more of the senses to envelop worshipers in a total experience that gets their minds out of the pews or off what they must do on Monday. She spoke recently to worship leaders at the Hollifield Leadership Center in Conover, North Carolina.
Q. How is worship changing? How must worship change?
A. Our experience of God always is a form. If we didn’t live on this planet we would worship God without some kind of package, but experience is always mediated. The reality is we get God in a form. God recognized this by sending Jesus in a form, in a particular culture, gender, and time in history, God in flesh and blood. We experience the infinite in a form and those forms change. They change with language, they change with our experience, and they change as the world changes. The way we worship needs to be changed.
Let’s say we have the same worship responses as we did in 1920 or 1880 when we were a rural culture. We are singing hymns about plowing and harvesting. Our experience has changed. To have immediacy in worship—if we are going to be able to access God— those songs have to go through a transformation. Plowing may not be the metaphor that works for us now. Maybe it is going to be something about the city, maybe a metaphor about rush-hour traffic.
Q. People assume they have a relationship with God. How has that mentality developed?
A. We used to think we got God sort of as a product of church attendance. To be in relationship with God or to sense or experience God we had to go to church. Over the past twenty to twenty-five years, people have investigated a plethora of other portals into the spiritual. It could be nature worship, Buddhism, New Age. More people are visiting Belief.net than are going to church on Sunday morning. So we have a whole lot more suppliers of “spiritual product.” And we have gotten out of the sense that we go to meet God in a building. We go to yoga class, we buy crystals.
Spirituality has been commercialized. Look at the spiritual book section of Barnes & Noble. It is completely different now than twenty years ago when you had a Judeo-Christian book section and a few Muslim offerings. Now there are endless permutations. People don’t have to come to church to access God any more. The perception is that God is who you make God to be. We are living off fragments of big systems, putting it together for ourselves.
As we saw after 9/11, with all the little shrines that people built, people want to make God tangible. Culture has moved so much into the visual, art, painting, sculpture, story—anything that preserves mystery. People don’t want information in their religious experience by itself. They want information only in context with what they can feel. They don’t want to get info on God in a lecture.
Q. Who are the “basement dwellers”?
A. Basement dwellers are the kids working with technology. I think my son is pretty typical. At age twelve he was working on graphics programs and building digital art and landscape pieces that he imported into other programs. They’re working with stuff you used to [have] to go to the San Francisco School of Art or Syracuse to learn.
Q. And you’re saying, utilize these people in worship planning?
A. Yes, the marvelous thing is this is a win-win situation. Suzuki violin and piano teaching method talks about the natural language, the heart language. That’s computer language for young people. Instead of saying, as I have so often to my son, “Get off that thing and go to bed,” we should be saying, “Find a way to use this natural language of these basement dwellers in church worship.” My son has been unchurched. And he has told me, “I would go back to church if I could get involved in video ministry.” It’s another portal to get people involved.
Q. What is the advantage of using congregational members in art/worship leading and planning?
A. You are giving the worship back to the people. Most of the successful Fortune 500 companies went to a flattened hierarchy years ago, in the late 80s. The Church is just reading about it now. The hierarchy in terms of worship planning robs our congregations of their expressive voices, of their stories. They don’t know their own congregation’s stories. How much better it would be to be in collaborative process where at least one time a week you’re face to face with people who are connected to other people and have a whole matrix of connections. You can be on eBay and find out more about people who collect Hummel dolls than we know about each other in church.
Q. Why is it important to involve more senses in worship?
A. Because we aren’t just a couple of ears. And we don’t just have more left brains. We have these right brains that long for stimulation and expression. Look how the teaching profession has changed. Teachers are putting students in groups, using video, experiences outside the classroom. They utilize learning-style education. Worship is more important or as important as our education. Why should we let the schools have all the good stuff? Or why should the devil have all the good videos?
Q. Is symbolism getting bigger today in churches?
A. Not a whole lot, but in younger congregations, yes. In emerging churches started by young pastors—and Baptists have the most of these grassroots churches oriented to twenty-somethings—they are very big on Celtic symbols, photography, all the stuff I was showing in my seminar. But in the big evangelical churches, community churches, no. I ask these pastors what they see when they turn on their computers. Icons, everything is done by icons. You don’t click on a word, you click on an icon. Thank you, Apple computer company. Apple knows we live in an iconic society. The visual can take the infinite into the finite.
Q. You say lament should be a part of worship. How can you visualize lament to your community?
A. Lament in worship is absolutely important. We have done “happy” until it is nauseating. People have a different perspective of their world than they did in the 80s. It’s not all happy and fun. Bad stuff happens and is going to happen. Do we still believe in God when bad stuff happens?
One of the things I love about the book Psalms of Lament is [that] Roger Brogen points out there are two parts of lament. It’s not just angst, it’s not just complaint, it’s “out of the depths I cry to you, why have you left me here?” That is Part A. Part B is “Yet I will follow.” It is that lifting up—even of that deepest form of grief and angst—lifting up the sovereignty of God, not getting an answer, not getting a “how to” sermon, not getting a way out. I will believe You are with me in this valley. I walk through the valley of the shadow of death alone no more. We have a hard time as evangelicals living in that tension, the artistic tension that is in a good drama. How can you celebrate and lament in the same service? Lament definitely needs to be a part of it. If we knew how to lament, we would have handled 9/11 better and we would be hanging onto a whole lot of the people who came to our service, saw and left.
Q. What is the greatest impediment to moving from currently dominant forms of worship?
A. That depends. A congregation with average age fifty to sixty or even older forties tends to think images or anything sensory is carnal … We must get past our print orientation. On the other hand, change is time intensive. We have gotten in a rut. We can just plug in songs and hymns, and the pastor can stay isolated. You can have [a situation where] the worship leader and the pastor never really get to know each other.
They email each other stuff, then come together on Sunday; it is just easy.
Q. Considering all that a church does, how important is worship?
A. I used to say that corporate worship is central. It is like the engine. Now? I still think that way, but when I wrote Worship Evangelism ten years ago you were still able to get your neighbor across the threshold into the church. Now you are lucky if [when] you send out a thousand mailers you get fifty people.
Luther said every worship is the school of the church. I think a lot of people will get schooled on Sunday morning because they don’t have time for small groups, Bible study. My concern is how little theology we put inside of worship and how little substance. There are so many expectations on worship—worship as Bible study, worship as fellowship, as evangelism. Yes, it is important but we have put too many eggs in that basket. Worship can only function well when it emerges out of a rich, seven-day-a-week church life—not church inside the box—but a church dispersed, sent out and serving, a church whose goal is not church growth but transforming the community. Think of worship in a congregation that is partnered with the community—that is exciting.
Sally Morgenthaler is the president and found of www.Sacramentis.com: Reimagining Worship for a New Millennium. The Sacramentis vision is to move worship beyond presentation (information, performed, music, and preaching) to an interactive sacred experience involving all the arts.
Norman Jameson is a public-relations and fund-raising consultant in High Point, North Carolina.
Copyright © 2004 Net Results. Used by permission. www.NetResults.org
