Objecting to New Trends in Worship

There are several reasons for opposing it. One, it's too new. Two, it's often worldly. ... The new Christian music is not as pleasant as the more established style. Because there are so many new songs you can't learn them all. It puts too much emphasis on instrumental music rather than godly lyrics. This new music creates disturbances making people act indecently and disorderly. The preceding generation got along without it. It's a money-making scheme, and some of these new music upstarts are lewd and loose.

~ an American pastor (quoted by Matt Redman in

Worship Leader magazine, May 2006, p. 20)

date of the quote ... 1723

Worship - Boredom (Winn Collier)

God is the one who always has initiated the relationship between God and His people. If worship is primarily something we make happen, then worship is centered on us. If worship is centered on us, it is small -- God is small.

And this small god is one we use for our own devices. Worship becomes centrally what we "feel," what we "want," they style we like. We race after worship experiences like addicts race after the back alley crack dealer. Rather than being captured by the Eternal One, we simply use His name for an emotional high. We view God as the one enabling us to "enjoy worship," another perk from the endless giver of all good things. We miss the audience of our worship. We forget we stand on holy ground in His presence. We forget we were created for His glory, not Him for ours. The god we worship is one of our own making, and nothing could be more boring than that.

~ Winn Collier in Relevant magazine

Worship and Service (Kathleen Norris)

Church is other people, a worshiping community. The worship, or praise of God does not take place only when people gather on Sunday morning, but when they gather to paint the house of an elderly shut-in, when they visit someone in the hospital or console the bereaved, when the Sunday School kids sing Christmas carols at the nursing home. If a church has life, its 'programs' are not just activity, but worship. And this is helpful, because if the Sunday-morning service falls flat, it is the other forms of worship that sustain this life. When formal worship seems less than worshipful -- and it often does -- if I am bored by the sheer weight of verbiage in worship -- and I often am -- I have only to look around at the other people in the pews to remind myself that we are engaged in something important, something that transcends our feeble attempts at worship, let alone my crankiness.

~Kathleen Norris (Amazing Grace), quoted by Philip Wise

in the Newsletter of FBC, Dothan AL 5/24/2000

Worship practice

Like a good game – or a good novel – worship enfolds us for a time into a way of seeing the world. It is the one hour in the week when an entire community acknowledges a world where God rules, where evil is named, where hope abounds, where the Spirit is on the move. Like a game, worship can only be learned by doing. A long afternoon of reading the baseball rule book will not help you execute a well-placed bunt.

~John D. Witvliet (Books and Culture)

Worship Experience

It is far too easy, within the current upsurge of creative input in the realm of worship, to find ourselves chasing spiritual or aesthetic experience, as if the highest achievements of our whole pilgrimage on earth was to enter some kind of praise-induced ecstasy. I wonder sometimes whether it is worship we worship, whether what we experience in music and song is actually our primary motivation, rather than honouring God.

Fundamentally, authentic worship is about pursuing that which pleases God, not us. It is about lives lived in service to God and neighbour, lives which are "living sacrifices", which are engaged in God's work in the world.

~Steve Bradbury, Target Magazine

(I think this is a British publication, given the spellings.)

Praise comparison (Leighton)

What are our lame praises in comparison with His love? Nothing, and less that nothing; but love will stammer rather than be dumb.

~Robert Leighton

Worship focus

Worship ... is not a means to and end; it is an end in itself. God is the object -- the only possible object -- of our worship as believers. Lesser objectives, worthy though they may be in themselves, become idolatrous if they are the focus of our worship.

~ Paul A. Richardson, "The Primacy of Worship"

REVIEW AND EXPOSITOR, 85 (1988)

Uniqueness of the Worship Environment

When we gather for worship, something utterly unique occurs ... It's not just about you and your conditions for fulfillment. It's about coming together with people who may not be of like mind with you, who are not just like you and with whom you may feel deeply uncomfortable. Where else in life is such a requirement made of us?

~Rev. Maggi Dawn, Chaplain • Kings College, Cambridge

in WORSHIP LEADER Magazine, Sept/Oct 2003, p. 21

Self-Centered Worship

To pretend homage to God and intend only the advantage to myself is rather to mock God than worship Him. When we believe we ought to be satisfied rather than God glorified, we set God below ourselves and imagine that He should submit His honor to our advantage.

~Stephen Charnock (1628-1680)