Who Unifies Our Worship?
Gather25 and the Gravity of Power
A recent article in Christianity Today by Kelsey McGinnis1 explores the struggle involved in attempting to produce a truly unified multicultural worship experience. Gather25, spearheaded by Jennie Allen, attempted to produce just such a worship service, with sites located around the world, streaming various segments of the 25-hour worship event.
In preparation for the gathering, Matt Redman and Jason Ingram even produced an album with songwriters from 10 different countries featuring, “Western pop-inflected praise and worship.”
Though the event itself reflected a more diverse set of musical styles, there was still a noticeable Western framework to the whole event.
The Western Church, first in Europe and then through North America, Australia, and New Zealand, has been the leading cultural force around the globe for 400 - 500 hundred years. Though there are significant global shifts happening, we still live and breathe this influence today.
What this cultural influence does is create the presumption that Western European, specifically the English language, and even more specifically American culture, is preeminent, centered, and normative.
When we assume our Western experience is normative, we Western Christians begin to look at other cultures as “ethnic” or “diverse,” and imagine a cultural space built upon Western presumptions with “diversity” sprinkled over the top. Essentially, an appropriation of other cultural elements used within a Western framework.
I really appreciated McGinnis’ thoughtful reporting as she brought some helpful voices into the conversation. As I read the article, these voices helped formulate, for me, a crucial question: who gets to unify the church in worship?
Speaking to Brian Hehn in the article McGinnis notes that, “the musical hierarchy of the church still powerfully shapes worship practices of Christians around the world and challenges the ongoing pursuit of a global practice or “global song.””
While, from the sounds of it, and poking around the Gather25 website a bit, it seems there was a genuine attempt not to engage in this kind of appropriation. However, this event, like others that are primarily generated and initiated by Westerners, there is always the risk of falling into the “hierarchy” that Hehn described.
Again, the question for me is, who gets to unify the church in worship?
I have two observations related to this question I’d like to unpack.
The Gravity of Power
There is a gravitational pull towards powerful things.
Black holes with stars, the Sun with planets, the Earth with the moon. Whenever a less powerful object comes close enough, these larger masses naturally pull all things toward themselves. They can’t help it, it is structured into the reality of their existence.
So too with cultures. When a culture has more power, it naturally pulls other less dominant cultures into its orbit, centering the dominant culture. Dominant cultures are those that normalize their own existence, whether intentionally or not. It is just structured into the way the people of that culture think and act in the world.
To go further, a dominant culture has a way of consuming every other culture around it, like a black hole. Often not even trying to, it just does it. When a hierarchy of cultural power exists, it overwhelms everything unless those from the dominant culture make extreme changes in their actions to make space for less dominant cultures.
I’ve described power in terms of a gravitational pull, but what are some of the factors involved in say, a dominant Western culture creating a worldwide worship event that incorporates (perhaps appropriates?) other cultural elements into what they are creating?
Jennie Allen, the founder of Gather25 describes the initial idea for the event with a question, “What if Jesus were to come back in 10 years?” A legitimate question, not far off from the parable of the 10 virgins that Jesus tells: we need to watch and pray!
More good questions are asked:
“If that were true what would we do to reach those around the world who don’t know Jesus?”
“Can 2.5 billion Christians be mobilized?”
The conclusion to these questions, however, is where the Western gravitational pull of power and presumption begins to appear in the logic:
To summarize her conclusion, what we need is a global worship service where we can all be connected by unprecedented technology.
This global worship service would have multiple locations around the world each taking turns hosting and it would all be streamed around the world so Christians everywhere could tune in.
In framing the solution to these questions around a global worship service Allen and her team make two assumptions.
What is needed for unification and mobilization is a massive Western-style modern worship service. (see the picture below, all the locations, even in India looked like they could have been another mega-church in the United States.)
That all Christians around the world can be mobilized through this one unifying source: the internet.
I’ll deal with the second assumption first and revisit the first assumption below.
This decision to utilize live streaming to unite Christians around the world is a profoundly Western assumption driven by our relative affluence to the rest of the world. As recently as 2020, Gordon-Conwell Seminary posted a great graphic and article which, among other things, showed that if the world was a population of 100 Christians, 47 of them would not have internet access. This means that roughly 1.1 Billion Christians had no way to participate in this event!
To be fair, that number, I believe, refers to home internet access, so it is not out of the realm of possibility that those “47” Christians could be gathered together to watch the event in a public place, as was the case in the Philippines where 5,000 came together to participate.
Even if this was the case, however, we still need to put these numbers into context. K-Love, the Christian Media Radio company, reported that 7 Million Christians worldwide participated in Gather25. That means that only 0.28% of the global Christian population was reached.
I want to be clear on something, I’ve never gathered 7 million people for a global event. That number alone is really impressive. It is a testament to a lot of hard work, planning, and logistical gymnastics. And, just because you can’t reach everyone doesn’t mean you shouldn’t start somewhere. However, I point these numbers out to note how small a drop in the bucket it actually is compared to global Christianity.
Evangelical Christianity, to which I owe much of my theological heritage, is a truly global movement, but it is not THE movement. It is, in many ways a small subset of global Christianity. Yet, because it has such a large adherence in the United States, where the gravitational pull of money and power is most prevalent, it is constantly drawing all things to itself, taking hold of our imagination, and leading us to assume everyone is just like us.
While I believe done completely unintentionally in this particular instance, the Western tendency to assume we can (or should) unite everyone around the world is extremely arrogant and naive.
This is bigger than any of us.
Because of the vast financial resources relative to the rest of the global church, it makes sense why the Western church has often taken the lead in resourcing various global events. However, we need to be more aware of the kinds of decisions we make from a place of power and affluence.
In this case, a decision was made about uniting the global Christian community in a way that made it impossible for almost half of global Christians to easily participate!
Revelation 7:9: The Anti-Imperial Worship Service
I turn now to the first assumption I mentioned above, which asks more directly, by whom should the church should be unified and mobilized?
At another time in history, global Christianity comprised, more or less, people within the Roman Empire.2 There were diverse perspectives within the various factions of the church on how to describe their central beliefs.3
Imagine the cultures and languages brought together in those early church councils! While they would have had common languages of Greek or Latin, these were often secondary to their heart languages. As more and more Gentiles came into the church, the diverse perspectives provided uncomfortable and challenging meetings.
When Christianity was given legal standing, Emperor Constantine imagined himself as the one to bring peace and cohesiveness to the various factions of the church, stepping in from time to time when things got messy. Even, according to some, imposing his will for the sake of unity.
In this instance, unification was on Constantinian terms: the most powerful person in the room would mediate the disputes between all parties, like it or not. (Do you see the gravitational pull thing happening?)
While perhaps a genuine attempt to unite the church, the church leaders may have been unaware of what else was coming into the room with Constantine: The gravitational pull of Imperial power.4
The idea of “Empire” as the place that could unite all peoples is a theme throughout the scriptures going as far back as the Tower of Babel. Empire attempts to flatten differences and force unity under one linguistic and cultural banner. Empire envisions itself as immortal and the highest achievement of human civilization. The symbol of Rome was known as “Roma Eterna” (Eternal Rome) because it was believed to be their divine right to unite all peoples under their name.
This same logic was present in Constantine’s attempt to unite the church, yet Constantine chose to do it with a new symbol: the Cross. (You can read more about that in a previous article I wrote.)
This was a cross of Constantine’s own making, however. It was not the shameful and weak cross of Christ that confounded the Gentiles and caused the Jews to stumble. This was a new, powerful cross that was the sign by which he would conquer. Thus began a Western tendency to conflate Imperial power with Christianity.
This trend has continued throughout Europe and into the United States to this very day, with language like, “One Nation Under God, indivisible,” in which one can see the continuation of this ethos of uniting all comers under one banner. Therefore, the same imperial tendency running throughout scripture is still a temptation today for Christians in the most powerful and influential global cultures.
Empire, however, is a counterfeit version of the unity brought through Christ by the Spirit and the Kingdom of God. We see this brought into full view in John’s vision in Revelation 7:9-10
“After these things I looked, and behold, a great crowd that no one was able to number, from every nation and tribe and people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, dressed in white robes and with palm branches in their hands. 10 And they were crying out with a loud voice, saying, “Salvation to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”’
Imagine, this gathering of languages, cultures, and ethnicities worshiping the Lamb in all their cultural particularities. Here we see a picture of the only one who can truly unite humanity across its diversity yet without flattening it into conformity. The only one worthy of uniting our worship, in all of its enculturated formulations.
There was certainly genuine effort put into Gather25 to collaborate across cultures, languages, and multiple locations around the globe. Whereas the worship album created for the event was all Western pop without, “a lot of diversity in the musical expression,” according to an ethnodoxologist that McGinnis interviewed, the event itself did feature music in various languages and styles.
Yet she also notes that “Christians from the US and the West also heard musicians around the world sing familiar songs or English lyrics.” Again, notice the gravitational pull of Western cultural power at work. The money and influence are in the US and the West. It not only influences these other nations to sing and worship within a Western frame, but it also points to the reality of who this event was for: Western English speakers. While the event was translated into 87 languages, those in the United States would not hear most of that, and many of the songs were originally written in English to begin with, adding to the familiarity and focus on the Western church tradition.
Quoting Hehn again, McGinnis writes, “People with resources and power have to stop and think, Are we setting up people across the world to worship in their own voices, through their own local expressions?” I would go further to ask, are we seeing and appreciating their own voices and expressions as equal to our own?
In my own perusing of the Gather25 website, I saw some signs of what one might call “enculturated” worship, yet many of the images displayed on the website could have been taken from any American megachurch.
It was not obvious to me that this was a global event other than a different language on the screen, and the majority of people in the pictures being non-white/European, depending on the live stream location.
For some of you who read me regularly, it may be hard to understand what I’m describing, but there are ways of making music and gathering that are deeply embedded in various cultures around the world that are completely foreign to our culture. (I’m not a musicologist so it would be best for others to explain that in detail!)
Yet when a Western, English, American-style gathering is prioritized (complete with livestreaming) it reinforces that our culture is the ordering and unifying value for global worship.
In other words, we are communicating that we Westerners are the ones who get to unify our worship.
We must realize how money and power shape us toward this Constantinian tendency to unify the church on our own terms, not the terms of the Lamb.
Not Perfect, but Honest
You might be reading this thinking (or shouting) “Andrew, chill! Give them a break, they are just doing the best they can with what they have to reach people.”
I want to again say clearly, that I am not looking for perfection. I don’t expect Allen, her team, and partners to perfectly involve, and collaborate with, the global church. As I already explained, that is bigger than any of us, it can’t be done. (That doesn’t mean we can’t do it more faithfully, but that is a topic for another time).
But what I do want from events like this is more honesty. Honesty about what is being done. Not pretending any one organization or movement can unify the global church in worship - that’s not our job.
I’m looking for more openness from evangelical organizations, that clearly have the resources to put on a significant global event, to put that money at the feet of the poorest and most powerless Christians around the world and ask, “What do you think God is doing?”
I’m looking for a cruciform posture from those of us with the most, to do what Paul commended: that we be like Jesus who, “being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be grasped” (Phil. 2:6).
I’m asking that we stop with the pretense and name the immense cultural power we carry that operates like a black hole as soon as we get near any other culture’s embodiment of the church.
I’m asking that we cease from the pretense that we can unify the church in worship.
That role is for One and One only.
Please check out Kelsey’s excellent work. I’ve found it so helpful and illuminating.
Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, is a great overview of the history of the church outside the West which in the first few centuries was certainly growing and active but was not where most of the Christian population lived.
By this, I do not mean that there were different versions of Christianity that were later suppressed as some would argue. The teachings of Jesus have still been handed down faithfully, but there were certainly differing perspectives on how to articulate and embody those beliefs.
There are also well-documented dissenters to aligning the church under Imperial rule as well. A conversation for another time.
Thanks Andrew. Ill be thinking about this!