Wrestling With Beauty
Wrestling With Beauty
I can't tell you how many times I've had conversations with young worship leaders feeling the pressure to 'perform' worship instead of leading it.
The conversation happened again. Another young worship leader texted or called asking, “How do I heighten the worship experience for my church? What am I missing? They just won’t engage.” Sometimes the pressure is internal, sometimes it comes from their pastor, and other times they cannot understand where it came from. Yet, pressure they feel. Pressure to “hype up” the congregation so they get “engaged and excited.” Pressure to find the next song that will stir revival and breakthrough. Pressure to eliminate musical or production mistakes.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a version of that conversation with young worship leaders (and older ones) feeling the pressure to ‘perform’ worship instead of lead it.
Where is this pressure coming from?
Certainly, the Psalmist calls the musician to, “Sing a new song of praise to him; play skillfully on the harp, and sing with joy” (Psalm 33:3), thus we hope to offer our best as we lead worship. However, what I am currently observing from my conversations, worship leader networks, and training and equipping settings in my denomination is, that worship leaders in evangelical churches experience an unrelenting pressure to keep people excited and engaged through experiences of the “new.” The order of the day has become:
Hype rather than Holy Spirit.
Excitement over Encounter.
Fun instead of Formative.
Please hear me, I’m not suggesting that the worship liturgy (formal or informal) should not be celebratory. What I am suggesting is that we have developed an unrelenting need to keep people entertained.
The American theologian Stanley Hauerwas once noted in an interview,
“There is nothing more disastrous for the Christian church today than the ugliness of our liturgies. Elegance is important…we got out of the habit of [it] because churches thought they had to compete with TV. And TV will always win because it’s better at what it does than we are. We’re not TV, we are a liturgical body of people who have been trained to [have] our bodies habituated to bend in the face of the body and blood of Christ.”
In saying, “We’re not TV,” Hauerwas argues that we do not go to worship for entertaining content but for formative encounters with the Living God. We’ve become so accustomed to a “content culture” that we fail to recognize how much we assume excitement and entertainment belong in our daily routines. Thus, when it comes to leading worship, our deeply engrained inculturation into the entertainment world causes us to assume we must get everyone excited, otherwise, we have failed miserably.
But Hauerwas’ comments about worship in the local church go far deeper than simply stating we are steeped in entertainment culture and need to get out. Rather, he implies two facets of what worship truly is that can help us find our way out of the hype and into the Holy Spirit’s presence.
Perform vs. ‘perform’
First, he suggests that we are “habituated” in the worship gathering in a way that forms us into the likeness of Jesus as we reflect on His death and resurrection. Here it needs to be said that there is a difference between Performance and ‘performance.’ By the latter I mean the struggle of the worship leader to entertain the people of God as I have described above. It is the pressure received from our cultural assumptions to provide a ‘song and dance’ where people look at us and enjoy the experience. By the former, I mean that we all perform actions as part of our daily habits and routines. All of these habits shape who we believe we are and who we are becoming. These kinds of Performances are embodied practices, not for the sake of another’s entertainment but to help shape us into who we are becoming.
When we Perform worship in this way it is not an individual or a band on the stage that performs but the entire people of God. Since I’m a pastor and preacher constantly in search of alliterations, I suppose another “P” to describe this is, Participation. TV, phones, or whatever we consume for entertainment, do not offer us more than the illusion of participation. (There is far more doom scrolling than posting). But in worship, we Participate with the body of Christ in worshipping the One whose life and death shape in us a new reality. Thus worship that is “performed” is just consumed content that cannot change people’s lives, whereas Performing worship, in the sense of participation, forms us deeply into the story of Jesus and the gospel.
Elegance vs. entertainment
While on the one hand, Hauerwas is trying to keep us from becoming entertainment-consuming machines, he also suggests that “elegance is important.” Does he contradict himself? Of course not. Elegance (or beauty) is not the same as entertainment. Beauty, as I would call it, is part of God’s good creation. When God created the heavens and the earth, the trees, flowers, mountains, and sunrise, God declared they were good; that there was something beautiful and awe-inspiring about them. Yet not for a moment would creation be misconstrued as “entertaining.” This is what confuses those who are responsible for organizing worship services in many evangelical churches: worship leaders, instead of curating spaces of participatory beauty, have produced spaces of “performative” entertainment.
Recognizing this error, many churches will overreact and make a move similar to Reformers, like Zwingli, who called for the elimination of any aesthetic pleasure in the worship gathering. White-washed walls in a simple gathering space became the norm in many Protestant churches so congregants could focus on the preached word. This Modernist approach has often led evangelicals to equate information with formation, discounting the ways in which our bodies need beauty to engage worship in multifaceted ways.
To correct this error, we need artists, creatives, and worship leaders who are deeply entrenched in the story of Jesus and the gospel, to appropriately subvert the artistic media of our day to help the Church Perform worship in embodied and formative ways.
Wrestling with beauty
Caught in the middle of our culture’s content consumption and the overreaction of “information formation,” we need worship leaders, pastors, and others who will curate worship services that wrestle with beauty. We need women and men who are not impressed by creation itself but understand that all beauty is a gift from the Creator to help us participate more fully in the worship of the Triune God. Because the goal is not entertainment, but beauty, the scale does not need to be large to be successful. Beauty finds its way into simple liturgies and complex productions. Yet when curated in a participatory way, it allows the body to Perform the story of Christ Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and find their particular role in the story.
So to all of you worship leaders, artists, pastors, and organizers of worship gatherings, please, submit yourself to the hard work of wrestling with beauty. Do not become overwhelmed or intimidated by hype and its overindulgence in entertainment. Do not give up on the role of the senses in drawing the whole congregation into God’s presence and story. Resist the temptation to ‘perform’ as everyone watches you. Instead, rest in the truth that the Lord is faithful to meet with the Church, you simply need to make the space.