Muzzling God's people

I asked the question yesterday: is your default posture in worship passive or active? Here is what led to that question.

I've never met him but Bob Kauflin seems like a great guy, although he makes me a little jumpy with his outbursts during songs. As one of the leading figures among conservative Christians in the arena of "worship", Bob gets lots of questions from other worship leaders on how he leads the congregation. A recent post, How Does a Worship Leader Cue the Congregation? , raised some serious questions for me. In his response Bob gives a brief list of ways to cue the congregation to start singing, all of which are probably excellent from a pragmatic standpoint in the church culture we live in.

I found this blog post fascinating simply because it is necessary. Being a “worship leader” means that you have to somehow let the people in the pews know when they are permitted to participate because they will assume that they are not welcome to participate unless told otherwise. The default, if you will, is that gathering with the church is a passive activity for most Christians. In an hour long service, you might spend 12-15 minutes singing along with everyone else but the rest of the time you are sitting in your pew and watching the proceedings, neither expected nor permitted to speak.

Most Christians bring nothing to the “worship service” other than a warm body that sings along on occasion and a check for the offering plate. People feel like they have “worshipped” if they sing a few songs dictated by the worship leader and listen to a sermon in a holy place (i.e. a church building). Worse in my eyes is that people think they are fulfilling the purpose of the gathered church by attending a service and watching and listening mutely because that is what we have been taught. That passivity is a horrible disservice to the church and has been the status quo for five centuries (and a carryover from the 1000 years prior to that).

As I am reading through Pagan Christianity, it is confirming a lot of what I have come to believe, that the traditional gathering of the church is, by design, set up to muzzle the people of God. Rather than a place of mutual edification, encouragement and exhortation, it has become row upon row of mute Christians watching a performance. Almost everything we traditionally associate with the church has the effect of muzzling God’s people: the pew, the pulpit, the worship leader, the monologue sermon, the tightly controlled and scheduled service, even the way “churches” are set up have the effect of creating an atmosphere of passivity. Think about a traditional church with say 100 people in the pews. If halfway through the sermon, the preacher stopped and asked Joe in the fifth pew what he thought, everyone would freak out, especially Joe! Joe wouldn’t know what to say because the idea that he has anything to contribute to the meeting is completely foreign to our understanding of “church”. Someone who wanted to ask for clarification in the middle of a sermon would get the stink eye and be hushed. A Christian who wanted to offer a prayer but who was not on the schedule and had not been invited would not be able to do so.

The church as we see portrayed in the Scriptures is a place for Christians to come together to minister to and be ministered to. It is a place of participation and mutuality without hierarchy and where Christians can edify, pray, sing, teach, exhort and admonish one another. That phrase “one another” appears so often in Scripture but practically speaking we see the church as “one and all the others”. How have we perverted the very vehicle designed to provide “one anothering” and mutuality into a barrier to Christians ministering to one another?