It is sad that the call to worship today is reduced to a time on Sundays, to a stage, and to certain music.
It is sad, as I think about the complexity of the world, the dramas that appear before our eyes, there are few worshiping groups whose vision of worship extends beyond their own small agendas. The great need of the hour are people who lift high the name of Jesus, not in the absence of great global turmoil, but in spite of it, or even fueled by it.
I see our worship communities and fear the sound we make is too inconsequential. The smallness of our worship is diseased by blindness-our vision of God is too small, our theology is too small, our experiences of his greatness too small, and so our sound is small. Pipsqueaks to be exact.
Are there any who are curious as to who can dare outmatch the rage of our world with the rage of sounding praise? Are there madmen and madwomen captivated and convinced by the greatness and sovereignty of God and his enduring and completely applicable and relevant love for the world we live in?
I look around me and see them not.
I see a cowarding church. A church fixated on its budget and its retention of jaded members. Jaded because church has been reduced to a plan-able organization, a four-walled prison, a failed utopia. Sad it is that we we feed sheep with nothing better. Sad it is that, God for all he claims to be, is rarely experienced, and subsequently rarely praised as so, and alas-the antidote for our world remains the sad din we call worship.
I long for a time of seeing a church captivated again by wild worship. Worship that is socially embarrassingly but eternally fitting. That heaven could actually agree with and respond to. But until then, I ache for lack of finding anything much better.
