Worship for "Real People"

I remember it well. It was the first assignment due in my Designing/Leading Worship class, Winter semester of 2010. I was overwhelmed when my professor told us what kind of worship service we needed to plan: Worship for "Real people". Now, in my years of experience, helping my mom plan worship at my home church and planning chapel services for the Kuyper College community, not once did I ever think to myself, "Hey, let's plan a worship service for fake people today!" So, when Carol said, "Real people" the first thing that popped into my mind was Pinnochio, jumping up and saying, "I'm a REAL boy!"

Carol didn't mean for us to plan a worship service for a group of Pinnochio's, did she?

(Answer: no. She didn't)

What she DID mean was that there are people in the church that are hurting, that are trying to make it day by day. Some people in the church are living paycheck-to-paycheck; others don't know how they're going to pay off student loans; others may have just lost a loved one; and still others may be troubled due to stresses at work, abuse at home, or a desparing sense of loneliness. How do we plan worship accordingly? How can we tell people to "rejoice in the LORD always when worship seems to be just another thing they have to check off an extensive to-do list?

I planned my service. I incorporated a time to lay burdens down at the altar, a time to be prayed over, and songs that dealt with how we will go through pain. One of my favorite songs dealing with this is "Lay 'Em Down" by Needtobreathe. For your listening pleasure, here is a video of it.

However wonderful that song is, I've recently started realizing what it is like to worship as a REAL person. I'm wonderful at making myself put on a mask when I enter into a worship service - everything is hunky-dory. Life is good. God is good (all the time; all the time, God is good). I can speak Christianese like it is a second language. But this past week, I got the challenge to plan the music for a sermon that will be on Hosea. If you've never read the book of Hosea, let me break it down for you:
God calls to a man named Hosea and says, "I want you to marry a prostitute. She will be unfaithful to you. She will hurt you. But you must love her. You must raise her children." So Hosea does. Through this, Hosea is reflecting to Israel the relationship between Israel and God. God is faithful to an adulterous nation. Hosea and Gomer (his wife) have 3 kids, named Jezereel - fortelling the destruction of Israel at Jezereel; Lo-Ruhamah, meaning "not loved"; and Lo-Ammi, meaning "not my people." If you know anything about the naming of children in the Middle Eastern culture, their names are who they are. Imagine yourself with the name "not loved." Ouch. So Gomer goes out and prostitutes herself, ending up living with a man who is not Hosea. Hosea is called to woo her back to himself. After a long and hard marriage, he gets his wife back - no. He BUYS his wife back. He will not leave her in sin; he will protect her and carry her back to himself, even though she is sinful and unrepentant.
God's never-ending love is enough to bring anyone to their knees - let alone the idolater, the lonely, the adulterer, the broken.

I have had the first line of "He Loves Us" by Kim Walker stuck in my mind for most of the day - "He is jealous for me." For the past two weeks I have been bombarded by papers, tests, and projects. For some odd reason, all of my classes had papers or projects due within the same time frame, and all of them are difficult. They are time consuming. They have driven me to the point of tears more than once in the past week. I have made an idol out of schoolwork; I have made an idol out of my life. I have let myself be so consumed with myself that it broke me multiple times in one week. I forgot to learn about that which I was writing.

Ironically, I was writing about headship and submission as gender roles within marriage. That is too big of a topic to tackle here (if you would like to read my 18 page discourse on it, ask me and I'll give you a copy), but one of the things that drew my attention was that in creation, humanity was allowed in what Timothy Keller in his book Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism calls the "dance of the Trinity." Early Church fathers called this dance "perichoresis" (which just so happens to be one of my favorite Greek words ever. Just say it... pear - ee - core - ee - sis) and it describes the mutually self-giving motion of the Trinity. Each person revolves around the other two, glorifying them and honoring them. "God is love," Christ statess, and He is love because He is always giving of Himself. He is constantly outporing, as Harold Best puts it. He knows nothing more than to pour out of Himself and into His Selves. When humanity walked with God in the Garden of Eden, we were invited into that dance. And we bowed out far too early. When we stopped dancing with God, however, we stopped dancing with each other. We became static, self-serving. We wished to dance only if others would orbit around ourselves - and if everybody is waiting for others to orbit around them, no one will dance.

Christ came to save us from the sin that has our feet bound and commanded us to move. By his death on the cross, we are able to not only be in the presence of God, but the Holy Spirit dwells within us. The Holy Spirit is constantly moving in our lives, making us turn outward to others - or it should be. We should be continually looking out of ourselves and looking out for the interests of others. Our minds should be the same as that of Christ Jesus, who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the very nature of a servant and being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death - even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:5-9)

What does worship for REAL people look like? It acknowledges the pain of living in a world that is still filed with sin, but looks toward the cross. It acknowledges that people are coming in from all areas of life and continually preaches the Gospel. It looks to glorify God in the presence of pain. It looks to remind people of Christ's words, "Come, all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me; for my yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Worship should ALWAYS be cross-centered; it should always have its foundation on the one who bore our sins and took them to the cross. It should always glorify the only One who deserves praise and adoration -God. One of my friends told me a story when she was in a worship service and she said that the music just wasn't touching, the sermon seemed non-applicable and she complained to someone, "I didn't get anything out of the service today." The person she was talking to replied with these words: "Good, because it wasn't for you."

Worship should preach the Gospel from the beginning to the end. That is what worship for "real people" looks like.