Mikel Berger’s Bailiwick

Today I had to drive up and back to Chicago. So I loaded up a bunch of podcasts for the drive. The first one in the list was a Mark Driscoll lecture called Continuous Worship: Idolatry. Listening to it I was reminded a lot of the class that Ben Whipple taught during the KSBC summer institutes in 2006. The main point I got from both is that humans are designed to worship and are always worshiping something and a lot of times it isn’t God (i.e. idolatry).

Driscoll got into the issue of styles of worship music and how they are so unimportant but a hangup for so many people. I can relate to that because a lot of the churches I’m familiar with have congregations where the preferred styles of music often fall along generational lines.

Sometimes I think I can get self-righteous when I complain about how those older people are so inflexible and that worship styles don’t really matter. It’s easy to point out someone else’s inflexibility when the style that we would be changing to is more of your own preference.

I’m not totally ready to let the inflexible crowd off the hook. So I wondered how does my generation keep from growing inflexible as we age and become leaders in the church with the responsibility to decide the worship style?

So here’s one idea I want to throw out there for some feedback. What if we had a Sunday morning service with absolutly no music? No worship band, no choir, no congregational singing, no music at all.

Driscoll made the point that you shouldn’t need a certain style of music to feel that you connected with the God or that the service was good. Regardless of the style we have, it will always be someone’s preference. So what if we removed it all just for a Sunday? What would we do with the extra time? Longer sermon? More scripture reading? A drama? Get out early?

I know it’s a crazy idea and I vaguely remember hearing it somewhere else (a very quick google didn’t turn up anything but there are no new ideas). So feel free to rip it apart in the comments or shoot me an email.