A Practical Guide to Praise and Worship
The current pandemic has changed everything, we all know. One major adjustment for me has been the need to shift my ministry classes to Zoom, which in my context has major benefits and few drawbacks.
The reconnection we’ve enjoyed has spurred us on into a new study, following more of a Q&A style, as several in my group represent a baby church plant. Over the course of their own quarantine, they met and dealt with a number of obstacles, but once they were able to reconvene, they found that some of their earlier disagreements hadn’t actually been resolved.
One of those disagreements involved worship in the church. Everyone seemed to have his own idea of what worship entailed, and yet no one was willing to budge or compromise on the matter. One said that worship meant Bible memorization only. Another said that worship required live music, while yet another said that live music is too distracting, so only canned music should be allowed. Things were getting pretty hairy.
They asked me to swoop in and help them find some common ground, so the first thing I did was search my Kindle library for resources I had on worship. This book, Exploring Worship by Bob Sorge came out on top in my search results, and I honestly don’t know where it came from or how it landed in my library in the first place! This book and its author hail from a Pentecostal background, so I knew from the start that it would advise methods very different than what I’m personally used to. I’ll get to that momentarily.
The basic definitions within the book are important, though, which was really the main thing I took away from it. Essentially Sorge teaches that worship (literally “to bow down”) is the attitude of humility we evidence before Almighty God, and praise is merely the physical and audible evidence of worship. I love that distinction, and I will continue to teach that.
In my discussions with the group, I opened with this explanation of differences before diving in to a study first of worship and then of praise. I explained to the group that while worship as a heart-attitude is a timeless and unchangeable command from God, praise as an outpouring of that worship can change and will be affected by personality, backgrounds, culture, and environment.
The disagreements they were having in church revolved around “how should we praise God?” which is a viable question, not “How should we worship God?” which is not. Worship requires humility, submission, and awe. It requires silence. It comes from the Word. It comes from our communion with the Spirit. It’s a person’s personal, intimate meeting with God. It’s a perspective within the heart that cannot be faked.
Praise on the other hand is the external evidence of worship. It can be, and probably more often then not is faked. I recall arriving at a church about 30 minutes too early and watching the worship team practicing on stage. They practiced their hand movements, their facial expressions. They even practiced their tearful prayers! How could I tell they were faked? Because right in the middle of a song or a prayer, the director stopped everyone to make a comment, and they came out “the zone” as if they were actors on a stage. Praise most certainly can be faked.
True worship, however, occurs in the heart, in spirit and in truth, as Jesus told the woman at the well. When this new church struggled with “how to worship God,” they all failed to recognize that worship is not the corporate outpouring of our relationship to God. That’s praise. That might sound like splitting hairs, but it’s not.
Where the members of this church were failing was to think their method of praise (guitar, .mp3s, or Bible memory) was what would ultimately usher them into true worship of God. But they got it backwards! Only when the individuals worship God first—humbling themselves before that Almighty Hand—will they be able to respond in true praise. Faked praise, which we see every Sunday morning in every church around the globe, will rarely bring a person into an attitude of true worship. The people in this church were fighting over the best way to dress up a corpse rather than trying to figure out God could raise that corpse to new life.
For all these insights, I’m grateful to Sorge and his book. Still, I can’t rightly recommend the book, as I’m not a Charismatic who thinks that spontaneous dancing (for one example) has its place in Church. If Sorge wants to point to King David as his example for how Christians should praise God today, then he shouldn’t haven’t a problem with people dancing naked in church, as the great psalmist had done. He can’t have it both ways.
Another reason I can’t recommend the book is that he takes too many liberties in his wording, phrases which the non-discerning might easily stumble over. For example in Chapter 1, despite having explained at length the importance of praising God in one’s own cultural way, he criticizes Conservative Christianity this way: “How far has conservatism gotten them? It’s easier to restrain a fanatic than to raise a corpse” (31). Is it really? Granted, it’s almost laughable how sadly most Baptists sing the “Doxology,” but isn’t the Spirit of God’s role to raise us to new life? I don’t know where in the Bible He’s ever described the “Fanatic Restrainer.” It’s a silly comment to make, and he injures his argument by criticizing Conservative Christians who don’t believe that dancing and shouting have their place in Church.
Then in Chapter 4, he writes that God doesn’t need our praises: that’s more for our benefit. But God does seek worshipers (John 4:23) “because He needs them.” I have a hard time ever reading words like this, that God needs anything, including me. I hate reading it, and I hate hearing variations of it in praise music out there. Groups like Hillsong, for example, love to itch their listeners’ ears with nonsense like this. God needs nothing. He deserves our worship, but He’s not incomplete without it. Even the trees clap in worship to Him, because their Creator deserves it. There’s absolutely nothing that I can do or give that will complete God, and it’s near blasphemy to teach the opposite.
Like I said, I can’t recommend this book because there are just too many throw-away lines like this that Sorge didn’t think through well enough and that could easily trip up a non-discerning reader. I like his foundation, though, just not the structure he’s built upon it.
©2020 E.T.