I have been concerned for some time about the face the church shows to the world. If you were a non-Christian who follows churches on social media, you would conclude that the most important thing about the Christian faith is corporate worship. There would be gifted musicians, worship leaders, and preachers on the stage and a crowd of worshippers experiencing various levels of joy and ecstasy as they sing songs in praise of God.
I think corporate worship is important. Though my main contribution to worship services now is preaching, there was a time when I also served as a worship leader. It gave me great joy to help lead people into a time when they encountered God in Word and liturgy. But is having a powerful corporate worship experience the highest expression of Christian life? Indeed, is God even in such experiences? James Houston wrote,
As Jonathan Edwards realized, true affections of God are gracious affections, for they are divinely implanted in our hearts by the Holy Spirit. During the religious revival in which Edwards was engaged, too many emotional outpourings were being attributed to God when they were merely forms of psychological release. [1]
I continue to be haunted by the fact that the church, in her first three hundred years, gathered as house churches, thirty or forty people meeting in a home. No halls, no stages, no religious spectacle. Yet it was during that period that the church grew rapidly. What was the face the church showed to the world that helped it to grow so fast? That Christians were a different kind of people, holy people who radically loved each other and loved the most needy in society. The world was struck by this “new humanity” that loved in a way that they had never seen before but were also committed to holy living. The church’s “selling point” was not religious spectacle. There were other religions that offered that. It was a new kind of people. A new kind of humanity.
The face we show to the world is also our invitation. Is the invitation, “Come join us, and you will experience powerful worship experiences”? Or is it, “Come to Christ and be transformed to become people who love God and others in response to God’s love for us”? We are called to be salt and light. We know they are there by their effects — salt that gives taste and preserves; light that shows what is right and wrong, good and bad. Such impact does not lend itself to becoming TikTok clips. But it is the way to help reveal the reality and nature of God.
So while I appreciate powerful Sunday corporate services, it is what kind of people we are in the world, Monday to Saturday, that really points people to God — or not, if we don’t show the God difference in our lives.
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[1] Joyful Exiles (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 18.