I frequently arrive late to church on a Sunday morning. This could be because I’ve become a bit sidetracked on the way (there’s plenty of potential for this, see, since it’s a thirty five minute walk – people you know, things you see, thoughts you have that really have to be written down so you have some proof of your profundity later on), but more often than not it’s actually a calculated lateness on my part, an attempt to skip Worship, or at least the bulk of it. I love a church that doesn’t frown on late arrivals.

 Worship’s boring. That is, Worship as it is in Church, with a capital W, which is singing songs (sometimes hymns) in rows all looking at a large screen (sometimes being watched by a small person looking the other way over a shoulder and not singing, lucky them). If you’re fortunate there’s only a maximum of three songs and they don’t get repeated. I become very much like a badly behaved four year old when Worship lasts more than half an hour. I fidget. I grimace. I become annoyed by the font the lyrics are in (fonts are a very big deal for me). I like singing, and I like the idea of a corporate experience of giving glory to God, but I don’t like Worship.

Once upon a time, if you wanted music in your life you had to produce it yourself. You sang to yourself while you went about your daily life, unless you were rich enough to have musicians at your beck and call. Now you listen, and you sing along, if you feel like it, and usually not from go to whoa, usually only in the good bits. Your average person never sings all the way through a song, I think. Worship in a church service is really a deeply strange experience. You have people up front playing instruments and singing songs, okay this is like a concert, so I’m like an audience member; but the audience members are all standing, okay this is like a good concert, the audience is showing its enthusiastic response to the music; and the audience members are all singing, okay so they’re like devotees, they know all the words; except the words are all projected on a large screen above the musicians and singers, so what’s the occasion? We’re Worshipping God. Yes, but how, if my focal points are either a large screen (with words written in a bad font, with odd line breaks and inconsistencies in layout between verses and spelling mistakes, and bad punctuation, and, and), or musicians and singers, and what I’m hearing is (mostly) augmented voices and instruments from the front and possibly the person standing behind me, and I can’t hear myself (but the person in front of me can, sorry about that), and I don’t even like this song, and I really don’t like the words in this line, and that last word’s only being used to resolve a difficult rhyme (because we really don’t do rhyming any more than we do singing now (apologies to rap artists)). I’m a Worship failure: it isn’t any better when the music is stuff that I love (and the stuff that I love is diverse), because then really all I’m doing is singing for my personal enjoyment. For me, music can be a barrier to worship: I’m too conscious of it and I have tried not to be, but I’m stuck. Give me poetry or art or landscape or music (no words) to listen to and I’m a bit more successful (thank you to my church as you sometimes does this).

I wonder sometimes, when I’m distracted, what a non-churchgoing person (let’s call him Handsome Sam) would be making of the Worship that I am at that very point experiencing. This embarrasses me (I embarrass easily), but I think that this (corporate singing) is exactly what Handsome Sam would expect to be happening in church, because that’s the way it’s always been. So, read Rosemary Dewerse’s interview with Donna Dinsmore, which we have titled “How then should we worship?”

This issue of Stimulus ranges widely. Included are articles that reflect upon matters artistic; others dip into baptism, while yet others reflect upon science, technology, God’s provision, human need, and the hope for justice.

Worship entails our heart response to God’s being and doing – these being bound, in Christ, to God’s self-emptying into, and for, creation. That response inextricably entails our faithful participation in creation and Christ – the response includes our missional participation in God’s activity in the world. Baptism is the formative shape of our personal participation in that mission, the divine undertaking in which our worship – both personal and overtly corporate – is rooted. So too our faith-reflection – upon, the arts, the sciences, technology, upon the needs of human community, etc – is an outworking of, and something sustained by, our conscious declaration of God’s worth-ship.

So indeed, Handsome Sam, how then should we worship?

Bridget Jennings
for the editorial committee

Douglas Maclachlan
Publisher