Instead of the people of God being ‘salt and light’ and incarnating the presence of God derivatively in the world, the church is incarnating the world under the guise of professed Christianity. The clamour in many congregations and denominations is ‘to be more like the world in order that we might attract the world’. This is not the way that Jesus either taught or modelled. So when the highest activity of the church – gathering for the public worship of God – becomes coloured and clouded by the culture of a fallen world, alarm bells should be ringing.

There once was a time – within living memory for many of us – when you could go to a place of worship and have a reasonable sense of what to expect during a service and not be taken aback by something that seemed out of place. Those days are rapidly disappearing and it is increasingly the norm that there are no norms for a service of praise. This should give us pause for thought.

In the first place because it is a reflection of the extent to which the church is being shaped by the world and not the other way around. Two millennia of the previously pagan cultures of the world being transformed by the presence and influence of the church – especially in the West – are rapidly being put into reverse. Instead of the people of God being ‘salt and light’ and incarnating the presence of God derivatively in the world, the church is incarnating the world under the guise of professed Christianity. The clamour in many congregations and denominations is ‘to be more like the world in order that we might attract the world’. This is not the way that Jesus either taught or modelled. So when the highest activity of the church – gathering for the public worship of God – becomes coloured and clouded by the culture of a fallen world, alarm bells should be ringing.

A second and more specific reason for concern is the way in which the shape, content and contours of worship seem to be more influenced by what puts the worshippers at ease during worship instead of what should fill us with awe and wonder. There is nothing ‘easy’ about approaching the Most High God – the One who is a ‘consuming fire’ before whom the very angels of heaven ‘cover their faces’. We are called to tremble before God, be silent in his presence and draw near only ‘with reverence and awe’. The ‘fear of the LORD’ has all but disappeared from the vocabulary of many Christians; yet it is still ‘the beginning of knowledge and wisdom’ and without it we have no spiritual or moral compass. This does not in any sense mean that ‘the joy of the LORD’ should somehow be absent from public praise; but, rather, that this joy in the fullness of what it means can only come into its own when we appreciate who it is we are praising and the lengths to which he has had to go through the cross to restore us to himself. In the words of David, we are to ‘rejoice with trembling’ (Ps 2.11).

The third and arguably the most important reason to be concerned about the current drift in much Christian worship is that it is quite simply directionless. It has no beginning, middle or end; frequently depending only on the charisma of whoever happens to be the ‘worship leader’ for that day to hold it all together and sustain the interest and attention of the worshippers. (Though the inordinate increase in toilet break traffic that nowadays disrupts and distracts the flow of worship may well speak for itself in terms of worshippers wanting a break from it all.)

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