“Cheerful” worship

This post is for professing Christians. It’s not meant to be a stick in anybody’s eye. It’s not one more self-defeating voice of postmodern faith. It is meant as my confession, my lament, and indeed my prayer for Christianity. I welcome you to interact if this strikes a chord with you.

It has long bothered me that Christians are so insistent on being superficially happy in their worship services. I do not mean the happiness is merely superficial, but that superficially Christian worship is consistently a positive and cheerful experience. You may be listing off the alternatives in your head and think I’m somewhat crazy. After all, who wants to worship with Christians who are unhappy, or downright miserable, or even just apathetic? It is not even the joy of Christian worship that I am referring to. The thought crystallizes in my mind: it is the homogenous emotions expressed.

Where is the lament? Where is the confession? Where is the broken humility? Where is the public expression of the other emotions we feel nearly every day, week, month of our lives? If our cheerfulness is a tribute to the greatness of our God, would not our sorrow show our need for his gospel? Would not we offer a fuller theological picture, a deeper portrait of what Christianity is, if we could cry out in sorrow as well as praise? Would not our lifting up of Christ and his cross be that much more meaningful if we had first traversed the valley of confession and repentance?

I am uneasy with the unspoken yet pervasive belief that Christian worship must reflect such a small range of emotion and human experience. It is reflected when every worship song turns to clapping. It shows in the plastic smiles of worship teams. What is especially interesting to me is that I have now seen this as an issue in diverse churches that are far-ranging on the comparative scale. The hymn-singing churches do it, and so do off-the-wall churches. Big churches and little churches. It is not satisfying and it is not true to human experience in a world devastated by sin and in need of a Savior.

It is dangerous and pervasive to embrace an approach to church and worship that is true both to a sovereign, powerful God who is mighty to save and to a sinful, fallen world swirling in sin’s grip. I am convinced that sinners need real hope, and that starts with being honest about where we are. If we can’t be honest about where we are, our own hearts and the world we live in, why would anybody care what we have to say about a solution? Superficial joy is no joy at all, just a face put on and sinners see right through it. Substantial joy is real, and it expresses itself to God as both praise and penitence, happiness and sorrow, grief and gladness.

My prayer then for Christians is that we could embrace the danger of being real before God and people.  Maybe that means exuberance, or maybe it means literally crying through a song.  Perhaps it can’t be scripted.  It might look different every time.  And maybe in the end God would get glory from sinners coming humbly to him without artifice or theatrics.