Worship and Performance

My friend David Taylor recently introduced me to some blogs about contemporary worship issues. Even though the worship in my churches would be considered traditional, the ethnodoxologist in me likes to know what other pastors and worship leaders are doing. Recently some writers who ply their trade in pop-rock song styles have been addressing the issue of "performancism" in worship. Jamie Brown apparently exploded his blog's hit count by calling out worship leaders who get in the way of the congregation's encounters with God. David Santistevan responded that the problems with modern worship practices are not the forms (like dimly lit rooms, over-amplified sounds, and projection systems) but rather the heart of the worshippers: the church isn't as hungry for God as we should be. Zac Hicks contributed his own theological insights, claiming that the church lacks a true understanding of the respective roles of law and gospel.

I agree with all these bloggers that there are big holes in our understanding of true worship. The concern that many worship leaders have for creating a tight performance set is not so much a problem in itself. It's more of a symptom of a bigger disease. We seem to lack good images for even talking about and conceptualizing proper worship. Specifically, the church of the 21st century needs to name and address the performer-vs-audience separation that exists in our congregations. Let me bring in two other writers who can help us identify this problem: one is a famous philosopher and the other is an obscure social scientist.

Soren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish philosopher, wrote about worship as performance. He pointed to the obvious comparison of the front of a church (the chancel, actually) to a stage, with the congregation in the pews (an area known as the nave) making up the audience. This metaphor is even more obvious today when many congregations gather in worship spaces that don't look at all like churches. Instead of a chancel, many worship leaders and pastors preside from an actual stage. Kierkegaard may have died before he had the opportunity to worship in a gymnatorium, but he nonetheless identified the age-old temptation to make the worship leader into a performer and the congregation into an audience. He wrote in an essay called Purity of Heart that these roles are mixed up from what they should be. The congregation wasn't meant to passively watch the priest/pastor perform a service. Rather, the pastor/priest is called to prompt the congregation to perform together with him or her: not as an audience, but rather acting as part of a large cast in the drama of God's saving work in creation. Worship leader and congregation are both on the same side of the curtain. Kierkegaard said that God alone is the audience of our worship. Said another way, worship is an offering of participatory celebration to (and I would add, with) God.

Less well-known than our Danish friend is Andriy Nahachewsky, a folklorist who teaches at the University of Alberta. He wrote an article in 2001 that described how the meaning of a performance changes when its presentation context is altered. For example, a folk dance from the rural Philippines probably started as a way for everyone in the village to participate in a celebration. There was no difference between performer and audience, because everyone danced together in the circle. When Bayanihan, the country's national dance company, creates a version of that dance for the stage, then they are also making a clear division between performers and audience. The stage is a physical barrier that also creates a virtual wall: those on one side may participate, and those on the other side can only watch. Nahachewsky says that the dance form may look the same on stage as it did in the village, but the meaning is completely different when performer and audience are clearly divided.

Here is my take-away from both Kierkegaard and Nahachewsky: Meaningful worship in the church should break down the wall of performer-versus-audience. These walls are everywhere in our societies: stages of theaters, fronts of classrooms, screens of cinemas (and TV sets). Our culture trains us to be passive consumers, to sit and watch what others create. Worship services ought to be counter-cultural experiences that break down this division and bring the worship leader and congregation onto the same team. The bloggers mentioned above have some good tips for moving our congregations in the right directions. (Getting more people singing is a very good suggestion.) But we also need better models for talking about and describing what we do on Sunday mornings (or Sunday evenings, or Saturday evenings, or Friday evenings...) Changing church architecture or song styles will not break down this barrier unless we start talking about worship in a different way.

This video has been around for a while, but it never gets old. Worship as performance, indeed...