Worship Ways: Worship and Mission

Tom Bandy and Lucinda Holmes's book Worship Ways: For the People Within Your Reach got my attention when I read, in a sidebar on page 4: "Worship is the purest form of God's mission, and God expects our collaboration to make it happen." I've spent most of my adult life trying to make worship and mission fit together, so this statement immediately put me on the side of the authors. While searching online for more information about this book, I became even more excited. I saw a recent blog post by Bandy that criticizes the "church growth leadership model," warning that it results in worship that is too focused on the performance of a few key leaders. This subject, too, is close to my heart. Recently, while researching the growth of contemporary praise and worship music in the 1990s, I found that many pastors sought to replace "traditional" worship, not so much as a mission strategy, but as a way to exert their leadership in the congregation. This book seemed to have it all: worship's integral relationship to mission, paired with a caution for centering worship around one strong personality.

Indeed, Bandy and Holmes, both clergy and leadership consultants, want to shift the conversation away from how we worship to why we worship. That necessarily means paying attention to the worshipers themselves. I'm guessing that the very title of the book—Worship Ways, just a letter off from the phrase "Worship Wars"—is intentionally calling readers to look past the battle lines of worship styles that were so rigidly drawn and defended in the 90s and 00s. Often those "wars" were more about exercising a pastor's personal leadership, and less a desire to reach new people. This book wants to give tools to a current generation of church leaders that will help them focus on the needs of those very people.

Bandy and Holmes lay out seven worship options for churches, with each one addressing a specific set of needs that might be found in a given congregation:

1. Coaching worship, for those who are lost and seeking direction
2. Educational worship, for the lonely who are looking for relationships
3. Transformational worship, for those who feel trap and need deliverance
4. Inspirational worship, for the dying who need renewal
5. Healing worship, for those who are broken and need restoration
6. Mission-Connectional worship, for the abused who need vindication and justice
7. Caregiving worship, for those who are discarded and need compassion

In describing these seven styles worship, the book's chapters list specific categories of people who are most likely to respond to each one. It was quite surprising to me to learn that these categories were created from identification codes used by the credit-reporting agency Experian. For instance, Healing Worship services (#5 above), which are focused on restoring the sick and broken, tend to resonate with this category of people:  the "M45: Diapers and Debit Cards" crowd. These are people who are "young, working-class families and single-parent households living in small, established city residences." Similarly, Mission-Connectional Worship (#6), designed for those seeking to correct injustices, is a good option for "younger, up-and-coming singles living big city lifestyles located within top capital markets." These folks fit into category G25: Urban Edge.

The categories are so numerous—more than 70, that I could tell—that the descriptions have to get quite creative: "A02: Platinum prosperity"; "H27: Birkenstocks and Beemers"; and "I32: Latin Flair." (By the way, these are all considered good fits for worship option #1: Inspirational Worship.

I have mixed feelings about applying consumer categories to worship programming. On the one hand, the sheer number of categories is overwhelming and confusing, and none of these Experian lifestyles fit any categories described as spiritual gifts in the New Testament (see Romans 12:6-8 or 1 Corinthians 12:8-10 or Ephesians 4:11). The apostles built their first-century congregations around these gifts of the Holy Spirit, not on consumer preferences.

On the other hand, it is a good thing to examine the motivations and desires behind our worship designs. If we are really thinking about the missional impact of our worship services, then we ought to consider ways to really get to know our neighborhood. For instance, designing a high-church, Anglo-Catholic service with choral anthems and weekly Communion might not be a good idea if you are trying to include people who have never been inside a church building before. Similarly, we would not want to focus on teaching and education if the community actually needs to work on healing and reconciliation. If these Experian categories can indeed help us think through the needs of others, then maybe they can point us in the right direction.

I imagine that people will respond to Worship Ways in the same way that they see the Myers-Briggs typology or the Enneagram. I know many people who have been helped by these tools, using them to work through their own personality tendencies, showing why they react to certain people and situations the way they do. Bandy and Holmes offer this same kind of assessment, bringing a different set of lenses for looking at a community. If you are looking for something grounded in scripture, this book is not for you. If you need to shake up your programming staff, forcing them to think about worship as a mission, Worship Ways might work.

What is Epiphany?

The Christmas season reaches its final conclusion on the day of Epiphany. After the twelve days of Christmastide, on January 6 the Christian church remembers that Christ was revealed to the entire world as the Son of God. Some people call this Three Kings Day, signifying the account from Matthew 2 when the magi arrived in Bethlehem to worship the infant Jesus. In honor of these first Gentile worshipers of the Messiah, some parts of the world use this day for giving gifts, imitating the wise ones who brought gold and incense. It is appropriate to sing The First Noel and We Three Kings on the Sunday closest to January 6. The refrain of that latter song so beautifully and succinctly links the light of the star with the light that Christ himself bore.

Most scholars agree that Epiphany is actually an older holiday than Christmas. It was established as a way to mark the beginning of the world's awareness of Jesus's sonship. For that reason, Epiphany has also been linked with Jesus's baptism in the Jordan River (read Luke 3). At that moment the voice of the Father and the presence of the Holy Spirit acknowledged who Jesus is, launching his public ministry throughout Galilee and Judea.

On Epiphany we live into the global nature of the Christian faith, acknowledging how God's plan for salvation has been revealed to both Jews and Gentiles. In Matthew's gospel it took both Gentile astrologers and Jewish teachers to find the Christ's birthplace. Today we have our own cultural categories that must be transcended by the Word, and the church is constantly working to overcome barriers of language, status, gender, race, and age. In this season we remember that the gospel message should never be so much at home in a society that it fails to agitate. When the truth is revealed, it takes on cultural forms in order to be meaningful, but at the same time it also works against social norms to drive out sin and oppression.