Worship teams. “Worship team” is one of the worst phrases ever invented. Much less Biblical than “prayer warrior,” yet more aggressively insane-sounding when dropped into casual conversation. “Yeah, after we rehearse for the Hearts on Fire Crusade 2007 in the public middle school gym this Saturday, I’m taking the worship team to Applebees.”
In my brief Evangelical interlude as a teenager (yes, as all these stories do, it started with some wonderful young woman), I saw plenty of worship teams: skits, matching t-shirts, and surprisingly competent musicianship. ~Michael Brendan Dougherty
I’m sorry, but I just don’t get it. It isn’t that I don’t understand the need for cooperation or sociability or community in church life. That all makes perfect sense. But what on earth is a “worship team” really? I mean, I think I have even seen one in action once or twice, but I had no idea what I was looking at when I saw it. To me it was a group of folks, undoubtedly terribly well-meaning, serious folks in their way, playing instruments and singing treacly songs about Someone Special whom I assumed must be God. Was this worship? I am sure that the people doing it believe this deeply.
Perhaps where this sort of thing loses me is in all of the swaying to and fro. In Russian churches, there is no swaying–none at all. You typically don’t move much at all, except for making the Sign of the Cross or making prostrations. Perhaps that seems bafflingly strange to our friends on the worship team, I don’t know, but I am fairly sure that it has rather more to do with worship than putting on a music show (even if the music is good, which this music typically is, well, not) and getting your spiritual groove on.
To some degree, I feel like Irinaios trying to make sense of Valentinian Gnostics, and I don’t mean that at all as pejoratively as it sounds–it’s simply that this sort of thing is so extremely far removed from anything I know as worship that I am baffled by it. As I look into the matter, I find that there are worship team guidelines and handbooks (as I suppose there would have to be) and an entire lexicon that has grown up around such “teamwork” (do you worship “frisbee style”?). It is clear that they take all of this terribly seriously, and it is also clear that many people respond to this sort of thing. But to what are they responding? What exactly is going on here? What, I ask you, is the point? Would it make any difference if we called them not worship teams but worship bands? If it wouldn’t, does it really make that much sense?
Normally I do not trouble to comment on the life and practices of other confessions, because I think it is generally not my place and not my business to do this, but this is one of those things where I am so astonished that I simply must intrude and ask: why?
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December 11th, 2006 at 4:43 pm
Jon Luker
Not only am I familiar with worship teams, I was, in my younger days a member of one. Your assumption about these folks being “terribly well-meaning” is a good one. In my case, I played keyboards for several manifestations of “praise bands” in my time and in most of those situations, the amount of “roadie” type work involved to pull it off could only be characterized as a labor of love. But, as you point out, and I came to realize once my experience in that world reached its apex in a “buster-generation” (supposedly post boomer-generation) “seeker-driven” “church” held in a rented movie theater (!), complete with rock music and even video clips of popular movies to introduce sermons, that this was spectacle, not worship.
I now, happily, participate in what the Reformed tradition refers to as Covenant Renewal Liturgy, which is a weekly feast (literally - you wouldn’t believe how infrequent the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper is observed in most Protestant churches) for my soul.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:02 pm
Kitty
I’m a product of a very formal Presbyterian church, and am at present a member of another one, and the “worship team” thing is as foreign to my experience as it is to yours. I think this arose from the practice of touring evangelists using Gospel singers, whose music is closer to popular forms. Think “Jordanaires” here. Popular music has been used in Protestant services ever since Charles Wesley and his famous crack about the Devil getting all the best tunes. Still, there’s a wide gap between “There Is a Fountain Filled With Blood” or “O For A Thousand Tongues to Sing” and using movie clips in worship. The music may have had a dance beat, but the rest of the service was generally pretty solemn.
I think worship teams represent an attempt to recreate the revival experience every Sunday, which seems to me to rather miss the point of having revivals at all. The old-fashioned tent meeting was a spectacle, but was so separated from quotidian existence that it didn’t intrude, and no one thought it should until the 1970’s. People lost entirely what it was that a revival revived, but they still liked the guitars, so some churches decided to try it once a week. They have an event that appeals to their emotions, but does nothing to elevate or enlighten them. I’m afraid that the habit of ecstatic worship acts like a herion habit; it takes more spectacle to produce the same high. Eventually it becomes impossible to obtain greater spectacle, so the members drift away unsatisfied.
December 11th, 2006 at 9:07 pm
Kitty
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I adore old harmony Gospel of the Jordanaires type. In fact, Gospel music saved my soul. Back in my middle twenties, I became involved in Wicca — long story, but mainly a bad boss and a delightful coworker. Said coworker was a priestess, and gave me books to study. I attended my one and only ritual with a coven, and was beyond appalled at the dreck that they misnamed “music.” I couldn’t give up ‘Amazing Grace’ or Christmas carols or ‘Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” unless I got something much better, which this wasn’t.
December 12th, 2006 at 4:21 am
daninardmore
I agree with Kitty. The classic hymnal I grew up with in the First Baptist Church, and its more-or-less clones in the other Protestant denominations, is perhaps the greatest spiritual treasure this particular religious tradition has to offer, where pretty much everything else depends on the personal magnetism and public speaking ability of the pastor. It is a tragedy that so many young would-be Christians know or care for nothing but the insipid soft rock of the “praise” services and rallies or revivals or whatever they are.
Another thing I have noticed for years that makes me think Protestantism–inexorably following its own internal logic– is cracking up and vaporising into a spiritual wilderness: whenever some “New Life” church finally raises enough money to move out of the converted Sav-A-Lot or former Wal-Mart and build their own facility, it invariably is indistinguishable from an anonymous corporate building or industrial park warehouse. This from people who claim the mantle of those who built Hagia Sophia and Notre Dame?
December 12th, 2006 at 10:34 pm
A.K.B. Cusack
My “worship team” is the Communion of Saints.
… sorry, is that too much of a t-shirt slogan?