One In Jesus

We must be a community that … worships in a way that orders desires towards God and away from narcissism (feel-good pep-rallies), for any other kind of worship cannot train us out of our narcissistic obsessions with sex.

I admit that I wasn’t expecting this particular thought to pop up here. How can worship be about sex? Worship is about the least sexy thing there is. I mean, if you’d grown up in the church where I grew up … well, worship was about keeping rules and suffering through s … l … o … o … o … w singing and bad preaching, because this is how we bought our way into heaven. Miss three services in a row and you’d go straight to hell. Maybe sooner. Maybe just one if you weren’t “Providentially hindered,” not that we believed in Providence, not really.

Okay. Here’s the point, and it’s a good one. We Americans are a narcissistic people. We are all about ourselves, autonomy, and self-indulgence. Therefore, we demand a worship service that meets our needs. But not our real, actual needs … our “felt needs.” And if we don’t feel the need for a lesson against fornication, well, the preacher needs to find something else to talk about.

And the way we worship shapes us as God’s people. Therefore, we need to carefully consider what lessons we are teaching ourselves in the way we worship. Continue reading →