"Please God may I catch this fly ball..."

There is a phenomenon in this country right now, known as "praise and worship".  This Christian fascination is not without its price: all across this great nation of ours, people are flocking to concerts, picking up CDs, and otherwise (*ahem*) singing the praises and filling the coffers of praise and worship music's select.  There is a hunger, an intense hunger, for the "worship experience," and those trained in the musical creation of such experiences have found themselves with plenty of employment lately...  Unfortunately, as it has become with most things in the modern church, music has become a victim of the church's loving embrace with modernist philosophy.  Worship music has become formulistic, predictable and secure in its execution -- making the typical "worship experience" very stale, rote, and anesthetic (this from the movement first begun in response to the "boring" liturgies of "old" church).

Most tragic of all is the compartmentalization that has occurred around not just worship music, but also our entire experience of God.  God has become someone we meet only on Wednesday nights and Sunday mornings (Saturday nights if we're hip).  Even worse, the goosebumps-up-the-arms take-my-breath-away God has become available to us only within the context of the evangelical music event.  Should our encounter with such an event be disrupted by our schedules, or worse yet, a talkative couple in front of us, we will miss out on God.  The bush was burnin' up on the mountain, but we missed the tram ride to the top.

The appropriate response to such separation of church and (the) state (of our lives) is Seeing God in the Ordinary: allowing God to integrate with our everyday experience of life, our journey of being.  He desires that place and deserves it, that place of being integral to our very lives. Who is to say one shouldn't be able to get God-goosebumps while sipping wine by candlelight, reclining on one's back porch?

But before we jump right to the end of this story, let's look at where we have been.  First, by way of definition: what do we exactly mean by "praise and worship"?  Do we mean the experience of God?  The liturgical order of worship?  The holy of holies?  No.  We mean, literally, praise and worship music.  Praise and worship music is primarily a style of music.  It is often referred to as "choral" music because of its trait of having oft repeated "chorus" sections--short, easily sung parts of a song.  Many times new music is kept out of the church canon simply because it does not fit into the understood style of "P&W."  Recent attempts by contemporary P&W artists, like Delirious and Sonic Flood, to update P&W's relevancy to popular music have been accepted with open arms by a church culture finally ready to add a modern feel to their P&W (never mind that groups like The Choir were creating modern liturgies a decade ago).  However it is important to observe the constancy of style that exists even within the "modern" P&W "movement".  There is, in fact, a theological and philosophical root to our contemporary praise and worship of God that threatens to bury church worship experience forever in pretension and irrelevance.

The common myth perpetuating the praise and worship music phenomena is that of the "sacred" versus the "secular"; that is, that there are segments of our lives more holy, sacred, and set apart for God than others--in this case, the praise and worship music service, specifically. As long as this ideology continues to steer the church at large, our worship of God will remain no more than a distant affair wrapped in the best of intentions.

In order to understand why Seeing God In The Ordinary is a better way, we first need to answer a couple of questions:  1) What are the reasons for the current segmentation?  2) Why is it wrong to believe in such compartmentalization?

There are many examples of biblical texts that have been used to support such a worldview, many of them condemning any activities of the "world". For example, James warns, "You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." (James 4:4)  The issue here is certainly not the validity of James' statement, but rather the exact definition of "the world".  In modern times, the world has been defined to be anything outside of western Christian culture.  It is easy to surmise that James had no such concept as "Christian culture," let alone that which is represented by western Christians today.  How did Scriptural statements such as this one become to be known as tenets of a sub-cultural phenomena rather than spiritual encouragements, or at worst, admonishments?

It is possible that many of us have fallen into the trap of using Scripture to support our already existing world view, as opposed to allowing Scripture, in the words of Mike Riddell, "to do [its] radical work among us" (from Threshold of the Future, SPCK: 1998).  Much due to the Enlightenment, we have allowed a type of cerebral idolatry to mark our world and God view.  The Enlightenment certainly is not the only development to influence our modern outlook: Darwinism has also given our faith a utilitarian tinge:

"Something happened in the secular world which then deeply affected and infiltrated the Christian church. Following the Darwinian theory of evolution...people began to look at themselves and the world around them in purely utilitarian terms." (Scheaffer, Franky. Addicted to Mediocrity)

There are some historical precedents against said segmentation.  Two very popular Bible figures are, in fact, among the most subversive of all historical persons: King David of Israel and Jesus of Nazareth.  The classic story of David dancing in his undies always puts a smile on my face (2 Samuel 6:14-16).  His shameless joy put a frown on at least one contemptuous observer then, and I imagine it would do the same within the presence of Christians of today.  Jesus was of course the most seditious of all, delivering a message that flew in the face of centuries' thought. Can you imagine how quickly the ushers would carry out someone overturning the ministry tables so common in the lobbies of our own vast temples--a poor, wild-eyed Jew gripped on each arm by large men in suits? (reference: Matthew 21:12)  Both men held back nothing from their faith-filled lives, living at once munificent and terrible existences--a great difference from modern Christians, who, after putting on a face to even go to church, experience a worship event once there that looks nothing like anything else in God's great Earth.

Praise and worship, as a segmented and process-driven event, suffers futility--it fails to reflect real life, but instead promotes pride, isolation, individuality, and a limited experience of God.  To become again relevant, humiliating, uniting, and awesome, our worship of God must integrate our entire lives; it must involve our communities and our day-to-day experience.  The fact is that there is nothing more spiritual about your Sunday morning service than there is about a Sting or Pearl Jam concert.  In fact, elements of performance such as Eddie Vedder's writing "Pro Choice" across his arm or Rage Against The Machine's standing silent on stage, wearing nothing but duct tape over their mouths, involve more spiritual interaction with congregants than your typical worship leader ranting "Everybody now!"  Typically such acts both understand what they are communicating and how to communicate it with vigor, engagement, and creativity--much more so than acts in the P&W genre.  It seems the Spirit has been working with a great deal of efficacy in the very places we have been isolating ourselves from.

"...Too many church services don't inspire reverence or awe. And so we turn elsewhere to encounter something awe-ful, something that puts us back into a truer perspective as a creature ourselves. Too often, in church, we feel like the centre of the event. Our needs are emphasized, our concerns are apparently addressed, our feelings, moods, worries and yearnings are the most important things that drive the agenda. And we're sick of it! We desire a worship experience that takes our breath away!" (Michael Frost, Eyes Wide Open)

We must assimilate worship and real life; we must see God in the ordinary, in our normal daily experience.  He is there and his Spirit is at work.  It's not just an unrealistic clichÈ.  It is real and it is possible to understand.  Begin with the arts, and observe the Spirit speaking, not only through Christians to Christians, but through all people to all people.  If we choose, we may be so privileged as to see his breath, to experience his worship, to drink of his life.

Once one's experience of God gets out of its box, it is possible to re-introduce common gatherings as a place for worship.  "It's impossible to avoid the forms of the past.  What is important are the meanings of today." (Josh Spencer, StrangerThingsMag.com, Jan-Feb 2001)  The "stimulat[ing] one another to love...assembling together," as the Scriptures put it (Hebrews 10:24-25), is a very important time for social interaction, spiritual connection and encouragement.  We are traveling across a mostly barren and often dangerous landscape--we frequently need to stop and circle the wagons.  Certainly art and unified awe-experience of God must be central to this event.  However, the presentation of that art and the actualization of that experience cannot come from within the limits of the P&W genre exclusively.

There are many hopeful glimpses to be found, once one has traveled to the edge and peered over the end of this flat world.  Those who have stepped over have found that the universe does not end at the horizon.  The horizon just keeps going, forever out of reach, forever calling us to pursue it.  Set sail out past the sight of land, breathe deep, and hope against hope for your breath to be taken away.