I notice that David Green said:
The elephant in the room for many leaders of worship (whether ordained or otherwise) is that when you are planning and then trying to lead your people through the journey of the worship, conscious of newcomers and guests, let alone children, keeping one eye on the clock, and another on whether dear ol’ Flo has pocketed her wafer rather than consuming it again, it’s very hard to retain a sense in your heart of worship and the presence of God.
He was picking up on this older post by David Cloake, which said:
As a priest, I either preside or I worship – the two rarely overlap
I confess that, while I sympathise with the practicalities being discussed, I am almost entirely unpersuaded by the argument. It is not just that there are a range of practical tips for gaining space for personal engagement with God (and 25 years experience says there are) in the performance of liturgical presidency. It is also that this “conundrum” seems to me to suggest an understanding of worship as a human experience of God.
I wonder, say, how such an understanding might relate to the idea of priesthood as majoring on the kind of rush-hour chaos of animal slaughter which characterised the Passover in the New Testament period.
I wonder also whether the way either David sets the question up depends on an assumption that worship is defined by what the worshipper experiences, rather than what the worshipper offers.
I am just asking, but it seems to me that those are rather important questions.
So glad you’re posting again. Loved the travel pictures. You’re right about the offering. Reminds me of Psalm 4:6. Personally, as a chorister stuck in the back corner, I doubt very much if the presider (to whom I give singing lessons for the canting) has any problems thinking about this. It’s worship because we are there together. Immeasurable I expect. (Listen to the CBC Ely Evensong on Sunday afternoon – very good in my biased opinion. Also worship even though I am not there.)
I think the question of whether worship is really worship if it doesn’t feel like what we expect worship to feel like is an important one, too. As a performing musician, my experience is sometimes what I would say feels transcendent, and sometimes not. The experience of transcendence doesn’t always coincide with similar audience experiences. There are so many factors affecting my own focus and concentration, and affecting that of listeners, that it is too complex a thing to unravel. The best I can do is prepare well, and accept that sometimes I will feel indifferent to my own music-making while others will find it inspiring, and sometimes it will be the other way around, and that all of it is worthwhile.
As an organist (arguably someone who leads worship, though not in the same way an ordained person might) I find the same approach helpful. I can practise the music, and prepare the choir to the best of my and their ability, and sometimes what I am doing will somehow speak to people and sometimes it won’t, and sometimes I will feel amazing and sometimes I will feel like a cantankerous organist who has got up on the wrong side of the bed to rehearse in a cold church with arthritic fingers. It’s still worth doing, every time.
But ultimately, worship isn’t something that I do because of the way it makes me feel, or the way it makes others feel. It is a response to how I feel about God (though my acute mood may vary considerably!). My remit in leading others in worship is not to make them feel good; it is to enable them, so far as I can, to respond to God.
A tangentially-related anecdote:
I was practising the organ one afternoon last year, and someone came into the church and started whistling along. It normally disturbs me when anyone “joins in” while I am practising and it took a bit of effort not to get up and find the person and tell them to hush. I continued playing, and the whistling continued, and I grumbled under my breath rather ungraciously, though I don’t think he could hear me.
When it was time for a break I got up and saw who had been whistling. It was a mentally disabled man who comes to the community cafe; at that stage I’d never seen him in a church service, though he has since started attending fairly regularly. I don’t know whether whistling along to my practising was a sort of worship for him, but it might have been. Certainly I felt a lot more relaxed about having had that additional distraction when I realised that the person whistling was someone with profoundly different abilities and experiences to mine.
Think I posted my previous comment as a reply to Bob’s comment, rather than a reply to your post. Oh sigh. It’s late, and I’m tired.
Fully agree Doug (I have more problem worshipping when I’m not presiding, because the darn priest isn’t doing it right! No, seriously…!). I think it all stems from the idea of worship as some sort of subjective inner mystical experience that you have to shut out the world and concentrate on, rather than an objective offering that we make to God. Personally, I love leading our congregation in making that offering of worship to God and I love breaking open the Word for them. And although I don’t try to ‘feel’ God’s presence, it’s a rare Sunday that I don’t go home with that sense of peace that tells me we were, in fact, together in God’s presence.
I think you’ve expressed the issue really well
‘I wonder also whether the way either David sets the question up depends on an assumption that worship is defined by what the worshipper experiences, rather than what the worshipper offers.’
There is a real sense, if we will allow it to be so that the liturgy is the worship – I also think that the Eucharistic prayer – or Great Thanksgiving here in NZ – is the prime point where the Priest is Offering worship on behalf of the whole church.
It is a little simplistic but I tend to think of it as in the liturgy of the word we assist the worship of the people and in the GT (not to be confused with G&T
) we are assisted in worship by the people of God.
Worship, at the end of the day, requires us (or not, after all He can raise up worshippers from stones . . .?) but it is not For us, but for His eternal Glory.