Now, there's a difference between creating a worshipful environment and flat out manipulation, and this post is not to dive into where that line is. My point is that we need to step back and discern what we are communicating by how we expect students to participate in worship. Are we communicating that worship is primarily about our experience of God, or do we communicate that worship is primarily about giving glory to God? As I said already, it's possible to have a positive experience as we give glory to God, but sometimes, we need to give glory to God when we don't feel like it, or when we don't understand what God is doing in our lives and we're frustrated, or when we're mourning.
By the way, whether we expect students to participate in the main worship services at our churches says a lot about our theology of worship and whether we think it's about the experience a student gets or about the student giving glory to God.
The column:
From the point of view of experience, it seems it's impossible to tell the difference between drug-induced and "natural" mystical experiences. Both are powerful. Both enable people to enjoy a transcendent moment. Both seem capable of transforming people so that they feel a greater sense of empathy for and unity with other people—what most people would call love.
This sort of thing makes many a Christian nervous, and for good reason. We live in an age in which religious experience is the centerpiece of faith for many, many Christians. We disdain faith that is mere intellectual assent or empty formality. We want a faith that is authentic, that makes us feel something—in particular, one that enables us to experience God. When we describe the one time in the week when we put ourselves in the presence of God, we talk less and less about "worshipping God" and more about "the worship experience." The charismatic movement, with its emphasis on experiencing the Holy Spirit, has penetrated nearly all churches. This religious mood, which characterizes our era, is epitomized by the title of Henry Blackaby's continuing best seller, Experiencing God.
And the money quote:
We are shortchanging our people when we make worship mostly about experience or a pep rally to motivate people to good deeds. We practice religious neglect when we fail to witness to them the saving story of God in Christ and train them to be fellow witnesses of that story, so that they might share that story with a world that does not know its left hand from its right. A world which does not know God as Emmanuel, but merely as "Something." A world that knows transcendence but does not have eyes to see God with us even to the end of the age. A world that senses "attunement with other people," but does not recognize the One who holds everyone and everything together by his love.
