Father Orthoduck was quite amused to have the comic above published on the same day as the latest commentary by Terry Mattingly on church trends. In his blog he comments:
Today’s megachurches offer members new options.
Grandmother may attend a service with hymns or — as Baby Boomers turn 60something — folk music or soft rock. Pre-teens will bop to Hanna-Montana-esque praise songs in their services, while the young people get harder rock. Over in the “video cafe,” evangelical Moms and Dads can sip their lattes while musicians build the right mood until its time for the sermon. That’s when the super-skilled preacher’s face appears on video monitors in all of the niche services at the same time.
A complaint that is heard from many across the spectrum from Orthodoxy through Evangelicalism through Mainline Protestantism through Roman Catholicism, etc., is that there is a line between a worship that has an appropriate cultural adjustment and a worship that has become pure entertainment. All too often, the focus in the type of megachurch worship pictured above is not on the worship of God–with culturally appropriate hymnology–but rather on the simple entertainment of the people present. And, it is not as fine a line as some in today’s megachurches would like to argue. When one sees “worship” leaders engaged in a dialogue with the congregation and trying to get them pumped up–a problem which has existed for decades and is not new to the megachurches–one is not participating in a worship but in performance art. When the preacher engages in rhetorical flourishes in order to draw ooohhhss and ahhhhhhssssss, the same is true.
Father Orthoduck is in favor of wonderful choirs that make goosepimples rise on your arms as your are worshiping the Lord in the Liturgy. He is also in favor of priests who are accomplished rhetoreticians. Father Orthoduck sees no spiritual benefit in having inadequate choirs and boring priests, unless it is the benefit of suffering leading to endurance which leads to character which produces hope. While it may be true that we Orthodox are engaged in the worship of God regardless of the adequacy of choir and homily, there is a reason why–in the Old Testament–the Lord insisted on trained choirs for the Temple and gifted musician/authors such as King David. Inadequate choirs and homilies can take the attention away from the worship of God just as much as the way in which “worship” takes place in some of the megachurches.
Either way, the issue is whether the worship truly focuses on God or whether it points to ducks, err, I mean human beings. When one sees a “worship” that points to human beings (or ducks), one is seeing no worship.
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