Food For Thought

Today, I was given a book to read by my good friend and colaborer Doug Thompson who happens to be an Emerging Church apologist (kidding). Below, I have included an excerpt from the opening chapter of Dan Kimball's Book, Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations. I believe he hit the nail on the head with his analysis of current worship practices in "successful" evangelical churches.

“We usually call the weekend time when a church family gets together a “worship service.” Ironically, this term used to mean a time when the saints of God all meet to offer their service to God through worship and their service to others in the church. Over time, however, the title has slowly reversed. The weekend worship “service” has become the time of the week when we go to a church building much like a car goes to an automobile service station.

Most people view the weekend worship service as a place where we go to get service done to us by “getting our tanks filled up” at the service station. It’s a place where
someone will give a sermon and serve us with our weekly sustenance. In automobile terms, you could say it is our weekly fill-up. We come to our service station to have a song leader serve us by leading us in singing songs. All so we can feel good when we emotionally connect through mass singing and feel secure that we did “worship.”

We go to the weekend worship service and drop off our kids – that way they too can get served by having their weekly fill-ups. We are especially glad that our weekend service station now serves coffee in the church lobby – it’s as convenient as our automobile service station’s little mini-mart.”