If you’ve missed it, we’ve been blogging through the book Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for This Urgent Time by Marva Dawn. For reference, here are the links to the previous chapters:
THE FATAL FLAW OF “DUMBING DOWN”
Dawn, citing William D. Hendricks’ book Exit Interviews, voices concern over a seeming paradox here in America: on the one hand, churches are growing. Yet people are increasingly disillusioned with the faith.
She returns to her earlier tension between tradition and relevance – the church can afford to be neither a stale traditional institution, nor “trivialize” the love of God and neighbor by revitalizing worship at the cost of substance. And this is the predicament that many churches today find themselves in.
Dawn argues that the solution is to hold fast to the “richness of the Church,” because even those aspects that run counter to today’s culture will seem a welcome breath of fresh air in a culture devoid of beauty, goodness and truth. It’s no wonder, then, that many voices have observed that the missional church has been dominated and led by artists rather than the CEO mentality of the megachurch world.
The problem, again, is that in catering to consumer demand, churches have suffered from trying to offer too many choices. To paraphrase heavily and offer an analogy from our culture, we often speak in terms of “going viral.” We love clever videos, bullet points and stories. The problem is that germs usually don’t live long. Who remembers what “went viral” thirty years from now? Granted, such tools may be useful in the short term, but if the Church is to survive the harsh tests of time it must learn to offer something far more durative.
Durative worship makes God the central focus:
“We dare not make worship too easy, for God is always beyond our grasp. Worship cannot be only cerebral or only emotional, for God is mysterious and wise. Worship must be unceasingly comforting so that through it God will address our suffering. It must be perpetually paradoxical so that we know we must worship forever. Strangers will have no need to return to our worship services if they can understand all that our worship offers of God in one Sunday gulp.” (p. 289)
DEVELOPING A LASTING ATTRACTION
She goes on to argue that worship that is a “lasting attraction” will do several things:
(1) Build character. Central to this is the idea of teaching sound theology to help the audience better understand themselves in relationship to God and neighbor.
(2) Build community. The challenge and task here is to move beyond mere spectatorship into genuine participation.
(3) Showing responsibility to the world. Applying the teaching of theology and scripture to a hurting world demonstrates a faith commitment that is not merely inwardly focused. I would add that genuine theology always leads to an outward focus, as it directs our narcissistic gaze away from self to God and neighbor.
(4) A passion for the gospel. It’s worth noting that Dawn writes before the recent explosion of “gospel-centered” everything. But surely, keeping the gospel at the center of one’s life is a sure way to assimilate all of the previously mentioned tasks. And churches can help accomplish this by keeping the gospel at the center of both teaching and worship.
The next post will cover Dawn’s final chapter as well as tie together some of these points.
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