Worship is More than Good Packaging
A week or so ago, I received an email from the Editor-in-Chief of an Internet sports site to which I contribute. It was addressed to all of the Featured Columnists. He admonished us to think more about packaging and less about content when we put together our articles. He talked about using multimedia presentations, slide shows, and other creative means of packaging our work to increase interest and drive traffic.
This editor talked about how the days of just writing a great article and letting it stand on its own merits are forever gone. He held up the newspaper industry as proof positive that the game has changed. Across the country, once-mighty traditional newspapers are dead, dying, or reinventing themselves to survive.
It all made sense.
It also struck a rather sad chord somewhere in me. I know I have heard all of this before…not in another secular industry, but in a sacred one. Have ministers not been told for a decade or so that the packaging has become paramount? Sure, we give lip service to the message, but you can tell that too many believe that if they have enough sizzle and pop in their presentation, the message could be in Na’vi (no, I haven’t seen Avatar, but I don’t live under a rock, either) and the congregation— I know that is an old-fashioned term: let’s call them the consumers— will eat it up, dance in the aisle, tell all their friends, and, perhaps most importantly, drop their wallets in the plate.
Whether you are writing a sports article or delivering the gospel, the prevailing message is that you have to keep up with the Camerons (as in James Cameron, Hollywood innovator) in order to be relevant. Maybe it is true. Maybe the package is more important than the Gift.
Or maybe we have turned church into some high-tech infotainment nonsense that feeds our egos and arouses our senses, and then confused that with worship. Maybe we think that providing entertainment that is arousing enough to pull this generation from their iPads and HDTVs just one time per week (though they may Tweet a “totally awesome” point you make while you are talking) is the essence of the Great Commission.
Look, before you pop a hernia or froth too much at the mouth, I am not saying we should not use available technology in presenting the Gospel. I am not saying that churches that are “cutting edge” are dens of iniquity. I am not even saying that I do not appreciate a multimedia presentation of the gospel.
I am saying this: if you spend most of your time consumed with the packaging, the presentation, until the message is more of an afterthought than you will ever admit, you have missed the mark and the meaning of ministry. Moreover, simply arousing the senses is not worship.
At least, Abraham didn’t seem to think so when he grabbed Isaac’s hand and his trusty knife and said, “The child and I are going up that mountain to worship.”
Go ahead and write me off as the Crusty Crab if you want to, Spongebob, but deep down in that dried out inside where you once soaked up Jesus until he oozed out your pores, you know I am right.
Who am I to talk? Forget I mentioned it.
God bless your Sunday.
Fly Right — A Devotional
Dead flies putrefy the perfumer’s ointment…
Even when a fool walks along the way, He lacks wisdom, and he shows everyone
that he is a fool.
Ecclesiastes 10:1a,3
Getting his strut on
Here’s another fly Solomon found in the ointment: the hypocrisy of a fool. The foolish person wants to seem self-sufficient, like he’s got it all figured out. He won’t ask for directions. He doesn’t need any one’s advice. He won’t seek input, even in the big decisions of life. In his mind, he convinces himself that he looks pretty smooth. He doesn’t know how transparent he is. He doesn’t know how foolish he appears.
I like the way the New Living Translation records verse 3: “You can identify fools just by the way they walk down the street!”
You can almost see the fool strutting in those words, can’t you? Putting on airs. Pretending to be what he isn’t. And maybe the only one he really fools is himself. How wretched the aroma of the hypocritical life! Just read how Jesus addressed such people in the gospels. He pulled no punches, calling the Pharisees “whited sepulchers,” pretty on the outside, but full of dead men’s bones.
God demands and deserves honesty. Let’s avoid the hypocrisy of fools.
A Prayer for Today: “Father,I am not everything I ought to be. I am probably not everything many people believe me to be. But I pray that the one thing I might be is honest. I commit to living honestly and openly before You. Amen.”
NOTE: This is part three of a four-part series:
Part One: Flies in the Ointment
Part Two: Shoo Fly, Shoo!
The Law of the Jungle and the Law of Christ
Galatians 6:2,5 (NKJV)
Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ… For each one shall bear his own load.
From Rudyard Kipling’s timeless classic, The Jungle Book, comes this morsel of wisdom:
“Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break
it must die.
As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and
back –
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is
the Pack.”
Pay especially close attention, if you will, to that last line: “The strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the pack.” There is so much instruction for us in that simple metaphorical statement, especially if we consider it in concert with the words of the Apostle Paul.
Allow me to break it down:
THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK IS THE WOLF.
You have heard, no doubt, that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. In any place of community – whether a home, a church, a business organization, or whatever – the strength of the whole is contingent upon the contribution of each individual. Without the wolf, there is no pack. It is the strength and dedication of the wolf that makes the pack a possibility.
The same is true in your church or home or place of business.
Paul puts it this way: “For each one shall bear his own load.”
Let one soldier in a unit fail to do his job, and the entire unit is at risk. Let one member of a team be derelict in his duties and the whole team may fail. Let one church member fail to shoulder his part of the ministry burden, and the entire congregation is put at a disadvantage. Let one family member… well, you get the picture, right?
The strength of the pack is the wolf. You do matter. It IS important whether you do your part. No individual has ever lived and died to himself alone. Your influence and potential is greater than you may realize.
THE STRENGTH OF THE WOLF IS THE PACK
As strong and beautiful as the individual wolf may be, if he is alone, he is vulnerable. He is not a great solitary hunter. His safety and his strength is in the pack
For the church, Paul taps into this truth about the “pack mentality” in Galatians 6:2 when he instructs us to help bear the burdens of others. A community of believers is at its best when it rallies to the aid of a faltering member. Whether it is seeing a widow through the loss of her husband, or a young couple through the death of a child, or a family through the stress of unemployment, or simply lifting one another up in prayer before the throne of the grace.
Way back in Genesis, God saw and asserted that it was not “good” for a man to be alone. He needs companionship. He needs community. Let us beware of too much isolation. Let us be even more acutely aware of how vitally important the church, the home, the workplace, the nation, etc. is to our lives.
The point here is that we each have individual responsibilities, but we should not be individualists. We need each other. Together, with each of us doing our part, we are as formidable and as functional as the wolf pack.
And that, my friend, is the law of Christ…and the law of the jungle.
A PRAYER FOR TODAY:
“Father, I want to take the time today to be thankful for the places of community You have afforded me. (Be specific. Give thanks for your, family, church, workplace, country, etc.) I pray that I will never
take them for granted, and that I will fulfill my individual responsibility so that I am ever a blessing and never a burden. In Jesus’ name. Amen.”
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The JourneyMan by D. Gene Strother is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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