McWorship

This post is a bit inspired by Brodie's post called All about me worship? and reflections from Easter w/d here in stevenage and visiting Grace's 'out of nothing' and Headspace's 'Icons of Easter.'

Last year saw the cinema release of Super Size Me, a documentary about a man who ate only MacDonalds for 30 days.  The result as you might expect from a diet of big macs and fries was a big gain in weight and damage to his liver. What does this tell us? – a diet of only MacDonalds is bad for your health - ‘Just as the Big Mac and Fries are filling, they are also somewhat uniform and bland and on their own hardly a wholesome diet.’ (Ward, 1998).

It got me thinking, what is our worship diet like? Are we feeding ourselves a proper healthy diet? Has our hunger for God resulted in a fast-food worship time, where we just want to feel that spiritual experience to get us back on an even keel?  Stackhouse suggests that ‘worship takes on an authority of its own so that only in and through the experience of worship, and the way we perform in worship, can grace be appropriated … worship as spiritual formation is sidelined in favour of worship as effect’ (Stackhouse, The Gospel-Driven Church, 2004, 48).  Do we need to be reminded that ‘worship is “for” God, which is not the same thing as “meaningful for us”’? (Hauerwas, A Better Hope, 2000, citing Marva Dawn).  We want McWorship, which is all about us and perhaps unwittingly all for us.  McWorship is homogenous and unsurprising, you know exactly what you’re getting before you get there.  McWorship is undemanding, it doesn’t ask too much from us.  McWorship is easily consumable – due to its sameness - and keeps us spiritually filled, as long as we don’t leave it too long before we come again.  McWorship offers us simple uncomplicated and down-to-earth theology, which focuses on the disembodied “you” where ‘Jesus died for me’ and ‘it’s all about him.’  McWorship is neatly packaged with a McChristian language. McWorship looks good and tastes ‘nice’.  In and of itself, McWorship is a quick-fix and not something we have to totally avoid.  However, I wonder if a regular diet of McWorship will not leave us like a man who only eats Big Macs and Fries.  David Lyon warns that this kind of world ‘trivializes truth, simplifies suffering, and sucks us into its simulated realities’ (Lyon, Jesus in Disneyland, 2000).

Has a diet of McWorship left us unable to walk the way of the cross? Has it left us lethargic and malnourished to be Jesus’ disciples? Has McWorship helped us forget who the God we worship is or reduced him to a series of romantic platitudes? Or to say the same thing another way, does McWorship give us a big enough picture of God or does it sell it us short with distorted doctrine?

We need to recover worship that breaks out of that which seeks to contain it as something which can be neatly packaged; worship that feeds our hearts and minds with a picture of our big God; worship that is not afraid to leave some things unresolved; worship that is for God; worship that transforms us to the image of Christ through whom we worship the Father, in the power of the Spirit; worship that speaks of God and not our feelings for him; worship that energizes and nourishes us to live faithful lives and walk the way of the cross; worship that is rooted in the Christian story – that tells us who we are - and the traditions of the Christian church (e.g. its calendar and liturgy); worship that is sacramental; worship that confronts and defies the commercialization of our lives.

Comments

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Of course, I can resonate with this muchly. I read an advertisement in the TV guide today that claimed McDonalds had "108 Happy Meal combinations for caring mums" or something. what utter tosh, any caring parent would NOT take their kids to McDonalds on a regular basis! but more than that... grilled chicken and carrots and jelly... it's still a variation on the same generic theme: utter crud with little imagination. reminds me of the generic standard way of singing "My Jesus, My Saviour" that is, twice through the whole song, repeat the last two verses, then repeat the last line 3 times.

I guess the point here is that I agree with what you're saying. We have these generic pre-packaged songs but we forget the "best before end" date. There is no room for alteration, just with or without ketchup.

And the classic hymns of our fore-fathers did not need best-before end dates: many of them are still poignant and relevant today, so long as the theology is sound... and it's not always, because we're not perfect.

but it's not just our worship that gets pre-packaged anymore unfortunately. we get McAlpha to alleviate all need to think of creative and locally relevant evangelism, and Super-Sized McCell Structures to impliment so we don't have to think about discipling people anymore. sad really.