Lying in Church

I have known people who have left the worship of the church because they believed they were losing their faith and could no longer in good conscience say the Creed, or in some other way participate in its common prayer.  They could not lie to themselves and others about their beliefs.  There are others, however, who have left churches not because they have lost their faith, but because the church demands that to participate in the worship service they must lie to God. 

As I write I have stumbled away from yet another Evangelical service where half the hymnody has made a liar of me. To join the songs I must tell the Lord what I think or how I feel about him in words that neither reflect my opinions, nor my experience of him, nor are they part of the universal language of Christian worship. In their place they are unobjectionable, since they presumably reflect the honest sentiments and opinions of the writers of the verses, and we may add to these the emotive language of what is unquestionably the common prayer of the church, in which, for example, the soul of the worshipper desires God as the hart pants for the flowing waters.

But does this justify having people congratulate the Lord for being “the best,” or make a personal prayer out of St. Paul’s confession that all he once held dear and built his life upon he counts as worthless next to knowing Jesus—the song of a convert from religious error and not of a person who has been raised in the Christian faith, its professions, confessions, and its longings? These are examples from the modern praise chorus, but they are no worse than many of the old gospel songs of the revivalist tradition from which they descend. These are not my words; they are not my songs, nor does the universal confession of the Church demand these confessions of me.

When the pastor, who is aware of the problem, suggests that if they do not apply directly to us (many of them assume the doctrines of perfectionism—which certainly don’t apply to me) we should make them our prayer, it doesn’t work simply because they are not. Because I believe the Lord who knows me attends all services of worship, and listens, I cannot sing them to his face. Paradoxically, the songs’ encouragement to draw close to God is the very thing that makes me avoid singing them, since the more aware I am of his presence, the worse many of them look. To sing them is not to enter into the common worship of the Church, the fundamental confession and experience of all Christians (whether or not they are personally aware of it) but to hold that common experience and worship hostage to the personal experience of the song writer. 

The worst is perhaps making me tell Jesus I love him or confess that “he’s my all,” for I am quite sure that I do NOT love him in the way this sounds in most of the music where I find this expression. He excites in me no sentimental interest whatever, and these songs are for the most part sentimental. And dare I stand before the Lord who knows my sins and inform him in a pleasant little tune that he’s everything to me? He’s not that, either, although he has every right to be. Nor can I sing the songs which nullify the self in magnification of God, for he did not send his Son into the world to make nothing of us, but to glorify us into his divine image—to make us by the redemption of his blood the gods we were meant to be—of which I will gladly and truthfully sing. The horrible “He’s everything and I’m nothing” song is an insult to our Redeemer. We were wholly unworthy of his redemption, but we weren’t nothing, either before or after. If we were, we couldn’t have been the object of his love.

As I grow older I am far more cautious about the use of words, great words like “love” in particular—so far more sensitive to their abuses. Where love for God sounds like little more than appreciation for someone who has done us favors, and the melody has no gravity, it seems wrong to sing it. On my very best days, I believe that I can just begin to glimpse the quality and magnitude of the love of God in Christ, and so begin faintly to love him as he deserves—and this never happens to me when I am in any sort of state such as the Evangelical “worship experience” desires to encourage, but quite the opposite—when I am thinking hard, or concentrating on doing things that I know I should do.

On days like today I leave church swearing that I have had it with the Evangelicals, and longing for the conservative Reformed churches, the old-fashioned Lutherans, and the nearly extinct (in this part of the world) Anglicans that paid very close attention to the words of worship music, subjected all of it to close pastoral scrutiny, put it in approved hymnals, and allowed nothing into it that was contrary to their theology. (There were reasons for this. They didn’t do it because they were fuddy-duddies or didn’t like anything new. It was done for truth’s sake.)  They did not allow it to pass unexamined from the realm of popular music, even if it was popular Christian music, into the worship service, no matter how attractive its tune or beguiling the minstrels who sang it. Then I remind myself that these other churches have their own problems; one picks one’s poison. (And yes, for those who will write me on it, that includes the Catholic and Orthodox poisons, too.)

Lex orandi lex credendi. I will say it once again: Evangelicalism cannot endure as long as it remains at the high level of theological irresponsibility and doxological infantilism reflected in its services of worship. The error and simplicity tolerable in the infant is intolerable in those who have come of age. However numerous the adherents it attracts may be, it will slip into the heterodoxies we now see it engaging in ever-larger numbers, and will in a generation or two be no church at all.