“I Don’t Get Anything Out of the Service”
“I don’t get anything out of the service.”
A Lutheran can never say this, at least if the service is liturgical, and especially if the service includes the Most Holy Sacrament.
In a liturgical setting, people will hear the Word of God. And that is always efficacious - even if it is read poorly. Traditional Lutheran hymns are also confessions of Scripture and grounded in our Lord Jesus Christ, and they also convey the Gospel - even if they are played too slowly or sung out of tune. Preaching, likewise, so long as it is the proclamation of the Word of God and not yammering on about pizza or the latest football game, is also efficacious - even if the preacher’s voice is grating, he is too loud or too soft, or is merely reading a manuscript and never looking up.
In other words, if the service is a traditional Lutheran liturgy, you are getting something out of the service. And not just something. You are getting everything out of the service. You are getting forgiveness, life, and salvation. You are receiving the gift of “the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.”
Of course, this is not to excuse poor liturgical practice. Not at all.
We pastors should strive for excellence and to constantly improve in our preaching and celebrating. This means working on our weaknesses. If our preaching is not up to par, we need to work on it. If we are not projecting our voices, or are yelling, we need to fix it. If our exegesis is weak, our biblical languages forgotten, our knowledge of the word of God fading, we need to roll up our sleeves! Practice your singing. Lead the liturgy with rigor and energy. Work on it! Conduct the rites as if you really believe this stuff. I know you do believe it, but convince everyone in the pew with your voice, your face, your gestures, and your body language. Lean into the rubrics. They are there for a reason. Celebrate the Mass with manly vigor and reverent joy. Behave in the chancel as if Christ were truly there by means of a miracle - because He is! Work with your organist/musicians to keep the hymns from dragging. Strive for excellence insofar as you are able - understanding that most of our churches are not Bach’s St. Thomas congregation in Leipzig.
When people say they “don’t get anything out of the service,” they usually mean that they aren’t being entertained. And this lust for constant dopamine hits comes from the world, as we are surrounded by 24-7 high-octane on-demand visual and audio stimulation. It’s naked girls and car crashes all around. To the world, a liturgical service with preaching, hymns, and Holy Communion is a staid affair by comparison.
So the so-called church growth/missional/contemporary crowd seeks to alleviate the “boredom” by doing not what Luther did, but what the radical reformers did: tear the edifice down to the roots (hence the term “radical”), get rid of the liturgy, sweep the traditional hymns away, stop giving exegetical sermons, and downplay the Eucharist. They replace the liturgical service with something sexier: instead of a liturgy, make it spontaneous and subject to change, replace hymns with upbeat pop songs with vapid and vaguely religious lyrics. Put a band up front, with drums, guitars, and a frontman. And surround them with screens. Get out of the pulpit, drop the vestments, dress casually, crack jokes, and just make people laugh and feel good. Get rid of the crucifix, and replace the theology of the cross with the theology of glory. The Lord’s Supper can be celebrated much less frequently, and without ceremony. You can even change the words of institution to make them sound more spontaneous, and add some nondenominational-sounding interjections instead of reciting the words with fidelity as they appear in the hymnal. The key is “passion” and an ironic forced and fake “authenticity.”
It’s all a show.
This is the common formula. It is currently being been done, at least to some degree, in hundreds if not thousands of our churches, all the while, promising numerical growth. If you build it, they will come. The experts of the Church Growth Movement have been making these promises, like the priests of Baal, for nearly half a century, only to see the numbers of Christians continue to shrink. Maybe their god is relieving himself.
The best way for the church to exist in a world of dopamine, porn, pop concerts, and light shows is to offer an alternative: authenticity that has been tried and true across the millennia: real worship based on God’s preferences rather than our insatiable desire to be the center of attention. We need worship that unites all voices across the range of age demographics and subcultures in a harmonious unity that transcends ephemeral pop trends. We need to be countercultural and stop playing with the ouija board of songs by heretics from Bethel and Hillsong and other New Apostolic Reformation so-called apostles and prophets - not to mention paying these cults royalties from our collection plates to use their rubbish.
I’m going to be writing more about that.
We need to stop galivanting around with secular sexiness and get back to Jesus, to authentic doctrine and practice, and offer an alternative to the trainwreck that is our decadent and degenerate popular culture. At very least, keep the world and its entertainment outside of the nave, and let the church once more be a sanctuary, a holy ark to protect the redeemed from the crafts and assaults of the devil.
Our fathers in the faith expressed wisdom, over and against the radical reformers of their own day and age, when they committed themselves to the traditional liturgy - a commitment that every Lutheran pastor (by virtue of his ordination vows) and every Lutheran congregation (by virtue of their commitment to the Book of Concord) share - in Article 24 of both the Augsburg Confession and the Apology:
In our churches Mass is celebrated every Sunday and on other festivals when the sacrament is offered to those who wish for it after they have been examined and absolved. We keep traditional liturgical forms, such as the order of the lessons, prayers, vestments, etc. ~ Ap 24:1
They knew that objectively, we get something out of the kind of worship centered on Word and Sacrament as opposed to innovations that tickle the ears of sinners obsessed with themselves and filled with hubris, believing that they know better than their fathers in the faith. Unlike the church bodies from which Lutherans have imported their non-liturgical worship forms, we authentic Lutherans confess the efficacy of Word and Sacrament, and that our justification is monergistic rather than based on a decision on our part that can be manipulated by feelings and emotions and musical seduction. For eventually the dopamine hits fail to come, and the “exciting new way of doing church” becomes stale and boring to the self-centered soul. And like an addict, the unsatisfied ego must continue to wander, “not getting anything out of it” and looking for greater titilation elsewhere.
It is only by defiantly offering a bold alternative, something that stands apart, that we will get people - perhaps a remnant - to start realizing that when it comes to the vacuous pop culture that has come into the church like a Trojan Horse, they truly “don’t get anything out of it.”