McWorship: A Million Customers a Day
Ξ March 30th, 2007 | → 2 Comments | ∇ Theology |
We go to church as consumers. It’s part of how we have all grown up. It’s a cultural default I think all North Americans end up with. We expect to get something for our time and in some cases our money. We expect that God will react in the same way as parties reacting during business transactions. I don’t think it’s a conscious thing - at least not all the time - but I do think it happens.
What has this caused? Well, churches have allowed themselves to be pressured into being a party in a business-transaction-type of worship service. Without realizing it, we have invented McWorship. A product where a million people a day are sort of put through the processing plant that we call the church. Why are so many churches so concerned about numbers? Oooo! That guy’s church grew to 2000 in the space of 2 years. HE must really get what God is trying to do. Well, either that or he’s just a good business man, right? Where in the bible does it talk about numbers being important anyways?
The bible talks about being fruitful - that’s for sure. But fruit isn’t necessarily numbers - and it’s not necessarily NOT numbers either. I think sometime it IS numbers, but not always. Confused? 
There are many many intangibles that we must be willing to allow for in our idea of what constitutes the “fruit” label.So why this McWorship? It’s cheap and nasty church-based consumerism. It’s thinking of God as some kind of commodity that we the church have possession of and are going to try and sell to the masses. One of our favorite sales techniques is “the show” of it all. How good is our band? How nice is our building? How flashy is our service?
As a songwriter I think about the musical implications of McWorship. In fact when a friend of mine, Dan Poxon, and I first thought up the term, McWorship, we were thinking more specifically of music. McWorship in the musical sense is the “safe” worship music. It’s “that praise band” sound, and that “hit” worship song. How does that make sense - HIT worship songs? Hits with whom? God? Are we sure about that? How do we know it’s a hit with God? The sales numbers for CDs they are on? So we say that if something sells well, then God must be blessing it and therefore he’s a fan of it? Thousands of people are out there in the world trying to sell a million different things and some of those things sell like hot cakes. Is God blessing all those things? Clearly not. What about pornography - a HUGE business. I dare say a business not considered a “hit” by God.
Anyways… we are all McChristians sometimes aren’t we? We just soak up that latest “hit” song - sometimes without even considering its nutritional value as a spiritual food for us. Is the theology correct? Are we engaging with the songs meaning, or just the catchiness of the beat? I mean seriously. Do we consume it in just the same way we sometimes consume a McDonald’s hamburger? We eat it and kind of turn a blind eye to the whole nutrition part. I mean, how can anything that tastes so good, be so bad for us? Right? And hey, it’s ok to eat it. It’s even ok to buy it. It’s just ok to build a whole diet around.
I think us as Christians (and especially we who are in charge of picking the songs that we sing on Sundays) need to take the time to consider the spiritual value of what we are offering in our music on a Sunday. We need to get serious about providing food that church go-ers can actually thrive on. In my opinion there are far too many songs that are written to sound just like the last “hit” song and therefore have a useable life of only a month or so. People get sick of them because they haven’t gotten over being sick of the last “big” song that sounded just like the new one. What they really need is something that has some creative integrity. What people REALLY need is REAL encounters with our REAL God - not fun encounters with great sounding music or a flashy media show. I feel like I say this all the time, but it’s true. We aren’t selling a product here. We are supposed to be realizing the fact that our God is THE God and that life with out Him is empty.
The consequences of not seeking a better diet are pretty clear. If people’s spiritual food is lacking substance and just has some addictive kind of aspects to it, then eventually people will stop thriving - or worse yet, if they are new to the church they will have never had the opportunity to thrive in the first place. They will fall into a sort of Christian junkie mode where they move from spiritual fix to spiritual fix without much concern about what they are consuming and without knowing that there is something very meaningful and real out there to connect with. They will start thinking that the presence of God is about how much they liked the music. Getting lost in the music is no measure of the presence of God.
Consider that people get lost in the music of bands all the time and much of time they are lost in the party atmosphere of a mosh pit or lost in the sexual nature of a song and how it might affect a potential relationship. Getting “lost” can mean a lot of things. What we better do is make sure we are getting lost for the right reasons. How do we do that? We need to provide music and teaching that provide people with real substance. We need to believe that God is as real as we say He is and stop pulling the punch. We need to believe that these people in the seats can have amazing encounters with God that can be every bit as wondrous as anything we read about in the bible. That’s when McWorship and McChristianity turn into AAA beef steak at Chez Jesus - we’re talking Haut Spirituality now. No more empty calories - no more one-off experiences that don’t really satisfy and only leave us madly running about looking for the next fix.
My point here is that we don’t really have to make sure that the music follows the popular format. It can be its own thing as long as it’s genuine and as long as it has integrity. We don’t need to follow the trends of the mega churches with their media-rich services. We don’t even need to water down the Word of God when we preach so that the newcomers can “get it”. Doing any of these things for wrong reasons is simply another church serving up McWorship. I for one don’t want to feel like I’m just following the fads of worship music. I want to pull up a chair at Chez Jesus and know that what I’m getting is the real thing.