Although I don’t agree with much of the theology of Tim Challies, and have taken him to task before, he makes an excellent point about people looking for “great worship”.

We have defined worship incorrectly as a church. I will write more on that later for now, props Mr. Challies.

Although there are things that can be done to enhance corporate worship, there is a profound sense in which excellent worship cannot be attained merely by pursuing excellent worship. In the same way that, according to Jesus, you cannot find yourself until you lose yourself, so also you cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself. Despite the protestations, one sometimes wonders if we are beginning to worship worship rather than worship God.

via Worshiping Worship :: worship :: A Reformed, Christian Blog.

I ran across this post from TheWorshipCommunity.com and thought it was worth discussing,

Bored With Contemporary Worship:

Musicademy caused quite a stir when they published this thoughtful post recently.

We don’t want to say it. It sounds like we’re consumers, wanting more entertainment, and we know that’s not the problem. Worse, it might sound like we’re tired of God – when we know we’ve only just scratched the surface of the infinitely creative, dynamically relational being he is.

Hence the collective sigh of relief in the London School of Theology Deep Calls to Deep conference when the outgoing Director General of the Evangelical Alliance, the highly respected and deeply passionate Joel Edwards, used the ‘B’ word without apology or caveat. ‘We’re bored in worship’. You could almost see tense shoulders sag and bright eyes perk up. We’re allowed to say it Our worship has become boring’ It was like permission, not to whine or complain or place blame people do that enough about worship anyway, but to admit the weaknesses in our contemporary corporate worship lives and to begin to address authentic, fundamental and God honouring change.

His full quote expresses it best:

“There is something about the charismatic movement which brought something new and fresh. It came out of something new God was doing.

I am thirsty for something new again. I have to confess to you that mostly on a Sunday morning I am bored And I wonder if one of the reasons why people are not singing is because they too are bored.

It may be a good thing to discover what you would write down if you spent two months noting what songs are sung on a Sunday morning. I cannot believe that so much of our repertoire has become so narrow. So predictable. That the formation of what we do on a Sunday is so utterly predictable. And I think to myself, how come the God who has formed the constellations and put the stars in place and has a new idea every second, doesn’t have something new for us for a Sunday morning? I wonder whether he might not be vaguely bored too.”

And so a conversation is stirring between worship leaders, pastors, songwriters, congregations, and radical thought the communities we are trying to reach, about how we might innovate our worship. No one person, movement or website has all the answers, but we’re pretty sure the questions begin with how we get out of this predictable, narrow, reality-dodging, inward looking spiral towards a creative, indigenous, multi-sensory, outward-looking expression of worship.

via Bored With Contemporary Worship : TheWorshipCommunity.Com.

The original post has some thoughts regarding the problem and solutions but I didn’t want to post them here. I wanted to hear what you have to say about the subject.

Are you bored with Contemporary worship? Do you long for something new and fresh? or are you very content with the way it is?

Sorry I’ve been a bit busy this week preparing for a worship retreat so not blogging or much of anything else. I will finish the final 3 of the 10 keys for effective worship leaders next week.

For now here’s a little levity as we go into the weekend.