By: Joe Barsuglia
The service is starting and everyone is gathering together. The guitar player gives a few words of welcome and invites people to stand up. "Alright everyone! Its time to rejoice! We have come together to lift up our praise to the King and worship Him. He is worthy so let’s sing it out! Great is Your faithfulness!" The service begins with upbeat songs about the faithfulness of God and His goodness and then might descend into a few personal songs that are a bit more reflective. Individuals face forward and sing along with the leader the familiar lyrics chosen from the top 40 favorite worship songs. This part of the church service lasts about 30 minutes and then everyone sits down and listens to a sermon for 45 minutes…then leaves. This is our reality. This is the medium, but does anything Divine happen? Is there any true encounter with the Holy One? Is there any real connection of our groaning souls with our Beautiful God?
Outside of our church services, lays a world devastated by floods, earthquakes, starvation, AIDS, war, violence & murder, economic challenges, and the destruction of the family. And, "we know that all creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time" (Rom 8:23).
Inside our churches we often give trite answers, cliché formats, provide pre-programmed spirituality, regurgitated conclusions, and bland monotonous expressions of Christianity that do not provide the means of redemption for the chaos in our world. Our world is full of disarray, allusions, confusion, spiritual hunger, and brokenness... and our times of corporate worship are often just cute, packaged, and nice.
Honesty before our Mysterious God has become a rarity in our worship services. A true encounter with the living Christ has become a distant ideal. Most of the time people come into our churches and leave because they don't smell Jesus (2 Cor. 2:15). No one can sniff out a fake faster than a college age student.
In our post-modern society we realize there are no easy answers, there are no quick solutions, spiritual growth is not always linear, and we often find the Divine in the least expected places. So how should this affect the medium, the channel, the avenue of our times of corporate worship?
How do we lead our college age friends collectively in times of expression to our Savior when they often doubt God's goodness, struggle with their own identity, battle with depression, and cannot seem to find the intimacy that their hearts' desire? As college leaders, what is important in our times of collective worship? What should people find in our gatherings?
What should our gatherings smell like?
The Bread of Life. Sincerity. Honesty. Communal sacrifice. Meaning. Repentance. Openness. Redemption. Glory. Identity. Truth. Family. Sorrow. Joy. Searching. Celebration. Longing. Grace. Grace. Grace. Acceptance. Questioning. Lamenting. Rejoicing. Intimacy. Restoration. Giving. Holiness. Global awareness. A taste of heaven. Compassion. Graciousness. An abundance of love. Communion with God. Communion with each other. Mercy. Needs being met. Reconciliation.
Our college gatherings should be a prophetic revelation and an eschatological foretaste of the divine family that Christ has adopted us into. With a divorce rate of about 50%, our college community desperately needs to know its identity as joint family members in union with the God who is love.
We often want our groups to sing, "Great is Your faithfulness," but we forget that Jeremiah, the weeping prophet wrote these words sandwiched between a suicidal sonnet of desperate lament.
We sing the words of David, the man after God's own heart, from Psalm 13, "My heart rejoices in your salvation." And we censor what he wrote three verses before, which could have easily been lyrics from a Kurt Cobain song, "How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day?" Why have we defined verse 5 as worship and truncated verse 2?
We must facilitate times where being needy for His grace is the norm and we don't come to the resurrection until we first come through death. We don't come to joy unless we first acknowledge the sorrow of a fractured universe. And along with our faith we must encourage our groups to bring their doubts, so we can honestly pray along with the words of Scripture, " Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief."
Joe has been leading college-age people in worship for over 6 years and has a tremendous heart for people to truly encounter God.
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