What Is Worship? | Week 1

True Worshipers

What does the worship culture of the local church need to look like to remain faithful and to engage with the realities that Jesus and the Holy Spirit bring us? Culture is the expectation, the standard, and the driving force that characterizes a group of people. We can not create culture in the same way we can create a structure or a system.

For instance, in church today, we can’t simply gather up all the appropriate pieces of what “should” be in the service and then have the end result be a worship culture that seems genuine, passionate, and aligns with what Jesus spoke of. Rather it’s something we all carry with us and try to manifest in our actions. The culture of the local church is embedded in each and every individual person who makes up that local body of believers. Understanding this is important. 

But where do we go from here? What did Jesus reveal to us? 

“But a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such as these to worship Him. God is Spirit, and His worshipers must worship Him in spirit and in truth”

—John 4:23–24, ESV

As the person in charge of music at my local church, I have to address the obvious elephant in the room: music, which up to now I have purposefully avoided talking about. This is because there is a course correction that needs to take place in overall church culture today: separation of the christian concept of worship and the artistic expression of music. There is an obviously overwhelming idea in the church today that fuses together musical expression and the lifestyle of worship. I struggled with this for many years, growing up in the church and having musical abilities. I had this notion that worship was just another word for church music. No one ever said that, but our actions kept perpetuating this idea, so I never thought to believe otherwise. 

There are different mindsets Christians and churches have right now regarding “worship in the church.” These aren’t present in the church’s mission statement, but rather in how it manifests in their church. These mindsets range from “worship time in the church (the time when they sing songs) is a time where we invite the Holy Spirit to do something dramatic in the room that would recreate some Acts 2 pentecostal experience” all the way to “church music needs to sound THIS way, with THESE songs (hymns), or else I can’t be happy.”

And then there are plenty of churches in between. But my biggest contention is that every single one of these churches in this wide range of thinking—though they’d be talking about their mindset with regard to “worship in the church”—would be actually just talking about their church’s music portion of the service.

Now, being a musician, I obviously love music. So I have no problems with Christians or churches engaging in musical expression. But I think there needs to be a hard line drawn between these seemingly inseparable elements.

If we, as Christians, can’t talk about our concept of worship without mentioning music, there is something wrong.

This brings me back to the words recorded of Jesus in the passage above. We should be careful to understand what he’s saying here, and not jump to conclusions of what we think is being said based on our current cultural environment. He’s not only revealing key characteristics of what “true worshipers” are, which we will address in the coming weeks here, but he’s giving us the divine insight that this is what God is looking for from his people. God is seeking true worshipers, those who worship in spirit and in truth. This revelation should not make us think about our weekly Sunday music time at church, but rather make us question how we are pursuing to be the true worshiper that God is seeking, regardless of our engagement in musical expression at our local church organization.

To end, I don’t think this is anyone’s fault. Music exists throughout biblical history. Music is a beautiful gift from God, and as Christians have sought to engage with these different artistic gifts over time, it makes sense that these expressions have been deemed important to become involved in our gatherings. I get it. But again, I think there is a necessary course correction that needs to happen. We’re all so involved with our creative and artistic expressions of “worship” in our current day and age that I think we’re confusing the current and upcoming generations on the way we should engage in worship. Jesus was not talking about musical expression in this passage. He was talking about something deeper. So in the church today, I think we’d be wise to lighten the focus from our artistic pursuits and to try to realign our pursuit of worship with Jesus’ revelation to us. This being that God is seeking those who worship in spirit and in truth; he is seeking true worshipers.

—Luke Soliwoda