From what we’re told about multisites and online churches…

1. We get just as much out of watching a video screen as being there in person
2. Participating in person wouldn’t really change the experience anyway
3. The leader is just as happy seeing me as an off-site statistic than seeing my face and hearing my voice
4. The leader doesn’t need to really know me, nor I him

If that logic is good enough for worship, shouldn’t it be good enough for football, which we’re told isn’t nearly as important?

1. Watching on TV is just as exciting as being there
2. Cheering from my couch affects the team just as positively as the folks who are cheering at the stadium
3. The coach and quarterback know that I’m with them when they review the Nielsen ratings the next day
4. The coach and QB would prefer that I never interact with them in real life

Besides #4, no-one believes that this is the case. Going to a game is such a different experience than watching on TV that we’ll pay lots of money for the opportunity to do it. It’s not surprising, therefore, that we so often find Perry Noble on the sidelines at Clemson football games, and his leaders in the stands (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

These guys obviously don’t believe that watching at home is as good as being there.

Except when it comes to church.

The sermon you hear on your iPod is significantly inferior to the preaching you hear at your local church on Sunday morning. Here’s why:

1. The preacher doesn’t know you. Although preaching is not the only aspect of shepherding, ideally preaching and shepherding should go together. A preacher feeds his flock the Word of God, though always presenting it in a way that’s meaningful for that particular congregation. To your pastor, you’re a known family member sitting around the (metaphorical) table; to your podcast preacher, you’re a hit, an anonymous number.
2. You can choose your sermons. Podcasts are perfect for people with itching ears (that’s all of us). Each sermon is labeled and invites us to download or delete it. When I go to my local church on Sunday, I usually don’t know the details of the pastor’s sermon. He commits to preach the Word of God as it’s written, and I commit to listen, test and obey the preached Word as I hear it. Dodging difficult messages is harder when you don’t see them coming.
3. You can listen while distracted. When you listen to a preacher while driving down the interstate eating your lunch, you’re probably not going to be able to concentrate quite as well as if you were sitting in church. The very value of podcasting is that we can take our preachers with us, so the assumption is that we’ll be multitasking when we listen. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with multitasking, but it’s not worship.
4. You can listen without your Bible. Although this is possible to do in church, the on-the-go multitasking quality of podcast audiences makes this much more likely. Having a Bible on hand as we listen lets us see as well as hear the Word; it also lets us quickly check the context of a verse and engage in on-the-fly testing of the preacher’s message.
5. You’re alone. In church I am both encouraged and challenged by the fact that I see my Christian family worshipping with me. Fellowship with God is accompanied by fellowship with his family. Although podcasting and Internet participation carry with them the idea of a virtual community, it’s still only virtual. I know there may be thousands of other believers sharing the podcast with me, but I don’t know who they are. Neither will they know me.
6. He’s always preaching to someone else. When we listen to a podcast preacher, it’s almost always someone else’s preacher. When the preacher challenges his congregation, it’s always someone else who’s being challenged, not me. Not only am I anonymous and unaccountable, the preacher isn’t even expecting me to be accountable.
7. It’s usually out of context. Sermons are an integral part of church worship, which usually includes other elements like singing, prayer, confession, communion and giving. To take the sermon out of that context deprives it of the participation and preparation that is a valuable part of the in-church sermon.

I’m not saying that we need to delete all of our podcast subscriptions. There are obviously exceptions to all the points I’ve just made.

Clearly, there is value in hearing the Word of God preached well by anyone, but our primary source of spiritual sustenance, beyond our own Bible study and prayer, should come through membership in a local church with a preacher that faithfully preaches God’s Word.

Everything else is gravy. Tasty, but not filling.

(Full disclosure. My own podcast list, in order of most listened to, is Sinclair Furguson, Alistair Begg, and RC Sproul.)

Worship should matter to us because WE BECOME WHAT WE WORSHIP! So right now as you read these very words you are evolving into your object of Worship. There’s only 2 kinds of Worship objects in this world: GOD & BAD – So who are you becoming?

Are we really evolving into God?

The idea appears in the statement four times, so it doesn’t seem to be accidental.

Some perspective:

He spreads out the northern skies over empty space; he suspends the earth over nothing…

The pillars of the heavens quake, aghast at his rebuke…

And these are but the outer fringe of his works; how faint the whisper we hear of him! Who then can understand the thunder of his power?

Some God.

Now, I’d like to open a discussion about mega-churches. Let me make it clear that I have never heard James Duncan speak against mega-churches. These views are mine and mine alone.  He is certainly capable of agreeing or disagreeing with any of these thoughts, as are each of you.  I will attempt to put forward a scriptural view of what Church is, and how it should look. However, admitting that some of this is grey area, I am open to correction.

Two straw-men that must be burnt before we can engage in any authentic discussion on this matter:

1. There is no concrete cut-off number where a church has become too large.  It would be impossible to pinpoint such a number. Thus, forcing me to do so would effectively change the point of this discussion and kill any other argument that I may be able to make.
2. To insinuate that large attendance of a particular church is necessary for the sake of thousands of salvations, is to completely misunderstand the nature of salvation, the purpose of church, and the power of the Almighty God. If God can save souls at a certain mega-church, he can also do so at a small rural congregation, or even in some open field in China where there is no established church of any size in sight.

For the sake of this discussion, we’ll use Hartford Institute’s definition for a mega-church, which it gives in it’s simplest terms as a Protestant congregation of two thousand or more regular attenders. Again, don’t get caught up in a specific number, but it will help if we all work from the same definition.

With all this in mind, I will now try to answer:

What is Wrong With a Mega-Church?

• It usurps the shepherd/sheep relationship that a pastor is to have with his congregation. We’ve seen here where some pastors have been down-right scornful with members of their flock who would hope for their pastor to care about them specifically. True, one man cannot faithfully minister to 10,000 people, but a pastor’s heart should be to care for his sheep. Here’s what Andy Stanley said in a 2006 interview with Leadership Journal: “Should we stop talking about pastors as “shepherds”?
  

  Absolutely. That word needs to go away. Jesus talked about shepherds because there was one over there in a pasture he could point to. But to bring in that imagery today and say, “Pastor, you’re the shepherd of the flock,” no. I’ve never seen a flock. I’ve never spent five minutes with a shepherd. It was culturally relevant in the time of Jesus, but it’s not culturally relevant any more.

  Nothing works in our culture with that model except this sense of the gentle, pastoral care. Obviously that is a face of church ministry, but that’s not leadership.

  I think most of us understand that you can’t just throw out biblical terms because they are problematic to our methodology, but that’s exactly what Stanley has done, as have hundreds of other “pastors” who see him as a mentor. We must change our methodology to fit scripture, even if that means not packing thousands of seats with people you have no intention of ministering to. It only makes sense that a pastor should not be over a congregation that is too large for him to meet their needs. Of course, some of this physical work is delegated to deacons, but if a pastor is to be held accountable for all the sheep entrusted to him, he needs to have a relationship with them. Some pastors may be able to faithfully attend to 1000 or more members. Some may only be able to care for 20 or 30, but if a person is going to church and not being ministered to, they are actually just attending a performance.

• It fuels the cult-of-personality, celebrity pastor driven congregation. The majority of these mega-churches are headed by charismatic, purpose-driven leaders. These guys are very driven towards their goals. I would assume that most of these guys could be just as successful running any business as they have been in running a church. That leads me to ask, is this why thousands of people are showing up on Sunday morning? I don’t recall Paul, when giving instructions to the churches he planted, asking, “Who among you has the most charismatic personalty? Who is the most fashionably dressed? Who has the most clever wit?”. No, the things he looked for in church leaders (listed in 1 Timothy 3:1-7 ) all dealt with character and righteousness.
• It raises questions about the motivation for a pastor to have such a church. As in, why do you need 12,000 people in your church, 11, 500 of whom you will never have any contact whatsoever? Are you the only minister in your town capable of delivering the Gospel? Isn’t it possible that a large majority of these peoples could be more effective elsewhere, where there attendance will be much more noticeable? Is it a pride issue? Does it make you feel powerful to know their are thousands of souls hanging on your every word? One could assume that a congregation of 12,000 probably pays better than a congregation of 500. Is that an issue?
• It makes it impossible for all attendees to be involved in worship in any meaningful way. The real worship will have to be performed by those on stage, while thousands of others watch from the seats. 1 Corinthians 14:26 paints a picture of all members being vitally involved in a worship service. This is completely impossible at a mega-church. The ministry is then left to the professionals, while the normal people sit and watch.  This is also in contrast with Ephesians 5:19. I could also argue that this is against the Priesthood of Believers described in 1 Peter 2:9.

I’m going to stop here for now. If there is sufficient discussion, I may do a series on this, but this should be plenty to get us started.

Jesus: Maveling and Moved

A Grace that Saves Suffices

Here’s what I find so attractive and refreshing:

1. It respects the power of the Word. Furguson doesn’t promise to rock our world, yet he does so simply by preaching simply.
2. It shows the benefit of going deep. Furguson knows the Bible, and it shows in the observations and insights he passes on to his congregation.
3. It engages the whole person. I love the way Furguson invites you to think with him about the Scripture, and then he moves beyond logic and touches the soul and the heart as well. Don’t tell anyone, but the conclusions of these sermons made me a little teary eyed.
4. It shows the benefit of sane thinking. A good pastor need not be out of his mind. Furguson uses careful thinking and logic to reveal profound insights that are not obvious at first reading.
5. It reaches the whole family. Notice at the beginning how children are encouraged to read the Word and follow the sermon. There aren’t any bouncers at the doors of this church.
6. The focus is on Jesus. These sermons are a careful study of Jesus and his grace. The first one, Marveling and Moved, invites you to sit and watch the Savior for as long as you possibly can. Furguson, through the Gospel, paints a picture of a loving Savior from whom you would never want to avert your eyes.
7. It is expository exaltation. When you hear the Word of God preached well, how can you not worship? As Piper said,
   

   Preaching does not come after worship in the order of the service. Preaching is worship. The preacher worships—exults—over the word, trying his best to draw you into a worshipful response by the power of the Holy Spirit.

8. It feeds the sheep. These sermons are excellent examples of how we can eat the Word. Learning anew of Jesus’ grace is life changing. Although these sermons don’t start out promising to solve some felt need, their life application is at once profound and practical.
9. It witnesses to the lost. After listening to the Word of God being proclaimed so clearly to the saints, how would you not want to know Jesus as your Savior? Furguson shows that good preaching to Christians is inherently evangelistic.
10. The accent is just right. Reformed theology and Scottish accents just work so well together (sorry, pastor).

Worship is the ONLY activity of the HUMAN SOUL…. YOU ARE INCREDIBLE WORSHIPERS!

What?

Worship should be the most important activity of the human soul, but you’re stealing a whole lot of bases if you assure yourself and your followers that you’ve got the whole endeavor sown up.

Job (Job 7:11) and David (Psalm 6:3) had bitter and anguished souls that required God’s restoration (Psalm 23:3). In fact, in Psalm 43 it is the very fact that David’s soul is downcast that turns him to worship.

Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me?

Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God. (Psalm 43:11)

In Psalm 103 David tells his soul to worship God.

Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name.

Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.

Was God just wasting his breath when he commanded us to love him with all our soul in Deuteronomy 6:5?

I could go on, but there’s no way that worship is the only activity of the human soul. Cooper presents a pantheistic version of worship. Pantheism says God is everything, which really means that God is nothing. Cooper says that worship is everything, which means that worship is nothing. If my bad attitudes, depressions, doubts and rebellions are worship, God is nothing either.

Cooper’s tweet apparently came from last week’s sermon on worship where he repeatedly taught that “it’s not about the quality of our worship, it’s about the quality of our worship object.” The implication is that we all worship something, so good worship happens when we worship the right thing.

Not so.

It’s like saying, “It’s not about the quality of your marriage, it’s about the quality of your spouse.” If you believed that, what misery and neglect would you have license to inflict on your fine spouse? How we treat our spouse is a central contributor to the quality of our marriage.

If we’re top-notch (incredible was Cooper’s term) worshipers and all we need to do is find God, why does God put so much emphasis on doing it correctly? If Cooper’s teaching were true, we can ignore the second (no images), third (no vain use of his name), and fourth (worship on the Sabbath) commandments. We also can do away with the whole tribe of Levi, whose purpose is was to ensure that God was worshipped correctly. If we don’t need the Levites, we can delete Leviticus as well.

Cooper is presenting a recipe for completely ignoring God. Worship requires discipline and obedience. As we’ve been discussing recently, it’s not just whatever we want it to be. It’s also not something we do all the time. We can cease to worship God, or worship him poorly, without necessarily worshipping something or someone else.

The object of our worship is indeed important, but so is the quality of our worship. Just ask Uzzah. He was a minder of the ark of the covenant who reached out to steady it when one of the oxen that was carrying it to the temple in Jerusalem had stumbled. He was certainly worshipping God with all his might, but he was doing it incorrectly, and God struck him dead for it. (2 Samuel 6:5-8)

Not only does it matter how we worship, but Cooper’s second statement is rendered meaningless by the first. If we worship all the time, what makes us so incredible? My goldfish swims all the time, but you would mock me if I told you that it was an incredible swimmer because of it. It’s an average swimmer, and sometimes it even stops swimming to rest. If it jumped out of the bowl to answer my phone, it would be an incredible swimmer.

Only God can give the verdict that we’re incredible worshippers, not a church leader who thinks everything we do is worship.

One more thing. An incredible worshipper would not ever wish to be known as incredible. Real worshippers just want to show how incredible the worshipped is.

what does it matter? as long as people are being reached for Christ and the doctrine is sound, who cares if online worship replaces physical in-house worship for some? think of it this way, say you live in florida and really like this church in seattle. if you’re able to attend the seattle church online and be ministered to, what’s wrong with the methods used in online worship?

One comment, three questions. Let’s give this a shot.

1. What does it matter? If the primary purpose of our lives is to recruit new converts, it doesn’t matter. If the primary purpose of our lives is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, it really does matter.
2. Who cares? God.
3. What’s wrong? It’s wrong because it inverts the purpose of worship and makes it all about us. Although worship does benefit us, its primary purpose is to benefit (glorify, bring joy to) God. Although he needs nothing from us, he instituted worship as the most appropriate way for us to regularly commune with him. As the Westminster divines discovered,
   

   The acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men.

   God’s Word has so much more to say about how we worship than it does about evangelism. Just because we’re trying to attract the unsaved doesn’t mean that we get to override God’s acceptable methods of worship.

If we are to ignore and abandon proper worship just because people are being reached, why include worship in our services at all? The commentator does acknowledge that doctrine is important, though I don’t know why. If evangelism trumps the worship of God, why should doctrine matter either? Actually, if a church’s doctrine suggests that the worship of God can be jettisoned for evangelism, it’s not sound doctrine in the first place.

Recently, we’ve seen Perry Noble mock parents for being concerned about worship, and this comment is in a similar vein. Why be so uptight about worship when people are going to hell?

Why? Because worship is the whole point. Evangelism is the gateway to worship. When God saves us, he regenerates our heart and makes it capable of performing its most important function of worshipping and glorifying God. Instead, the Turnstile Church treats evangelism as a gateway to evangelism. That will work for a while, but at some point the newly recruited recruiters will ask why is it so important to be saved? If it’s just so that you can be a volunteer to help sign up more volunteers, you’re cheapening the faith by running the church the same way as a multilevel marketing scheme. When the primary value and purpose of a marketing operation is in recruiting rather than in enjoying the product itself, loyalty to the product and process is going to be tenuous and temporary.

God-directed worship gives us an answer to the question of why salvation is so important. God, by his grace, adopts us into his family, making communion with him possible and necessary. God desires our worship, and he wants us to worship in ways that he has directed. It’s appropriate to honor him by paying a great deal of attention to what those directions are.

Although it’s not its purpose, worship can be an evangelistic tool. When the unsaved see how we are able to enjoy God’s presence, a jealousy to be a part of that may suggest that the Holy Spirit is drawing that person to salvation, because we know that our natural condition is to rebel and hide from God. So, rather than considering God-directed worship as an optional extra, we should place it front and center and show the world that it is why and how we rejoice in our salvation.

The first 3:20 is the best, but it’s all worth a look.

Could you not have a physical campus-less church and still be the church as Christ intended it?…

Is the disciple-making machinery of church the worship service or the community the worship service creates?

If the technology is here, or coming soon, where sophisticated worship services can be experienced in all their intensity anywhere in HD, the real work ahead for the church is learning how to guide and manage community, the kind of authentic community that, in Acts, added to its number daily and changed the history of the world.

I think a lot is going to boil down to questions about what’s the role of the weekly service in daily worship? And how important will it be to have a weekly physical gathering spot that belongs uniquely to a specific community of believers?

In other words, does worship need a common physical foundation as has traditionally been found in the church sanctuary? My answer to that question is yes. Without a weekly gathering spot we lose the sensuality of worship that God built into it.

Worship is inherently physical. It can’t be fully experienced by clicking a button or watching a screen. Let’s look at ways that worship engages our five physical senses.

1. Hearing. In one sense, this is the easiest sense for the online church to satisfy. We hear God’s Word read and taught by preachers. We hear prayer. We hear the worship band and worship leader. Worship can also include the absence of hearing, as found in moments of silence and reflection. One weakness of online worship, however, is that we can’t hear each other. If I do sing along, no one hears my joyful participation, or perhaps notes my lack of participation.
2. Sight. Again, another one that is served fairly well by a computer or television screen. We can see the leader. We can see Scripture texts and various artful symbols of God and his works. As with hearing, online worship, for now, doesn’t have the capability to let me see the people I am worshipping with, people who are made in God’s image. Young believers can learn and be encouraged by the behavior of older or more mature saints. The simple ability to see multiple generations of a family worship together communicates profound truths about the body of Christ that is lost if all we see is the preacher and the band.
3. Touch. God’s people don’t just assemble, they rumble. Right hands of fellowship are extended. Holy kisses are exchanged. Feet are washed, oils are poured out. We touch each other, but we also touch the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper when we break the bread and hold the cup. Baptism also requires touch.
4. Taste. The bread and wine of communion obviously engage this sense. The New Testament church often extended their fellowship into meals. Interestingly, one of the first things we’ll do in Heaven is feast, so good food is a small taste of Heaven. In a more spiritual sense, God tells us to taste and see that he is good (Psalm 34:8).
5. Smell. This is listed last because it’s one sense that we don’t engage nearly as much in contemporary worship as the other four. In Old Testament times, however, worship would have had very strong odors with the sweet smells of incense mixed with the more pungent smells of animal and crop sacrifices. To some extent, we do add some pleasant odor to worship with flowers and personal deodorants and fragrances, which some are more likely to wear on Sunday than most other days. Even though we don’t have as many obvious physical fragrances, Ephesians 5:1-2 and Philippians 4:18 tells us that our worship, including giving, is a fragrant offering to him.

When God condemns idolatry, he often does it by pointing out how sense-less the idols were. From Psalm 115:6-8:

They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but they cannot smell;

they have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but they cannot walk;

nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.

Our God, on the other hand, is a sense-able God who asks to be worshiped in a sensual way.

When we try to worship through a computer screen, we have to first take leave of our senses.