Undistracted.

“No one could ever accuse us of being a well-oiled machine.”

My pastor said this once to me after a church service, and it’s stuck with me. It still makes me laugh, because it is so true, and I am so thankful for it. I was hired on staff at theHeart when I was 20 years old – just a junior religious studies major who had spent my life singing on stage, but NEVER led a band. Leading worship was intimidating, because although anybody would come to our church and assume that I fit the mold of contemporary worship leaders (20-something-years-old, vague Christian tattoo on my wrist, wearing skinny jeans), I am totally jaded by contemporary church culture, because I have been a part of it, and I’ve watched the goal of worship totally slip away from the act of worship.

I’ve watched churches and people that I love become more concerned with being relevant for the sake of the Gospel than for simply attempting to be the Gospel. Does that make sense? As technology has increased there has been a massive influx of marketing and production within the Church. We’re living within a church culture that can be over focused on luring guests in with free t-shirts, first-timer gifts, elaborate productions for a worshipful atmosphere, and an obsession with social media marketing. It draws the biggest, youngest crowds, and it also draws a lot of criticism. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard the phrase “creating a worship experience”. I would never in a million years say that the motivation behind the production is wrong. We (the capital C, Church) want to embrace the culture we live in, and we want more people to know Christ. That’s great. But the problem is when we spend more time and energy in the shallow presentation of our relevance than the deep, spontaneous movement of the Holy Spirit. The problem is when the production and the creation of a worship experience distracts us from being open to improvisation with the Holy Spirit.

We have a catchphrase at theHeart: Love. Simple. It’s kind of the core value of how we want to do church. We want to do everything with love, and we want to keep things simple so that we can focus in and be intentional about the important things. When training our sound team and band this year, we talked about the philosophy behind why it matters more to strive for excellence in the things we’re already doing rather than adding more things. Communal worship requires vulnerability and freedom. We want to be a tight team who knows what we’re doing musically and technically – not because we want to create something, but because we want to remove distraction. If the sound is wonky and feeding back, if the musicians don’t know their parts or how to transition to the next song, it can distract and take away from that vulnerability and freedom that we want people to have. We are still trying to figure this out. We’re still learning how to make transitions less awkward, how to be comfortable with silence, and how to push through totally messed up lead lines or forgotten lyrics.

But sometimes in the quest for excellence, in all of our good intentions, our focus on the atmosphere can become more important than what the goal of the atmosphere even is: honest, vulnerable, raw worship.

“Thank God for broken strings.” A couple of weeks ago I decided to change it up and do a stripped down acoustic set. Just me, Glenn, and Glenn’s guitar. Throughout the week, Glenn spent a lot of time preparing and creating these beautiful guitar parts for Sunday morning. And right before service, as we were running through songs, Glenn and I had a conversation about setting aside the focus of what he had prepared guitar-wise and making the priority leading the people in the room with us. After the first worship song, I prayed for the Lord to help us to be raw and open in our worship that morning, in spite of everything (in spite of what, I had no idea).

Halfway through the second song, Glenn’s E string breaks. If you’re a guitarist, you know that when one string breaks, the rest of the strings totally freak out. So he stopped playing. And we kept singing. And after an awkward moment of “I have to go figure out what to do about this,” from Glenn, I said, “We’re going to keep singing anyway.” We just lost the one instrument we had, and we were going to keep going.

Some kind of wall totally broke down in that moment. It was like, Okay, there is no guitar to be the buffer. There’s no instrument to be the “ambience” that makes it feel worshipful in the in between. It’s just all of us singing together. That’s it. And as a body we made this unified act to throw the awkwardness out, to throw the original plan out, and we sang loud and hard. Glenn threw off his broken string and re-tuned, and before the next song I couldn’t help but remember that I had just prayed to be raw and open in spite of everything.

Mother Teresa said, “Listen…because if your heart is full of other things you cannot hear the voice of God.” (No Greater Love, p. 8). She was talking about prayer, but I think it is just as important for church culture. We don’t need to stop thinking about how to make people feel comfortable in the church, and we don’t need to stop thinking about how to be the church within our own culture. But we must not cross that very thin, sometimes blurry line into a place where it’s over prioritized.  The truth is, if people are at your church because you’re offering something they want in that moment (great children’s ministry, an awesome band, lots of church programs to get involved in), then the minute someone else offers them something else they want, or something that is now more “relevant” to them, they are most likely out of there (this could even be you or me!). Instead of cultivating a church culture that encourages consumerism, cultivate a church culture that encourages vulnerability, that encourages space for the Lord to flip all of our plans for our worship service upside down. Be the kind of people and the kind of church that never has to worry about an awkward transition or a mishap because you know that the movement of the Lord is not contingent upon the guitar or microphone working properly and the movement of the Lord is not necessarily reflected in the amount of people that show up or talk about your church.

As we each look introspectively at the culture we’re cultivating as a minister of God – whether you’re an attendee, a volunteer, or church staff – look at the way you describe your church to other people, look at your Facebook and Instagram and Twitter. They can be tale-tell signs that you might be more concerned with what you want everyone to see that you’re experiencing, than you actually being fully engaged in a real, honest, undistracted experience with your community and the Holy Spirit.