Intentional, Fervent Worship, Part 2

The Place of Emotion in Worship

This second entry in the worship series is essentially a response to a recent post from another blog—a case in point, if you will.

I’ve recently made the call for more thoughtful and expressive worship. I especially did so in this lecture at the Preserving the Truth Conference. I suggested that fundamentalists tend to overreact to modern abuses of emotion by subverting emotion in worship altogether. We tend to be less expressive, for example, than the Psalms, where both grief and joy were demonstrated rather overtly and even physically. We tend to write off genuine emotion as contrived, or as charismaticism. We’re afraid of expressive, emotional worship. I’ll unpack those ideas here soon.

Ironically, such concerns have been met with this (one of several poorly-reasoned, thread-pulling critiques the author has aimed at the conference sessions):

I have observed that the desire for experience manifests itself in many different ways. In some circles, there is a lot of hooting and hollering (in the vernacular, hootin’ and hollerin’), shouts of ‘Amen!’, emotion laden sermons that tell sob-stories to invoke an emotional response, and so on.

There is another kind of push for emotionalism that finds expression in terms like these, “intensely”, “intentional”, “relentless”, “passionate”, “saturated.”

What drives this desire for experience? I am not advocating that we become as expressionless as Heimie the robot on the old Get Smart series (my all-time favorite which seriously dates me…), but why do we see such a desire for emotion in religion? Has it always been this way?

If we look back in history, we see the rise of charismatism since the 1970s, the Pentecostal movement in the 60 years preceding that, the camp-meeting/revivalist emphasis (especially rural) in the 19th century, and the Pietist movement before that. I wonder if what we are seeing today is an increase in the desire for experience or if it is the norm. I wonder if it is the product of popular culture: music, movies, television, video games, etc. or if it is simply the natural expression of most humans (stick-in-the-muds like me as exceptions).

I wonder if it is good or bad. I kinda think bad, but, then, maybe that’s just me.

I couldn’t have made up a better example of the problem. That’s precisely the spirit I’m talking about. Emotion equals emotionalism. Fervency equals Pentecostalism. Enthusiasm about the things of God is the result of video games(!). And by the way, it’s pretty clear that the writer is asserting, not “wondering.”

The writer draws attention to a few words, which he arbitrarily ties to groups from recent church history. Perhaps he prefers their opposites—worship that is “dull” or “unintentional” or “indifferent”? He fails to mention that they have been used in discussions that specifically call for us to be more biblical in our worship—using the Psalms as our example, choosing more doctrinal hymns, singing Bible songs or songs that are filled (dare I say saturated?) with Scripture, etc. He doesn’t mention the  warnings against emotionalism in those discussions. Most egregiously, he ignores the Scriptures themselves, attributing emotive responses to “the charismatic impulse” (whatever that is) and saying nothing about the biblical calls for whole-being adoration of God (Luke 10:27; Deut 6:5; et al).

I do desire emotion in religion. Guilty as charged. I labor to promote songs and services which engage the minds of God’s people, and in turn, their hearts. To argue that such a response to truth is emotionalism, to write off being affected by Scripture as the product of worldliness, and to suggest that there is some “desire for experience” that competes with or undermines biblical teaching is absurd. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary.

Frankly, that post made the case for course correction more effectively than anything I’ll write.

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