In my inaugural column for YouthWorker Journal, I want to define worship. My goal isn’t to have a correct theological definition. I want to articulate a concept of worship that can help youth workers establish important patterns in the spiritual lives of young people. After all, how we define worship—either intentionally or unintentionally—shapes what kids think worship is.
The importance of this became clear to me when a 10th grader told me he was looking forward to that night’s worship. He said he loved hearing everyone sing. This gave him a buzz that he didn’t experience during the rest of the week.
The emotional rush he experiences when a mass of voices all sing together is the same buzz I get at a Springsteen concert or U2 show when bands and their audiences create a sense of corporate transcendence that is beyond what any one of us can do alone.
I didn’t want to downplay his experience, but was he defining worship correctly? Was he mistaking worship for the emotions most of us feel when thousands (or dozens) of voices sing together? Those emotions can grow stronger when the singing is accompanied by videos and lighting designed to enhance the whole experience. That’s true at church or at a rock concert.
The Private Side of Worship
When I think of worship, I think of sitting quietly in my car while stuck in traffic. Or meditating on Scripture as I sit on a curb during lunch at a school parking lot time. Or serving in children’s ministry and playing games with the kids to help them learn the truths of Scripture. Or being in an ugly room with no fancy lighting, sitting with 20 other teens whose singing doesn’t quite sound as good as Bono and his fans.
This 10th grader showed me I was guilty of teaching that music equals worship. I did it when I said, “Let’s now worship,” before the songs began. After my teaching, the guitar player did it when he said, “Let’s worship again,” before leading us into another song. We all do it when we call the music leaders in our churches worship pastors or worship leaders. We do it again when we assume that a worship CD is full of music, not teaching.
Our practice of equating music with worship is why our kids don’t see sacrificing their time to serve the poor and needy as worship. It’s why they don’t see studying the Bible or putting a dollar in the collection plate as worship.
Where did we get our notions that worship equals music? Not from the Old Testament, where the most commonly used word for worship is hishahawah, which literally means “a bowing down.” The most commonly used word for worship in the New Testament is the Greek word proskuneo, which means “to kiss toward.” Charles Ryrie writes in his Basic Theology that when the early church met, its focus was to attribute worth and value to God, to move the members’ hearts and minds in awe of the resurrected Jesus. They did this in a variety of ways, not merely by singing.
An Attitudinal Adjustment
I’ve had to make some changes in the way I speak about worship since I saw how kids interpret what I do. I’ve changed small things, such as inviting kids to participate in musical worship, or referring to our band leader as our musical worship leader.
I still have a long way to go in my efforts to show others that worship is a life attitude, not merely a period of singing that we do in our groups. Meanwhile, let’s remember you and I will worship God eternally. Everything else we do will fade, but worship never will cease in this life or in the life to come.
Now you know why I wanted to devote my first column to defining worship for us and our kids. I look forward to exploring worship more fully in future columns.
