Why Does Worship Look Like How We Worship

There’s a church here in Indianapolis, City Community Church, that’s decided to put their worship on hiatus. They’re asking the question “Why?”. I think we all know the answer to one of the why’s in that question, but perhaps the real question is why does our worship look like the way we worship?

Erik Cooper, pastor at City Community Church recently shared this on his post “Why We’re Quitting Worship“:

But right there. In that moment. For those people. At that time. I had no answer. At least no good one. We had forced creative, passionate, worshipers into a very narrow channel. And I couldn’t seem to find the remote control.

Sometimes you have to stop doing something to remember why you were doing it in the first place.

So for the time being, we’re not going to open each service with the standard 22 minutes of music. We’re taking a break. A breath. A step back. A Selah if you like.

Are we stuck in the, “…because that’s the way we’ve always done it” mentality?

I’m not sure how I feel, I understand that worship can mean many different things to many different people and can be expressed in many different ways.

Adjust. Change. Morph. Adapt. But I don’t think you just stop. Can you?

As Matt Redman experienced, have we just drifted away from the heart of worship again?

It reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw recently, “If it’s not broke. Don’t fix it”

Is the City Community church really experiencing broken worship? Or is there something else that’s not working? I know that many times church staff, volunteers, musicians, vocalists and tech team people can get buried in doing the production of worship for multiple services multiple times a week. That needs to be addressed for sure if it’s happening, but is the worship itself really broken and in need of fixing?

What do you think?