Lights.”
I wasn’t sure I heard accurately. I asked the coed to repeat his answer.
“Lights.”
Again I used to be reduced to silence. Clearly I used to be missing something.
“Do you mean electricity? Like, as a substitute of candles?” I asked uncertainly.
“No,” he replied. “I mean lights—, lights.”
And then it dawned on me. The student meant lighting—dimmers, spotlights, coloured lights, the entire array of controls for “stage lighting”—what you would possibly find at a stand-up show, theatrical production, or concert.
I had proposed an issue to a room of 40 college freshmen: Suppose you traveled to a latest city next weekend, and on Sunday morning you selected to go to a church. What would you anticipate finding?
I often ask this query to start a discussion about liturgy, the “script” that different traditions follow of their public worship, nonetheless “high” or “low” the church in query could also be. Students typically consider greeters, ushers, pews, people, preaching, tithing, prayer, Scripture. Sometimes Communion gets a mention. Creed and confession of sins rarely do.
Increasingly, though, students discuss technology: screens, videos, cameras, livestreaming. Other elements are equally technological, though they don’t consider them that way: mics, headsets, multi-piece bands, a posh production with many moving parts. All signs of technological development and adaptation; all relatively latest to Christian liturgy; none greater than just a few generations old, not less than by way of common church usage.
All this got here home to me in my student’s honest first thought in response to my query: Lights. When he imagined going to church, when he mentally walked right into a Christian house of worship, what got here to mind before anything was a controlled lighting system. Dim lights for quiet meditation, vibrant lights for benediction, a highlight for the sermon, various colours for various band members and their respective solo moments.
From liturgy of Word and sacrament to a theatrical light show. How did we get here?
The very first thing to note about my student’s answer is that it mostly reflects experience in large churches. My students are, normally, Bible Belt evangelicals. Even after they hail from rural or small-town backgrounds, though, their upbringing feels to them like an exception to the rule, and the rule is a well-heeled megachurch with a high quality worship “production.” That’s how their feet vote after they move to a much bigger town, like Abilene, and the identical applies after they move to a significant urban area, like Houston or Austin or Dallas–Fort Worth.
But based on recent studies, a super-majority of American churches today have 100 or fewer members. When we predict of a typical congregation, then, we must always consider one consisting of two or three dozen families. Few congregations of that size have the resources for—or the expectation of—skilled lighting. They’re more nervous about keeping the lights on in any respect.
Moreover, while church attendance and membership are each in decline, and while the typical church size is barely within the triple digits, a growing share of the general church-attending population finds itself in large congregations. In other words, as the proportion of Americans who attend church shrinks, those that do attend increasingly frequent greater churches. This phenomenon distorts what appears like “the typical church” and, due to this fact, what “typical worship” is like.
To afford, maintain, and operate skilled lighting of the type my student had in mind, a church would should be far above the ninetieth percentile of American congregational size, which is 250 regular attendees. Yet for my student, as for therefore many others, this size and its hallmarks are paradigmatic quite than exceptional. They’re just “what church is today,” what one would reasonably expect visiting a random church in an odd city.
This trend is each cause and consequence of churches investing in technologies that make Sunday morning a high-production offering, whether for in-person crowds or for people who stream from home. Long before COVID-19 but exacerbated by lockdown, many churches have been competing in a sort of techno-liturgical arms race to attract seekers, especially young families and professionals, to the “Sunday morning experience” of high-tech public worship.
For many seasoned evangelicals among the many millennial and Zoomer generations, the result—state-of-the-art, high-definition, skilled video and audio and music, with smooth transitions and fancy lighting, all frictionless and ready-made for the web—is just becoming the norm. It’s what church, or worship, means.
At best, the gospel retains the facility to chop through all of the noise. At worst, believers receive neither the Lord’s Word nor his body and blood. Instead, they get a cut-rate TED Talk, spiritual but not religious, sandwiched between long sessions of a soft rock concert.
There is no doubt that ministers at churches like these have been motivated by good intentions. If more people need to hear the gospel and provides praise to God, should we not make it possible for them to achieve this? Should we not construct it, praying they may come?
Few would suggest that the mere size of a constructing is evidence of unfaithfulness, nor would I propose that microphones be abolished in favor of preachers gifted with naturally loud voices. That’s a caricature of so-called Luddite concerns with latest technology. Theological questions on technology are more serious than that. For one, they’re rarely answerable upfront. They’re discerned on the bottom. But they do require discernment. The mere undeniable fact that a latest technology appears at first to help within the church’s mission is just not sufficient.
We might as a substitute interrogate the character of Christian worship itself. I asked my students what they’d expect, visiting a church for the primary time. What should they expect?
The historic answer of the church down through the centuries is that they need to expect the liturgy of Word and sacrament. They should know upfront that, with real but limited variations, they may pray, sing, confess their faith, confess their sins, hear the word of the Lord in Scripture, hear the gospel of the Lord in proclamation, and receive the visible word of the Lord’s body and blood, the bread of heaven broken for his or her salvation. Whatever country they’re in, whatever language is spoken, whether visiting a city or a town, a congregation of 5,000 or a parish of fifty—that is what should await them.
Notice what’s needed for the celebration of this liturgy: sisters and brothers gathered within the name of Jesus, a frontrunner, the Bible, slightly bread and wine. Believers, Scriptures, elements, and a spot to bring them together. That’s it. In fact, on a given Sunday morning around the globe, you will discover them brought together in cathedrals, in houses, in apartments, in strip malls, in cafeterias, in mud huts, out within the open by rivers and under trees, hidden in basements and attics for fear of being discovered.
This is the genius of Christian liturgy. Beyond the tools required to provide texts (which long predate the printing press) and foods and drinks (that are needed to live), no technology is needed for the church to worship the Lord in Spirit and in reality. Perhaps, because the case could also be, latest technologies have the potential to assist. But they at all times have the potential to harm, to distort and misshape.
On one hand, worship is a type of catechesis. It molds our hearts, minds, and imaginations. Young individuals are right to expect, on a given Sunday, what they’ve seen and heard on lots of of previous Sundays. It’s clear to me that the current catechesis has worked, but in all of the unsuitable ways.
Too many evangelicals assume that extraordinary worship is what I’ve elsewhere called the tech-church show—a performance in every sense of the word. Not the drama of the Eucharist or the reenactment of the liturgical script but a slick, high-def production. If I’m right that that is what many assume is normal, based on its prevalence amongst larger churches, then my suggestion is that ministers need to return to the drafting board. Back, I should say, to the time-tested wisdom of Word and sacrament. Call it the ABCs of Christian liturgy.
Recall, alternatively, who’s in a position to “compete” on this worshiping arms race: large churches in major cities. Who can’t? All the remainder of them. That is, not less than four-fifths of congregations cannot play the high-tech game.
Given that tens of tens of millions of Americans have left church over the previous couple of a long time, that is liturgical malpractice. It’s short-sighted too, given the church’s mission. But above all, it’s a failure of fraternal love.
We don’t want small churches to shut their doors. We want churches of each size, in every form of locale, to flourish—just as they’re, just where they’re. But if the norm is the high-tech production I’ve outlined above, then these churches, even after they are in cities, will proceed to die, since they inevitably lack the resources to maintain up with the ecclesial Joneses.
Much might be said for a joyful service that communicates each uninhibited and Spirit-filled adoration. But faithful worship is, and due to this fact needs to be, something any church can do, no matter production level.
We must imagine an alternate catechesis—one which, for college kids like mine, brings to mind initially the risen Christ: his living Word, his body and blood, his gathered people. The query is: What sort of worship would produce such a thought?
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University.
