Taking Christianity back from Institutional Religion

Why Christian Worship Doesn’t Work for Many Cultural Creatives—and What Might - Part Two

The challenge today for culturally creative followers of Jesus is to wrestle the heart of Christianity from the powerful grip of institutional religion. We need to take Christianity back from the theology and practices of institutional religion including what is commonly referred to as “worship.” 

Many postmodern or integral “post” Christians no longer identify or connect with a religious group or church. Many also have mixed feelings about using the word “Christian.” For some it can carry too much baggage. However, they may not yet have given up on Jesus or a core reality of deep spirituality experienced in their native tongue of Christianity. But often the traditional churches no longer tap into that reality for them.

What do they do with what today we traditionally refer to as “worship”? Where do they go to experience this? They may have even given up on the whole idea, since the very word “’worship” may also carry cultural baggage and bad memories. For many, it may even be too difficult to think in those terms. Underneath the baggage, worship is a deep human longing for something transcendent, something worth devoting ourselves to. Everyone has this need in some way or another.

What Jesus did with “worship?”

To begin to reflect about “worship” together we must first look at what we mean by the word —no easy task in a world of over 4200 religions with Christianity itself divided up into at least 33,830 different groups. Let’s start with Jesus.

In the ancient world, relations between Jews and Samaritans were very strained. Leave it to the Jewish man Jesus to strike up a conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well. In one simple but elegant conversation Jesus wiped out most of what we think of today as worship.

“In one simple but elegant conversation Jesus wiped out much of what we think of today as worship.”

The woman said, “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.” (Nothing like a “What church do you go to” conversation to keep things from getting too intimate.) Jesus, moving the conversation to a deeper level, replied, “A time is coming when you will worship God neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. (In other words, where you worship is not important!)  The time has now come when the true worshipers will worship God in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers God seeks. God is spirit, and God’s worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.” (Italics mine, reflecting what I imagine to be Jesus’ intensity in saying this.)

In one sentence Jesus did away with any idea of the “right” group, place, form or ritual that needs to be followed for authentic worship.

Jesus was laying aside all formulas and places as a prerequisite for true worship. The temple is now our hearts and minds. Worship is anywhere and anytime and in whatever form that focuses my heart and mind on God. Any attempt to return to a form associated with the temple or to any form as a prerequisite to authentic worship ignores Jesus’ teaching here.

Worship within us and within the energetic presence of Jesus and others.

Whatever worship is, Jesus made it first of all an inside job. Jesus said “in spirit and in truth.” It is concerned with the divine/human spirit, which is about waking up in higher consciousness, and truth, which is about growing up in our worldview. It’s about our inside, but not only our inside alone. It is also about the energy field originating inside of a group of “worshippers.” This energy field is co-created together by the participants and the nurturing presence of Jesus. This is the powerful context of “For where two or three gather together as my followers, I am there with them” (Matt. 18:20). More about this in a later article.

What is “worship?”

If it’s not necessarily that thing traditional religion says you do on Sunday mornings in the form prescribed by our brand of religion, what is it?

The most common word translated into worship in the New Testament is proskuneo which is formed from two words, the preposition “unto” and the word for dog! It literally meant “meaning to kiss, like a dog licking his master’s hand”!! How about that for highlighting, in graphic terms, the cultural difference between ancient Israel and today’s postmodern culture! It would have been understood in ancient Israel for us non-canine humans as “to kiss the hand,” with definite connotations of one giving honor to a superior.

In its English origins, worship literally means "worth-ship" or giving worth to something. In its older sense in English of worthiness or respect (Anglo-Saxon, worthscripe), worship may on occasion refer to an attitude towards someone of immensely elevated social status, such as a lord or a monarch, or, more loosely, towards an individual, such as a hero or one's lover.

If worship means to “give worth,” most of us today understand that we are not “giving worth” to God, who is already the source of all worth in existence. Do we really need to tell Source of its worth? Do we still need to worship in this way? Have we outgrown it, and do we even need to continue to include this old etymology of worship?

The evolutionary visionary, Teilhard de Chardin, in the language of his day he said, “The more man (sic) becomes man, the more will it be necessary for him to be able to, and to know how to worship.”

The needs and drives behind worship—such as transcendence, devotion, gratitude—are fundamental to being human, and according to Teilhard, will be even more so in the future. So how do cultural creatives learn to worship in the world today? Can our evolving understanding of God inform the way forward for more authentic and freeing expressions of worship?

The idea of “devotion” rather than “worship is often more helpful for cultural creatives.

It may be time for those who consider themselves postmodern cultural creatives to drop the word “worship,” since it is so loaded with religious baggage and instead use the word “devotion.”

We commonly say things like:

 She is a devoted wife.
He is a devoted husband.
Their group is devoted to the issue of climate change.
They are devoted followers of Jesus.

Devotion carries with it the idea of passion, of opening your heart to a person or cause.

Who are you devoted to? Who or what do you open your heart to?

True devotion always begins with opening our hearts.  Of course it is not limited to heart opening. But that and that alone leads to opening our hands, feet, and voice from an authentically integrated place.

I have found that the best contemporary understanding of worship is “Opening our hearts to God in devotion, love, and service.”

Transcending the limiting religious practices of previous stages for some feels like escaping religion to become spiritual. Others have found what they need in traditional worship.  I am happy for them and bless them. However, devotion to God is both an ancient spiritual tradition and a transforming contemporary practice that can be astoundingly liberating. We can find ourselves emerging into a whole new world when we become whole-heartedly devoted to God!

More about devotional practices for cultural creatives coming up in the next series of articles.