Critical Crucial Worship

Yesterday I was out with a friend and as usual he started winding me up with a bunch of analytical questions.  Don't get me wrong, I love the kid and it's great to be challenged, but as usual I came away with a dozen things I wanted to write about.  One of them was a continuation of an earlier conversation about the state of affairs in the church today.  While he's devoted, tied, and bound to one church, I tend to bounce around because of my constant travel schedule.  The offshoot of not having a steady, every-Sunday worship place, is that the things I am looking for in a church are different than his particular list of church priorities.  Not that either is correct, we were just analyzing the differences.

One major difference concerns the worship service.  He's old school and I'm modern worship.  He delights and finds comfort in the ritual and formality.  I find it confining and too easily insincere.  I take more from the worship and environment often, then I do the message.  Well, right away anyway.  It can take a little time for the message to sink in, but the worship can move me immediately.  Expanding this into the rest of my life, I find I take a lot of my strength from good Worship music.

As an example when I workout or run I've found that the best music to listen to is Worship music.  It's no secret that I'm a huge PlanetShakers fan, and I am constantly on the lookout for more Worship music that moves me.

How is it that two people can attend a service, and find two totally different paths to the same God?  For me, this only reenforces my belief in the personal and not corporate nature of my relationship with my Savior.   For my friend, his anecdotal evidence suggests that the contemporary worship is the more shallow of two types of services.  We are at both ends of the spectrum staring at the opposing pole and wondering how they do it?  I guess it's true what they say:

You can't clap with one hand

Nowhere is that any more true then when we consider the myriad of choices in worship style we find in churches across the nation.  There must be one for every kind of person so that way we all get feed.  I'll leave you with a quote from one my favorite worship artists of all time.

I pray that more than ever God will lead each of us into a place of true worship, that we will encounter His presence and power and that His desire will be accomplished in us.
-- Twila Paris