On Sundays, many Christians go to worship services. They believe that expressing love and appreciation for their Creator is beneficial not only to themselves but also to the community. The various denominations differ in their forms of worship. Some mega-churches feature large bands and advanced audio equipment, accompanied by dynamic performances with talented singers. Some, like the Quakers, do not sing at all. Other churches are more liturgical, with chanting or responsive readings.
Yet, perhaps all Christians could benefit by reconsidering worship. Is it something we can do any time, or does it require our full attention, turning from anything else we might have going on, closing our eyes, and speaking either within or out loud, praise and devotion to God?
To truly worship, must we suppress our reasoning minds and let our feelings of love take over? Must we put ourselves in a posture that allows the Holy Spirit to wash over us, give us tangible signs like goose bumps, and fill us with his presence?
In many churches, apparently, worship occurs when the “worship leader” plays devotional music for us, and we all sing what someone else has deemed good things to say to God. If we really dig the song, it helps us get those goose bumps. If not, we wait for the next one. And when the singing is over, we go on to other aspects of the service that technically aren’t worship.
I seem to have an unusual sensitivity to phoniness. God knows my heart. I cannot do something I don’t believe in. I won’t pretend so that others might not take offense or be improperly influenced. That is precisely why I don’t go to church. I believe we should pray continuously with eyes open as we go through each day of the week. In those moments, we can express love. However, our devotion can sometimes allow us to express honest disappointment or even anger. If I give my whole self, mind, heart, body, and strength to the Creator I believe in, shaky though my belief may be, I express true worship.
Jesus explained this to the Samaritan woman in John 24. While he was somewhat cryptic, at least one aspect is undeniable. We must not pretend. God sees the heart.
God is Spirit, and those who would worship him must do so in spirit and truth.
Recently, I listened to a podcast by a retired pastor that put some of my worship misgivings into words so poignant that I had to take note. This was Culture, Faith, and Politics by somebody. I chuckled, trying to figure out his name, which was nowhere on the screen that I could find. He’s got a YouTube channel and a Substack page. I finally tracked it down: Pat Kahnke.
The YouTube talk was not primarily about worship. He was less concerned with what might be wrong with church; he was talking about what was wrong with the Charlie Kirk memorial service.
Just past the halfway point, Kahnke discusses his experience years earlier, when he was a church worship leader. He realized that aspects unrelated to the Holy Spirit could lead people to believe they feel his presence.
By the way, why don’t I write “His presence”? That same phoniness meter. I am pretty sure God doesn’t need me to capitalize his pronouns. Not only that, we all know that the Creator is neither male nor female. Neither is he an “it,” so we find ourselves in a bind, with no adequate pronouns available. Someone should invent one! But I know it doesn’t bother him that I use uncapitalized male pronouns because he knows my heart.
Now, where were we?
Kahnke realized that those he was leading were being manipulated. Here’s how he put it:
I had to learn the subtle difference between facilitating a congregation’s worship and manipulating the congregation. And it was really unsettling to me when I started to figure out that if I did certain [things], for instance, when I’m playing guitar and leading the band, certain chord changes… Or if I was playing the drums that day, if I hit the drums a certain way at a certain time, invariably people would come up to me and they would say that they felt the spirit move.
And that was really disturbing to me. And it actually affected me, and it kind of turned me into a really boring worship leader…
Music can do that to us. Although I personally don’t appreciate the aesthetics of most Christian music, the act of making music is an art. Music is part of what makes us human, a vital creative expression with instruments, sometimes lyrics, that have emotional power for us. I have heard rock singers put a phrase to music so potently that it drives home deep truths about living, giving glimpses of our shared human condition.
Especially when combined with powerful lyrics, music engages our minds in beautiful ways that might defy explanation. You hear something that you already know deeply and agree with, perhaps unconsciously. The beat of the music infuses the words, engaging your mind and heart simultaneously. Nothing else in our experience has this effect.
People vary in their music appreciation. I love good lyrics, but some of my friends don’t at all. They like the sound and ignore the words. Or they listen to music that has no words, such as classical. This exemplifies the remarkable diversity of human beings. Some love jazz, others hate it. Some love rap, others hate it. But whatever you appreciate gives you feelings you get nowhere else.
So, the band leading worship in church might give you feelings you get nowhere else, and you might, just might, mistake that for the presence of the Spirit. You might think that the feeling is worship. You might think if you didn’t feel that feeling, you just didn’t feel worshipful that day. You might accidentally restrict your ability to worship by associating it with feelings that it doesn’t require.
I don’t complain about my church. I refrain from trying to change those who belong. I’m just a peculiar human, introverted and overly introspective. When Christian friends ask why I don’t go to church, I assure them that it isn’t the pastors or the people. It’s mostly what I’ve said here.
In some of these blog posts, I have even shared snippets of music that deeply move me. Another human trait is that when we feel these things, we want to tell others. Won’t they be as impacted as we are? In sharing music, my experience has been one of overwhelming disappointment. The mind-heart impact is so unique that a different mind and heart cannot feel what you feel in the same way. Their mind-heart is touched by something else; something that didn’t stand out to us. In my puzzlement, I wonder how my friend can be so different from me.
But the bottom line is this: don’t confuse those feelings with the presence of the Holy Spirit. I would go a little further and be even more provocative. As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the Holy Spirit is not a ghostly presence. We have to talk in metaphors, and the Holy Ghost is one that I think is too misleading and, therefore, unhelpful.
Our conception of the Holy Spirit is closely tied to the subject of worship and the sense of a supernatural presence. We have no way to imagine who God is without metaphors. He is like a father, a shepherd, a white-bearded grandfather. Jesus is depicted as a long-haired, skinny man with a beard, likely of a darker complexion. The Spirit could be a ghost that occupies space and moves around, possibly in this room now, but later seeming to have left. I’ve heard charismatic church leaders claim they could “see the Spirit resting on” someone in the congregation.
None of these metaphors fully captures who these supernatural beings really are. As humans, we are probably incapable of truly knowing in any deeper way. At best, we think up descriptions that compare them to our own physical experiences.
I think the ghostly presence metaphor for the Holy Spirit is less helpful than what I will describe below. But it has the advantage of being simpler to understand and easier to imagine, even though we don’t otherwise tend to believe in ghosts.
I suggest we gain a better understanding by refraining from thinking of the Spirit as a separate being. The Creator has made every atom, and every atom is part of him. In a humorous human way, we could suggest that he doesn’t keep track of every little thing, but lets life go about obeying the Laws of Nature without the need for babysitting. Yet, every atom has the potential to draw the Creator’s attention. People, animals, and things can draw his attention. This allows us a chance to sense the mind of the Creator and engage with him.
Our spirit is also not a ghostly emanence, separate from our mind and body. Our spirit is the accumulation of our experiences and what we have made of them, which includes all our relationships.
The Holy Spirit is the Creator interacting with us through each other and through our physical experiences with people, animals, and things (which are all part of himself). The Creator is everywhere at once, all the time. Perhaps the feeling we experience from worship music is indeed an interaction with the Creator, which we can refer to as his Spirit. I only caution that we not limit ourselves by thinking God is missing if we don’t have that feeling.