Goat-Sensitive Worship
Geoffrey Thomas
John Reisinger tells of dressing with his wife one morning and noticing how she had buttoned the bottom button on her cardigan through the second hole, and so on, and on, 13 times. Then discovering a button spare she saw what she had done. “How many mistakes had she made?” he asked. “One, or thirteen? Thirteen because she made one fundamental mistake at the beginning.”
So it is with worship: men make a fundamental mistake, and that is to believe that the purpose of our gatherings on Sundays is for evangelism.
Then they measure everything in our services in the light of the goats who may wander in or who have been invited. Nothing must threaten, mystify or intimidate them. Goats do not know the words or tunes of the hymns: so they commend praise in the form of a group singing songs. The concept of publicly reading from a book which they do not know is alien to them, so the reading should be very brief, if you have one at all. They move the Lord�s Supper to a private function on Sunday afternoons or a Thursday night. The prayers should be short and simple, and so should the sermon, and it should touch on issues that matter to goats, such as loneliness, absent husbands, hopelessness, discontentedness, heartache, the difficulty of raising teenagers and how to cope with such troubles. From this Sunday meeting they should be encouraged to come to small study groups and take a course in what sheep believe. To this end how we have been worshipping God for many years is strongly discouraged.
Everything will change, however, if we believe that worship is centered upon the God who has taken such pains to reveal himself through the Bible. Our concern will be to please this great Lord. How are we to approach him? Through the name of the Lord Jesus Christ alone. That must be made transparently clear. By his blood and righteousness, and then with joyful confidence, but also with reverence and godly fear. When the Son of God himself prayed he kneeled down in the presence of the God who is a consuming fire. If anyone had a right to be informal and casual with his Father it was Jesus of Nazareth. He never hurt his Father once, but he got down on his knees when speaking with him. All we do and everything we say must be pleasing to God, that is, the Lord is aware of even the spirit of those who put their mites in the offerings, and he loves cheerfulness in stewardship or in anything we do. Our praise and prayers must be in accordance with the Scriptures, and above all the Word preached must serve that end, because the sermon is the climactic aspect of worship, because in it the Maker of the universe speaks to specks. Let the message both in its spirit and content give to those goats who have been drawn to the meeting some glimpse of how glorious a being the living God is, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, fearful in his might, matchless in his glory, and extraordinarily gracious.
There is no way that the church has a calling to stroke the affections of goats. The men who lead the worship cannot say, “Now we know that you are not interested in the Lord Jesus Christ�s life and death so we have something else for you.” We have nothing else whatsoever, and we must be absolutely clear and united, pew and pulpit, about that. If they don�t want our Savior we cannot suggest to them ways of spicing up their marriage, or put on a musical evening, choreography, or rules of conduct to make working in the office sweeter, or a course in singleness. All we have to offer is a Prophet to teach them, a Lamb who will take their guilt away and a Shepherd to guide and protect them.
Our own lives are to be as godlike as possible, especially when we gather together. We meet to encourage one another to live like God. We are unashamed in our dress, language, use of time, relationships, or even humor to be known as those whose desire is to please Jehovah Jesus in everything, and our evangelism is largely letting the world know this and why we believe it. The goats discover that they have come into the company of those whose chief end in life is glorifying Jesus Christ. We hate anything that fails to make that clear to them, like a liturgy as bare as a monk�s cell. We want our words to be full of God-fearing feeling and affection. Intelligibility and simplified language is less important than other more subtle and effective elements. We�ve always noticed when people have touched us through talking feelingly and transparently of the Savior and his love for them that they have broken away from ordinary, colloquial speech. We love that, and tremble about any attempts to insist our modes of expression on Sundays be in the language of ordinary, everyday life. That language may be all right for communication but not for expressing the wonder of so great a salvation. If the style and mode of our expression when we meet in God�s presence is just like that which the goats hear in the office or in the schoolyard life then we have failed them. We whom the Lord is seeking and saving are sensitive to their real needs, and so anything trivial and shallow we will flee from like sin itself as suggesting to the goats a deity unworthy of their attention. So our worship will be simple, spiritual, substantial, warm, reverent, characterized by free prayer, great hymns and metrical psalms climaxed in expository preaching and anchored in proven forms that quickly gain familiarity and so become better means of channeling people to the God we are serving, and away from noticing clever servants who are speaking.
Reprinted from Christian Renewal 3-8-99 (spellings Americanized)