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Rev. Mike Brown of Christ United Reformed Church in Santee, CA (near San Diego) writes about having a “purgatory” in their church’s facilities. It’s actually what most families call the “cry room”.
We have worshipped there many times, and theirs is a good setup, with the cry room in the very back of the sanctuary, a glass wall separating the room from the main worship area. The sound is piped-in, so all the parents, siblings, and babies don’t miss a thing in worship (unless, of course, one of the little ones create a mess). Pastor Mike says that the cry room is not just to maintain peace and quiet during the service by keeping the babies out, but it is a training room. “As parents, we have the responsibility to teach our children the meaning and importance of the worship service. As baptized members of the covenant of grace, our children belong in the worship service with us.”
Train babies and little children to sit quietly in the pew/chair for over an hour? I must be crazy, you’re thinking. Give the child a pencil, some crayons, and some papers. Tell them to make drawings of what they hear and see. Tell them to write words that they hear. Ask your pastor to address the children periodically during the sermon with very short illustrations that would arouse their short attention spans. When my oldest son didn’t write yet, he drew a picture of the pastor preaching from the pulpit! During the sermon, or after the service, my daughter shows me her sermon notes.
How different this is from the usual types of segregation (age, ethnicity, worship style, etc.) we find in most churches! Today, all the children up to high schoolers are herded into their own “worship” services, which usually consist of a lot of singing, a little pep talk, and here come fun and games.
But in our churches, whole families, from 3- to 4-year-old runners to centagenarians, worship together with hearts and voices as one in reverence and joy. I was raised in a church like this, so we were trained to sit together as a family all the way into adulthood.
The big mistake of one-generational worship services today is that the children grow up thinking that worship services are nothing more than the usual fun and games they have everywhere else (my 13-year-old daughter’s friend prefers “fun” worship over “boring” liturgy). And when they go into their high school and college days, they’re not trained to go to a real worship service. The result is very obvious: most of these teens stop going to church altogether, because they were not trained, as Pastor Mike says, “to become mature worshipers and active listeners, who eagerly receive from God in Word and sacrament, and respond to God in song, prayer, and giving.”
Albert
2 years ago
I prefer “boring” liturgy than “fun” worship now. In the past when I still knew nothing about Reformed Theology, I already realized that I could not really worship God because the music I was playing was controlling my senses. I kept on ending up either entertaining myself or closely watching the way the musicians play the instruments. The basis for worship was more emotional, than doctrinal.
As I have observed, Reformed Theology’s Regulative Principle does away with the extremes found in both the Roman Catholic and contemporary evangelical worship.
The following article was very helpful to me in evaluating the problems and the remedy to contemporary evangelical worship.
Nollie
2 years ago
Albert,
I was raised in a liturgical denomination, Unida Evangelical Church, in the Philippines (their churches have long gone overboard to “fun” service).
In the States, we were members of a liturgical Presbyterian church for many years. But our pastor left, and when the new pastor was hired, our church also jumped into the “fun” bandwagon. At first, my family thought it was a breath of fresh air and absolutely loved it! But like everything that’s “new and improved,” this too wore off, and we re-discovered our liturgical roots in a Reformed denomination.
Thanks also for sharing Maureen Bradley’s excellent analysis of the “worship wars,” “Worship Wars: Are We on the Right Battlefield?”
Jamie
2 years ago
True enough, the church where my cousin Andrew goes to have gone overboard in trying to make the Sunday worship service attractive. I didn’t like the idea of having a separate service for the ‘adults’ and the ‘youth’, even if it was only once a month.
Soon, these youth will grow up to be the elders and deacons of the church, and with their idea of what a church should be, I don’t want to imagine what would happen many years from now.
pjmiller
2 years ago
“As parents, we have the responsibility to teach our children the meaning and importance of the worship service. As baptized members of the covenant of grace, our children belong in the worship service with us.”
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Amen…i totally agree.
Since my children have become adults, its amazed me to hear them quote time and again, from something my first pastor may have preached or spoke of, 25 years ago during a service, with a; “Yes, i know that, i remember pastor Trent teaching us about that from the bible, he said”……etc etc
It may not always be evident when they are sitting next to us with paper and pencil [i use to take those things also for mine] that anything is being accomplished but it is–seeds are being planted, important things learned, which come back to them later as adults.
Todays segregation & ‘fun time’ for children, has seemingly taken the place of what was once known as sunday school…which was a totally different thing. Sunday school was for all ages, broken up into specific age groups, and was held prior to regular service. Its a thing of the past now…
Pastor Galying
2 years ago
Dear Nollie,
I too belong to the Unida Church. But we belong to the breed that guards our liturgy with zeal. As pastor of the church my goal is a solemn worship where you can feel the presence of God. And now that our sanctuary is fully air-conditioned we can close all the doors fully during worship and last Sunday’s worship is well on the way to being fully solemn also. Within the worship you must feel the presence of God who is within you because it is for him that you are there. It is not so that God can feel your presence because he can always see you, individually and collectively without any help from anybody.
The problem with today’s fun worship is that it is what my generation calls “MASKI POPS”. Meaning, maski papaano – no plan, no liturgy at all, with the convenient excuse that it is as the spirit moves them. But do not believe that they do not have any program, because even if they do not have a written liturgy, they practice a sequence, scene per scene, of how to excite the senses and to make people believe that God is also excited to see the people singing, dancing and jumping for joy, as they put it. They also practice where the music will go slow, high, low, and fever pitch and just when the P&W leader will make his pitch which is actually a sermon, and takes away the pastor’s opportunity the deliver the main sermon of the day. THAT’S SHOW BUSINESS that appeals to the senses rather than to the spirit. But that’s like eating your cake and still have it too – worshipping God and having fun too.
But Sunday is the Day of the Lord. It is not the day of men but of God. It is a day when one worship in remembrance of Jesus giving His life for our Salvation. It is a day when a man must go back to God and forget for a while the fun that he had for 6 days.
The tower of Babel was a cacophony of sounds and today’s type of worship is BABELOUS. Amidst all the electronic sounds, noise, in what they call Music, they say they can feel God. But is it God that they feel, or themselves, or a spirit that is alien to God?
Some of the youth laugh at my generation’s hymns and their lyrics. That’s ok with me because I too laugh at their songs and often times wayward lyrics. To each his own I guess. But ultimately, one must be able to block out all the noise of this world and MEDITATE WITH GOD. Give me a day of silence, a solemn day when I can be with God. That’s Sunday. And Sunday was not made for men, but rather, Men were made for Sunday.
As for having children in worship, please hear me out Nollie because I have been a local pastor for 30 years. It is ideal but it is not practical to coop them up for 2 hours. You say it can be done but I say it cannot without sacrificing the solemnity of the worship. But you can give them a 30-minute worship in another place.
Nollie
2 years ago
Pastor Galying,
I agree with your critique of worship becoming entertainment. And also with your assessment that all churches have their own liturgy, “even if they do not have a written liturgy, they practice a sequence, scene per scene, of how to excite the senses.” We see that in Pentecostal churches which take pride in “being led by the Spirit.” That’s nonsense, in reality.
This also shows that the importance of liturgy is not because “this is the way we’ve done it forever.” The most important question is, “Is it biblical?” The Regulative Principle of Worship that Albert mentioned is based on the Protestant Reformation’s principle of Sola Scriptura, which is laid out very clearly in the Westminster Confession of Faith 21:1:
The Reformers knew the total depravity of the “imaginations or devisings” of the human mind (Calvin’s “factory of idols”), and thus limited the way of worship to only that which is prescribed in Scripture. Of course, God himself knew the human mind too well; this is why he gave us the second commandment. In contrast, today’s evangelical worship principle is not only a far cry, but exactly the opposite, of the Reformed regulative principle: whatever is not prohibited in Scripture, we may do so in worship.
Regarding children in worship: having children in the worship service is absolutely doable. A couple of examples are in order. First, I was raised in a Unida church where all the children sat with their families during the whole worship service. Second, as I said, in our URCNA churches, most children as young as three years old can sit still with their parents for the whole service. Our worship services are “done decently and in order” (1 Corinthians 14:40) with a lot of little children. And this is done without sacrificing the “reverence and awe” in our churches: not to boast, but if you’re looking for a “solemn” service, visit one of our churches, and you’ll hear a pin drop. It all depends on training and teaching, which, in most churches today, are absent.
Irma Crow
2 years ago
I too grew up in the Unida Church that held not just a liturgical or Reformed way of worship but most of all a Biblical way of Sunday Worship Service. The pulpit is at the center of the altar because the preaching of God’s Word is the heart of worship – Why? Because the Word Incarnate is Jesus Christ Himself – He Who is the theme and the One spoken of in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, and the One by Whom, in Whom, and for Whom everything is created. He should be the focus and the heart of our worship services.
It is just sad to notice that the pulpit is now moved to the side making room at the center for the performers or the worship team which includes singers and the band of musicians. Gone are the days of solemn hymns and choral anthems, composed and written by men of God who spent years of praying, reading and meditating on the Word of God to be sure their compositions are theologically and doctrinally sound, thus glorifying God instead of men.
Nowadays, the preaching of the Word or the breaking of the (Spiritual – the Holy Spirit, Jesus Christ, the Father) bread is denigrated to just being a part of the whole “program.”
“The Golden Chain of Salvation” (Rom.8:30) culminates in the “intention of the new birth” (James 1:18, 1 Corinthians 15, Matthew 27:51-54, Titus 2:13-14, John 1:12), wrought in our hearts by the Holy Spirit’s “internal call” through the “external call” which is the preaching and hearing of the Gospel/the Word of God (Ephesians 1:13, Romans 1:16, Romans 10:17).
Salvation doesn’t come by hearing the music or lyrics of songs written by men – however inspiring and moving the testimonies, experiences of miracles, prayers, etc. are. Salvation only comes by hearing the Word preached to us which is the only way used by the Holy Spirit after preparing our hearts for this purpose.
Sorry for this long posting. I guess I still have a hangover of our Wed. eve. Bible study here at TURC with our pastor. BTW, we have a nursery for the babies up to 3 yrs. old during worship services. But the rest of the kids, from 4 yrs. old – up, sit with the parents in the pews during the worship services. As I remember, child evangelism starts with this age (per our study in C.E. Educational Psychology, and child pedagogy).
A Blessed Lord’s Day to everyone. Take care and God bless.
Irma for David too
Tim
2 years ago
There is some sort of middle-ground at our church, I guess. Kids sit in the pews for a good 30-45 min and then are “dismissed” to go to children’s church. Before they are dismissed, our pastor does a good job in talking directly to the kids from time to time.
This works well for us, since we a 3 year old, the 30-45 minutes is sometimes the longest he can sit still at one time. Then when he goes to children’s church, we are “free” to pay our full attention to the sermon.