Contemporary Worship & Words From God

Notebooks Project #3 Late December 1999

Dec 20, 1999 AD

In God’s eyes, my life must be a wreck. I got this and that going on. All for God, but so much more. I went to God’s house to get to know & it seems as though that’s the only time I grow. I don’t know. My revelation tells me it is time for a mercy song. It makes me wonder how sovreign God is.

Dec 21, 1999 AD

Now I know what the mercy song is for. Now, I am a Christian. I can handle this.

ESSAY

I would tell my Great grandparents to prepare for change. They need to be prepared otherwise they won’t enjoy the comforts of technology because they’ll not want to change.

Dec 22, 1999 AD

NOW I know what the mercy song is. God listened to our prayers of repentance at church tonight. I sung His mercy song & thank God I can’t remember it. Life is a song but you don’t have to write it down. God allowed me to sing the song of laying down my gifts to Him. The gifts are the fish. I have to let them go back to God for His glory. I write for Him & through Him.

MARGINALIA

WORD: I need to feel away something.

Contemporary Worship in Evangelical Churches

“God listened to our prayers of repentance at church tonight.” I want to describe what this looked like, felt like, sounded like. I want to share this experience as well as I can because the worship service is one of the key contexts that explains many of the themes I wrote about in these notebooks.

This is easily the most uncomfortable thing I’ve written so far for this project. It feels like telling a secret you’re not supposed to tell. I have tried and will try to own my experience, my own beliefs, even as a teenager. But part of my own beliefs came from what happened to me. And this is what happened. Not exactly, but something like it. Repeatedly. And not only did it happen, I wanted it to happen. I wanted to be a part of these worship services. And this is what they were like.

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You walk into a modern church sanctuary. Cushioned chairs linked together by metal hooks stand in place of pews. A center aisle rolls out before you on industrially-made carpet. The stage is covered in muted gray tones and the regalia of contemporary music. Guitars on stands, microphones, an electronic keyboard, a full drumset, a jambay, some tambourines, a tangle of black wires, glints of chrome finish. A simple podium front and center.

The band assembles and the worship music starts. It is hard to describe if you have not heard it¹. It is entrancing. Lyrics are projected on a screen; hymnals are old-fashioned. And if you sing—with everyone else—you can feel something. It stirs inside. An awakening. Like getting lost in a good book. Like a day you don’t want to end. Your spirit lifts, and it is not just because the music makes you feel it, but if you are singing to God, you rise above your small, small world into a glorious story. About creation. And redemption. And all that is good.

And yet, there is an intimacy to it. The walls, minimally decorated, seem to cradle you, wrap you in safety. The mass of personalities and secret dramas float away, and you all are one voice. Singing. As simple as breathing, except you are aware of it. You notice it, and you feel the life inside you bursting. The people are covered in love, bound together like the cushioned chairs, linked in intimate expression to One.

As the songs bleed into one another, you lose track of time and space. A distinctive spirit floods the room, unites all in song and worship. And it waves.

It moves with the tempo and mood of the instruments, but each individual can contribute, can change the chord. A shout of “Hallelujah!” can spur hoots and hollers. The band picks it up, the tempo and volume rises. And the room crescendos.

A wail of anguish may rise above the din. The musicians quiet and listen and follow the wave of the spirit through the room. Then the wails continue. The drums pause. The keyboard softens, shifts to a minor key.

The wails spread. More and more. The crowd slowly divides, like the Red Sea before Moses, and everyone is sitting on the floor now, heads in their knees, crying. And now, someone has a “word.”

They walk to the stage, and stop short, standing off center in the space between the stage and the first row of chairs. It is a leader in the church. Someone respected. The music team hands them a mic.

“God is saying the world is hurting. Groaning. OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. It is groaning. Your friends at school. The people you work beside. OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. They are waiting for Jesus. They are waiting but they cannot see! OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! They cannot see! They cannot hear! They are anxious, they are dying, they are OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! The Lord is grieving, weeping! OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

An elder in the church stands up to take the mic when the “word” is done. They interpret and pray.

“Lord, we have not done your will. Have mercy on us. Have mercy on our friends, our family. Lord hear our song of repentance. Hear our cries. We are here to do Your will.”

And the wailing continues. The song changes, minor key, a reflection of the mood of the room. It continues. Maybe half an hour. Maybe an hour. Who knows. Who cares. You’re in it now.

A Word From God

A “word” is when someone feels the Spirit of God compelling them to share what the feel God is saying to them. It is something cultivated; it is not automatic. You must have “discernment” to recognize when something in your spirit is from God—it aligns with Scripture, it is consistent with what God has said before. You can have a “word” from God for the whole church or for a specific person. I was once given a word, “You don’t have to prove anything to anyone.” It is often some form of encouragement. Sometimes it’s vague and you have to interpret it. Evangelical Christians reading will recoil, but it’s not unlike an astrology reading when you get a “word”—the difference for Evangelical Christians is that a “word” is from God and an astrology reading is from the devil.

So. In these entries, I got a “word” from God. “Mercy song.” Just a phrase, just for me. Something in my head that wouldn’t go away. I still get those. And I still listen. Because sometimes it’s important. Sometimes it tells me something about my life that I need to take action on—or something I need to let go.

I like the various attempts, in these entries, at trying understanding the “word.” My favorite line here is: “Now, I am a Christian.” Now I understand the “word.” I didn’t before; I do now. Now, I can really feel it. “Now, I am Christian.” How many times did that happen? So was I not a Christian before? Is it a switch you turn on and off? How many “altar calls” did I go up for?

Altar Calls

An “altar call” is a period at the end of many Evangelical Christian services where whoever is preaching that day says something like, “If you died in a car crash on your way home from this service, are you certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that you would be going to Heaven? If you’re not sure, come up here and we will pray with you.” And then the music follows suite. And then they wait. For somebody to go up to the “altar,” the space in between the chairs and the stage where everyone can see you, like you’re in a fish bowl. And in that space, they’d pray with you to (re)dedicate their life to Christ. It’s an inside joke in Evangelical Christianity how many times someone gets “saved,” how many times they go up for an altar call. Theoretically, at some churches, you could get “saved” every week.

The altar call is a master class at emotional manipulation. Even if I felt my walk with God was good, I’d still feel “convicted” and want to go up there. I’d have to fight a million emotions not to go most weeks. It was very serious to me, but I like the story the late and hilarious Christian comedian Grady Nutt tells about an altar call he went up for simply because the church service was going on too long and his mother told him, “The roast was burning” in the oven.

Nutt is a testament to the fact that Evangelical Christianity does not have to hurt if you have a little humor about it. But a self-serious teenager like myself felt like it was life and death all the time. Because I really believed it was.

The margin note here is another “word” I got that I needed to “feel away” something. I’ve written about this before, but I hope my description of an Evangelical worship service gives it more context for it to make sense. Those services were emotional highs. I am not cynical enough to believe that all of them are designed to be that way; I take people at their word that many of them feel the Spirit. It is not unlike old Quaker traditions. But after those incredible emotional highs, I went home and did math homework and took orders at McDonald’s. The disconnect frightened me because I felt, if I did not always feel the way I felt at church, maybe that meant I had strayed from God. Maybe it meant I was disobeying Him or going to hell. Which means every waking minute is supposed to be focused on God. Doing my math homework… for God. Taking orders at McDonald’s… for God. And when I wasn’t thinking about God, something was wrong with me. So I would spend hours trying to conjure those feelings, stir them up, just to make sure I was right with God.

And that, my friends, is just Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Textbook.

• Obsession: fear of going to hell because I don’t feel right.

• Compulsion: pray, sing, ruminate until I feel right.

• Rinse. Repeat. Hours. Days. Months. Years.

Does it make any sense? No. That’s why it’s a Disorder. It is something broken in my brain, and I’ve recently come to accept that there may not be a time where it’s not there, at least in the background, as a predisposition. It’s the background hum. Like when you plug in an instrument at a contemporary worship service.

Random Notes

• The “ESSAY” section is a response to the journal prompt my teacher gave me, which must have been something like, “What would you say to your great grandparents if you met them?” I have always been a technology booster, but the “comfort” thing is quite a trip. I told a group of friends once as we all paid for our meals at a restaurant on our phones, “If I could tell my past self one thing about the future it’s that everything will be very convenient, and it will be a nightmare.”

• More reflections on being too busy. In the Midwest, a common response to, “How are you doing?” is “Keepin’ busy.” “Busyness” is a virtue in the Midwest. Idle hands and all that.

• “The gifts are the fish.” I used to fish, but I rarely ate what I caught. I did catch and release. Here I’m creating a metaphor about receiving a gift from God as catching a fish—and that the thing to do is to release it and give the God back to Him in worship. I do not exaggerate when I say I felt like every thing I did was meant to be for God.

• I wish I could tell you these entries aren’t all going to have at least some reference to Evangelical Christianity, because I don’t want people to think all I’m doing is beating up on the faith of my youth. But, again, I’ve read ahead, and we’re in for quite a bit of it for quite a long time. The later poetry notebooks offer some respite. But I didn’t fully deconstruct until the middle of graduate school, so around 2014. We’re in 1999. So buckle up or just tune in for what you’re interested in.

• There are many words I cannot spell. “Sovereign” is one of them. I think I’ll start keeping a list.

1. This links to the livestream of International House of Prayer, a place where people engage in contemporary worship in shifts, 24/7.