A few years back in our church, we realised that some of the things we thought were helping our worship were actually hindering us. They were throwing us off the scent of what it means to really worship. We had always set aside plenty of time in our meetings for worshipping God through music, but it began to dawn on us that we had lost something. The fire that used to characterise our worship had somehow grown cold.
In some ways everything looked great. We had wonderful musicians and a good sound system, and lots of new songs were coming through. But somehow we had started to rely on these things a little too much, and they had become distractions. Where once people would enter in no matter what, we would now wait to see what the band was like first, how good the sound was, or whether we were “into” the songs chosen.
Mike, the pastor, decided on a pretty drastic course of action: we would strip everything away for a season, just to see where our hearts were. The very next Sunday when we turned up at church, there was no sound system to be seen and no band to lead us. The new approach was simple: we were not going to lean so hard on those outward things any more. Mike would say, “When you come through the doors of the church on Sunday, what are you bringing as your offering to God? What are you going to sacrifice today?”
If I’m honest, at first I was pretty offended by the whole thing. The worship was my job! But as God softened my heart, I started to see His wisdom all over these actions. At first the meetings were a bit awkward: there were long periods of silence, and not much singing. But we soon began to learn how to bring heart offerings to God without the external trappings we had grown used to.
Stripping everything away, we slowly started to rediscover the heart of worship.
After a while the band and the sound system reappeared, but now it was different. The songs of our hearts had caught up with the songs of our lips.
Out of this season, I reflected on where we had come to as a church and wrote The Heart of Worship, which begins, “When the music fades, all is stripped away, and I simply come.” In the chorus I tried to sum up where we were with worship: coming back to the heart of worship, where it is all about Jesus.