Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Worship SHIFT: Why the Word “Blended” Scares Me as a Worship Style

Churches suffer for many reasons. In some cases, they are subject to moral failure, to stubbornness or to attacks from the devil. But, nothing kills a church or ministry faster than the greatest devil of them all: ambiguity. When people don’t know what the boundaries or definitions of terms everyone’s throwing around are, other people get hurt. When words like “blended” enable everyone to attach their own particular meaning, people fight.


The ironic thing is that many churches strive for ambiguity under the guise of “freedom” or “inclusivism”. What’s interesting is that we fail to take into account our theological perspective on human depravity – that, given ultimate freedom with no boundaries, we fail every time. Boundaries don’t necessarily limit freedom so much as they provide an open space within which to create. You spend less time worrying about what is “acceptable” and more time focusing on continued innovation on the norm, which is key to worship in any style or context.


I’ve seen far too many churches choose “blended” for the wrong reason. You’ve generally got the traditional camp thinking to themselves “how much are we willing to give up to appease the contemporary side?” and the contemporary camp asking themselves “how far can we push the limits before the traditionalists bite back?” Of course, the problem with all of this is that no one is thinking about the bigger issues – how does God want to be worshipped? How does our immediate neighborhood/target demographic want to worship and what sort of music to they listen to?


Really, it brings out the selfishness in everyone – each side determining to themselves that they’ll define what sort of blend we’ll have – 80/20 instead of 50/50, for instance. Both are blended – but both include concessions from one side or the other. You can call my latte a blended drink regardless of the percentage of milk, espresso or flavoring.


So what’s the positive solution? There could be many, but I’ll propose one. If you truly want a mix of traditional, contemporary and modern elements – try on this word: eclectic. Unlike “blended” which simply implies the presence of two elements (99/1 is still blended), eclectic has qualitative degrees. For instance, something with 10 elements is more eclectic than something with 2. To be eclectic is to notice when the presence of a particular element is under-represented or simply missing.


How would you describe your church’s worship?

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