The computer hated me. I don’t know what I did wrong or how I must have offended it, but its malice felt remarkably personal. I was working the slides at my church last week, running them from the tech booth for both the sermon and the worship, and every time two of the songs started, the computer would glitch. The slides would refuse to come up. And each time I held my breath – terrified that the sudden lack of lyrics and chords would bring the worship to a screeching halt. Thankfully, the slides eventually came up, fixing themselves about thirty seconds into each song. But all week, I haven’t been able to stop wondering… how would people have responded if the service fell apart?
For as long as I can remember, I have been aware of a well-practiced way to do Christianity. It’s never spoken or taught explicitly, but that didn’t make it any less clear. Services progressed from an intro, to worship to a sermon. Hands went up, down or out, and beautifully highlighted Bibles accompanied the prayer journals of all those who considered themselves serious churchgoers. Faith may have been someone’s belief, but Christianity brought another level. It encompassed how they believed. And, more than that, it was how perfectly put together their show of belief was.
Without a doubt, this feeling of the “right” way to do things is a cultural one. As Americans, we live in a culture where not only is faith a norm, but there is, as a result, an “industry standard” of how aspects of faith are carried out. No one in the process of church hopping walks into a Sunday morning wondering whether or not there will be a speaker, just like no one buys a daily devotion book wondering whether or not it will tie pieces of scripture to practical questions and prompts. There is an expectation of what will happen. An expectation of how God will move. An expectation of what it looks like to approach him.
This summer, in the midst of traveling and various projects, I had the chance to work at a camp that I attended as a camper the year before I came to college. It was a great experience in many different ways, but one afternoon, as I was taping up written prayers from previous years in preparation for an annual reflection night, I came across one I recognized. One I had written. Though I remembered writing a prayer during that night when I was a camper, I had forgotten how raw it was. How harsh. How – simply – un-pretty.
As a Creative Writing and Screenwriting double major, I am used to trying to make my writing “good.” Even in my prayer journal, I often find myself slipping into a more poetic style. But this prayer wasn’t poetic. It wasn’t even nice. It was a gut-twisting, accusation-filled shout at heaven, screaming, “What the crap?” It came from the first night I shouted at God. But also from the first night that I ever heard something back.
The last thing that I want to do with this article is to accuse our Christian habits of being wrong or immoral. The fact that my church uses slides and lighting cues for its worship doesn’t make the worship any less real, just like the use of purple cursive in Sunday school journals doesn’t mean that a person’s notes are invalid. But sometimes, I wonder if we lose something in our quest to make Christianity pleasant. I wonder if, in being pleasing, our worship has become predictable. I wonder what would happen if, for once, we let things go wrong: fumbled with our words at the pulpit, and shouted out prayers in all the ranting desperation we would use with our roommates.
I wonder if the God we’d see would be even greater than the space we’ve left for him.
Photo courtesy of Unsplash.
