Worship, Bottom-up or Top-down?
Ever see someone take credit for something they didn’t do? Proud parents are guilty of this quite often. Sometimes little kids, with big smiles on their faces, will take credit for an arts craft that, for the most part, was assembled by an adult. From the over-exaggerated to the irrational assumption that everything we have is due solely to our ingenuity (and not the varying levels of privilege we were born into) we tend to overemphasize human efficacy. Could it be possible that we do the same with our understanding of worship? Is worship primarily a human endeavor? Or is it primarily a divine encounter? Is it merely bottom-up human action? Or is it, at it’s core, a top-down encounter? How we answer this question, whether consciously or subconsciously, and how we’ve been formed to view this subject will have a dominating impact on how we view liturgical form (which every church has). Is repetition in worship bad? Is it insincere?
(the following is an excerpt from the book “You Are What You Love”)
“When we unhook worship from mere expression, it completely retools our understanding of repetition. If you think of worship as a bottom-up, expressive endeavor, repetition will seem insincere and inauthentic. But when you see worship as an invitation to a top-down encounter in which God is refashioning your deepest habits, then repetition looks very different: it’s how God rehabituates us. In a formational paradigm, repetition isn’t insincere, because you’re not ‘showing’, you’re ‘submitting’. There is no practice that isn’t repetitive. We willingly embrace repetition as a good in all kinds of other sectors of our life - to hone our golf swing, our piano prowess, and our mathematical abilities, for example. If the sovereign Lord has created us as creatures of habit, why should we think repetition is inimical to our spiritual growth? Learning to love anything takes practice and practice takes repetition.”