Between Randy's post on worship and talking with Anna about her devotion for this week (on dancing), I've been doing a bit of rolling the whole worship thing around in my head. As many of you may or may not be aware of, I hail from a fairly conservative and Baptist-oriented background, and charismatics positively give me the jibblies. The fact of the matter is that this dislike is largely due to a complete lack of understanding. When it comes down to it, I am not a very emotionally-driven person and I am much more given to an intellectual worship than an emotional one. Thusly, for a long time I was not exceptionally accepting of the emotional variety.
Currently, while charismatics make me at least slightly uneasy, I try not to be too down on them and live by a policy of "If it's biblically-justifiable, go for it... as long as you don't expect me to follow suit." Granted, this approach extends to fairly straight-laced things by charismatic standards like dancing, holding up hands, waving things around, etcetera. I'm still not buying into things that are traditionally held as not biblically-justifiable such as being "Slain in the Spirit" or speaking in unintelligible "tongues".
All of that said however, the root of my problem of worship is essentially that which disrupts others... especially when said "others" are expected to join. For instance, if you have a tamborine that you insist on playing during worship but couldn't keep beat to save your soul, that's going to bother me. Even so, this still could be considered a valid form of worship and it could be that my skin isn't thick enough... but my least favorite thing is when forms of worship with which I am not comfortable are forced on me. Do you want to dance? Fine... just don't make people participate. Same thing for traditional worship like hymns and chants: just because it is the preferred form of the moment doesn't mean it should be mandatory that someone who doesn't feel comfortable participate.
Posted by Vengeful Cynic at April 8, 2004 04:40 PM | TrackBack