The Lord has shown me something in Timothy the Musical I hadn’t considered before about the evolution of church services over 70 years and the tendency of them to change in response to culture and revolving door membership. Remembering my boyhood church and traditional liturgical services, they were not called worship services then but church services. There we gathered with an invocation, sang hymns accompanied by an organist, recited the Lord’s Prayer and Apostles Creed, read responsive readings, listened to a choir anthem, sang the Doxology and Gloria Patri, listened to the message, made prayers of intercession, and departed with a hymn and benediction. The tithe wasn’t preached instead charity and stewardship. Services were conducted by a black robed pastor with liturgical stole, robed choir director, deacons and elders dressed in their Sunday best, with the youth sitting in pews with their parents or together in the back. Every hymn was a statement of faith, which when sung along with the readings, creeds, and Lord’s prayer, was a common confession drawing us together in mutual encouragement.

Fast forward to today, youth have displaced the elders and their ways, staking an unyielding claim to the stage with electronic keyboards, amps, monitors, guitars, basses and drums – often so loud and overpowering that they have to be enclosed in a plexiglass booth. There the 30-something band leader Bogarts the microphone for an hour or more, singing not a single hymn of the faith as a gesture of honor and respect for their elders, but droning repetitious songs of self indulgence masquerading as worship.

How often when watching a contemporary “worship” service have I wondered whether any of the young and unseasoned leaders ever read 1 Corinthians 14:

What is our conclusion, brothers? Whenever you come together, let everyone be ready with a psalm or a teaching or a revelation, or ready to use his gift of tongues or give an interpretation; but let everything be for edification. If the gift of tongues is exercised, let it be by two or at most three, and each in turn; and let someone interpret. And if there is no one present who can interpret, let the people who speak in tongues keep silent when the congregation meets—they can speak to themselves and to God. Let two or three prophets speak, while the others weigh what is said. And if something is revealed to a prophet who is sitting down, let the first one be silent. For you can all prophesy one by one, with the result that all will learn something and all will be encouraged. Also, the prophets’ spirits are under the prophets’ control; for God is not a God of unruliness but of shalom. (1 Corinthians 14:26-33a CJB)