MAKE THINGS HAPPEN OR BE A COUCH POTATO

Sophisticated advances in media technology easily make people consumers of the arts. People rent plays and movies on video. In addition, people buy CDs and music cassettes. Big screen TVs envelope viewers and magnificent stereo systems surround listeners. Everyone earns the right to sprawl out on sofas and catch a power nap in recliners. The drive for relaxation is big time!

The desire for entertainment has a drawback. The penchant for passivity creates couch potatoes. People can lose the ability to make things happen. People can miss out on being acting subjects who participate in life by making marvelous melody, by telling suspense filled stories and funny jokes, and by creating publically.

Everyone has to choose how one will worship. Shall I contribute to make things happen or shall I be a passive couch potato? Peter W.Marty, senior pastor of Saint Paul Lutheran Church, Davenport, Iowa, addressed this question in an article he wrote on church attendance. In the March 18, 1998 issue of the Christian Century he wrote:

"Hardly a book on evangelism in the past fifteen years has escaped the language of attendance when it comes to mapping out strategies that promise to turn churches around.

What's the problem with making special note of attendance? Nothing, really, except that it detracts from deeper values that give congregational life its beauty. One does not attend worship, at least not exactly. One may go to, congregate for or participate in worship, but one does not attend, in the passive sense of the word. We attend a junior high band concert or a New York Yankees baseball game, where a seating area is separated from a performance area. When we use the same word for worship, however, the clear focus is on us. Those planning public worship begin to think their task is to create an audience. And those who come to worship are individual spectators who wonder what they'll get out of it. As long as pastors and church musicians believe they must satisfy the desire of every living thing, worship is in trouble. Congregations will keep leaning on the contemporary and traditional distinction, haphazardly adding services, hoping to serve the unformed subjectivity of worshipers who find their way through the door.

The real role of a pastor or a church musician, however, is to shape a congregation. It is to bring together a wild assortment of people and to hold them together by the Savior's love. It is to keep God and the glory of God's presence (not us and our attendance) as the subject in the grammar of worship.

We need a new sense of the understanding of congregation, the treasured body created to worship. The occasion of praise is a moment of togetherness unmatched by anything else in culture. It's an opportunity to transcend every instinct bent on confirming personal taste. We shed our little worlds to enter a great big world. We leave the worst sides of individualism behind to gain a new sense of community. We become consciously aware of the needs of a whole body of people, unlike at any other time during the week. And we find all of this to be a marvelous privilege."

Amen! Amen!