LET ALL MORTAL FLESH KEEP SILENCE

Rev. Mike is talking about the attitudes and behaviors of people in church, and he has a couple questions:

My question for you is this — when you advertise on the sign out in front of your church that you have “casual worship,” what do you think you’re telling people about what you think about worshipping God? Are you telling them that you dress casually, or are you saying that your worship of God is casual? Another question — would you attend a meeting with the CEO of your company or the President of the United States [you Bush-hatin’ furinners stay out of this! ] dressed the way you attend church? If so, why so, and if not, why not?

We don’t advertise “casual worship” but we have it on Wednesday nights. Sundays, I wear the alb and the stole and all that; Wednesdays, I wear a collared shirt (not a clerical collar) and khakis.

Sunday mornings, people are chatty as chatty can be before worship. Wednesday nights, people come in and sit in reverent silence. Go figure.

Congregations are supposed to be communities. Communities don’t work on hierarchical, “speak when spoken to” norms. They require informal networking in order to function. It would be great if we could steer informal conversation to our coffee hour, but it’s not happening that way. I’d rather people talk to their friends and neighbors before church than not talk to them at all. (Not that it’s an either/or, but my mission in my current call is to recreate a fading sense of community, and that doesn’t happen through formalized interaction, in my experience.)

We speak of the church building as “the house of God.” “House” implies familiarity. If I’m a guest in your house, I *might* sit quietly and wait for you to tell me exactly what to do. But if I know you, I’m probably going to feel a little more relaxed. And if I’m a member of your family, I’m certainly going to feel free to talk to the other people in the living room, grab a soda out of the fridge, use the bathroom without asking permission, etc., etc. In other words, if I know I have a place in the house, I’m going to enjoy the time I spend there.

As to your second question, yes, if I were meeting the president, I’d wear a suit. But when I go to worship, I’m not meeting the president. I’m meeting my heavenly father, someone who claims to know everything about me, even my secret, innermost thoughts–and, despite this, loves me anyway.

When somebody knows you that well, do you dress up to impress them? No, and you don’t do so for two reasons: (a) it’s unnecessary, since there’s a significant prior relationship, and (b) they already know whether or not you respect them–your clothes are not going to change their opinion. If God can see the heart (and we claim he can), then he knows if your nice clothes are a sign of respect towards him, or just your fulfillment of a cultural norm. He knows if there’s Hugo Boss on your body and Urban Outfitters in your heart.

Anytime such strong cultural norms as mandatory pre-worship silence and unspoken dress codes are strictly enforced in the congregation, it works against the notion of a personal God who “walks with me and talks with me.” God becomes cold and distant, not warm and immanent. There have to be certain boundaries maintained, of course; I’ve chased hide-and-seek games out of the sacristy and “re-educated” mothers of the bride who wanted to “change the tablecloth on the coffee table in the front of the church” because the green of Pentecost clashed with the dusky rose of the bridesmaids’ dresses.

But I can’t get behind the notion that the sense of “the presence of God” requires meek silence and a certain set of clothes. I’ve experienced that presence in high-church worship, but it’s not automatic. If the music is self-indulgent and the sermon is boring, how is God present? I’ve also experienced the presence of God in low-church worship, but it, too, isn’t automatic. If the music is unsingable and the sermon is a low-grade cultural commentary, how is God present?

God is present in worship when the Spirit is invoked, when the music flows smoothly and calls no attention to itself, when the sermon is relevant both to the Bible, and to daily life, when the prayers are sincere instead of merely appropriate, and, most important, when people walk out of the sanctuary afterward and feel both cared for and challenged.

Yes, excessive pre-worship noise can be a distraction. And certainly there’s clothes that you probably shouldn’t wear to church. But none of that cultural “noise” is more powerful than God. None of it is stronger than the Holy Spirit’s ability to break into people’s lives in the strangest and most difficult of situations. Given the choice between seeing myself as the keeper of a house or the curator of a museum, I’ll take the former 103 times out of 100.