How Fast is Worship?

If your congregation is like most, it probably tries to keep worship confined to a 55-minute block of time.  The advantage of this is that it gets us all home before opening kick-off—pragmatic, yes, but not exactly the noblest of reasons for truncating worship.  Or perhaps it keeps the clock-watchers happy; you know, those parishioners who will pull you aside sometime in the next week and ask you why worship ran over by five minutes.

Unfortunately, the hunger for short worship is an insatiable one, and allowing ourselves as worship planners to become slaves to it forces us to decide what is worth doing in worship.  Should we cut two verses of a hymn?  Omit the creed?  Use intinction?  Cut a song altogether?  Go right from the sermon to the offering?

Of course, our Christian freedom gives us license to do any of these things, and sometimes, as in the case of large congregations with limited parking space, we must make concessions for the sake of the Body.  But all things being equal, such chrono-centric focus teaches our worshipers that the elements of worship are ultimately unimportant and can be included or excluded as we see fit.

But is this really the message we want to send?  Are there not things that must be done in worship?  For lack of a better analogy, worship has an agenda—there are items of business that must be dealt with, and skipping over them does us a disservice, as does rushing through them haphazardly.  It also tells our worshipers that their non-church-related business (the football game, their crock pot, etc.) is more important than giving God their sacrifice of praise as well as time.  A congregation that cannot deal with a service longer than 55-minutes because it has “things to do” is a congregation whose loyalties need to be addressed.

But more than that, good worship requires an attitude of deliberateness.  Worship that is confined to a time limit versus worship that is allowed to end organically after all is accomplished is the difference between McDonald’s and Olive Garden.  It’s the difference between eating fast and eating slowly, which has some recently discovered health implications.  And it seems to me to be the height of human arrogance to suggest to our Creator that prayer, praise, and thanksgiving for the promises of God are worth but one hour of our time—less than 1% of our week.  Is that how much God’s blessings are worth to us?  Less than 1% of our time?

How can the Church stay counter-cultural in the midst of pressures to simply “get worship over with”?  How can we cultivate in our congregations a culture that understands that the divine drama that unfolds on the stage of worship is one that is worth our time?  Or, put another way, that the cost of our discipleship—or the price Christ paid for our ransom—is something we should be demanding to get our “money’s worth” for, not rushing through as fast as we can.