This is an excerpt from an article by Jonathan Aigner, found here: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ponderanew/2022/01/07/confessions-of-a-former-worship-leader-2/. While Aigner ended up Lutheran, classic Lutheran and Calvinistic/Reformed theologies of liturgy largely overlap. The stress is on seeking God where he has promised to be found — in his Word and sacraments, not in our emotions or fluctuating feelings. Whereas the medieval church turned people back onto their works of penance, pilgrimages, and relics to find God, the Reformers pointed to God’s promise to meet with his people in the liturgy. God manifests his presence and delivers his gifts to us in the means of grace. The modern church has replicated the medieval problem in a new form — people are taught to seek God in their own experiences and emotions. We need a recovery of Word and sacrament as effectual means of grace and salvation, as taught by Luther, Calvin, and the Westminster divines.
“I grew up in the non-denominational tradition. For us, worship was the six songs we sang before the sermon, and the two after. We were encouraged to participate enthusiastically, to pour out our love for God in song. It was just assumed that, of course, we arrived every Sunday with a hopper full of it. I was a very earnest young believer, desiring to please God with my efforts, so I sang from my pew every week, sometimes with gusto, others just kind of plodding…
I continued to sit in rooms full of people high on dazzle with nothing but guilt in my heart telling me I must be doing it wrong. I must not have been spiritual enough that week. But it couldn’t be that. How could I possibly be the only person in the room who sinned himself out of “Experiencing the Manifest Presence of God (TM)” that week, EVERY week?
No, it must be something else. To this day, I haven’t found it, though I quit looking long ago.
After studying music in a conservative Evangelical college, I went into full time work as a “worship leader,” i.e. I strummed a guitar and led the singing. I believed that God inhabited the praises of his people, and you couldn’t lead people further in worship than you’ve already been. But these sentiments began to make me question if I was truly fit for the task. I consoled myself with the experiences that the people in the pews seemed to be having. Maybe it’s not true, God doesn’t need my worship to be authentic in order to use my music to create legitimate experiences for other people. And so I continued to strive, comforted that my efforts seemed to be doing some good, even if I wasn’t a recipient of it….
Why did I feel this way and have these concerns and doubts? How could I be sure I loved God if my emotions were all over the place?
I knew one thing for certain: I couldn’t get up there on Sunday mornings actually looking the way I felt. My growing desperation to feel the presence of God, and perceived alienation from Him, were leading to doubt, frustration, anger, despair, and depression. I’d have been one sorry sight, if you could have seen my soul. It got to the point that leading music on Sundays was painful. I dreaded it with every fiber of my being, and went home completely drained and exhausted every time. There were times I was literally choking back tears as I tried to sing, which ironically, probably just made my crooning appear that much more convincing. My song became a prayer, a desperate cry for God to touch my heart and heal the brokenness of feeling so disconnected from Him. My dark night of the soul had no light at the end of the tunnel.
I had been looking for God inside myself, in my feelings, my experiences, my spiritual faithfulness, and works of obedience. I’d come up empty. I had nothing. The game was over. The God I had been seeking was turning out to be an imaginary best friend whom I was outgrowing.
I finally reached the point where I couldn’t fake it anymore. It was tearing me apart to the point that atheism seemed preferable. I felt like such a hypocrite standing before the congregation every Sunday to lead them in the kind of “worship” that felt like leveraging commercial subculture to manufacture experiences that would hopefully be misconstrued as spiritual. I threw in the towel.
Five days after giving my two weeks, I received a phone call from a Lutheran church on the other side of the country. They wound up taking this religious refugee in and teaching me to worship God in a more emotionally and spiritually healthy way. A much older way.
Rather than pushing me deeper into myself to find my connection with God in emotions and subjective experiences, I am being pulled out of myself to behold something that is objective and external: A God who speaks to us in the sure and certain words of the scriptures, and gives us His grace in the visible and tangible sacraments. My navel-gazing narcissism posing as piety is being put to death by the constant reassurance that as surely as I can hear these words of forgiveness and taste this bread and wine, I can know that God loves and accepts me, because of Jesus, no matter how separated from Him I feel…
Now, I have the freedom to pursue my vocation as a musician untethered from the faux spirituality of manufactured zeal. I no longer feel the pressure to help people connect with God, because the Holy Spirit does this just fine without my help, through the means of grace.
I no longer have to worry about “leading people in worship”…
I’m just the music guy now, my job is to help believers sing the Gospel.
The burden is gone.”
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