""It's going to be an awakening experience when conservative Christians get to Heaven and realize there are no pews and everyone is acting like a fool. You can't fully worship God in the comfort of the box that you've put up around your faith." -Anna Joy Wells
I haven't blogged in over a month! This is not because I did not want to, but rather because I have not found the time to, and when I have had the time to, I just haven't had anything remotely interesting worth blogging about. But alas, that streak of nothingness ends with this blog! Recently I have been thinking a lot about worship, how it is perceived and how Christians react when it goes out of what they consider the "norm." I think we as southern baptists, Catholics, and most other denominations are too traditional. I LOVE tradition, don't get me wrong. I love hymns and tradition; but who among us has not sung a hymn and was just singing the words, has participated in other traditional conservative church service that had no meaning to them? Everyone has done it at one time or another. One question that was brought to my attention in the summer of 2011 that I really honed in on was the question, "why do we continue to follow traditional worship, if it has completely lost its meaning for some of us?" I was challenged to sort through the parts of Christianity that I have been taught all my life and to pick out the traditions that are meaningful to me and figure out why others had lost my sincerity. Because, as I have come to find, without my heart in it, "worship" is not worship.
Challenge #1-Find what traditions are meaningful to you and do those. Discover which ones have no meaning and find out why. Above all, have sincere worship however that worship my manifest itself.
In addition, a friend of mine put another idea I was thinking into words. She said, "It's going to be an awakening experience when conservative Christians get to Heaven and realize there are no pews and everyone is acting like a fool. You can't fully worship God in the comfort of the box that you've put up around your faith." I can criticize Baptists because I am one, but here's what I realized, our...umm... ostracism (for lack of a better word)...often stops people from participating fully in communal worship. As Baptists, if you raise your hands in church, you may get a weird look, but nothing too bad. If you sing super loud and off key, you may have some people around you move from their pews. And heaven forbid you....DANCE!...I think Christians, especially Baptists are in for a huge surprise when we all get to Heaven. I don't care what you say, I'm dancing in Heaven. It will all be with a heart of worship that will have thrown tradition aside and be fully engulfed in glorifying my Lord without fear of what anyone else has to say about it.
Challenge #2-Take God out of the box you've put Him in, and let Him guide your worship rather than going by what you think everyone else expects your worship to look like. I really think God could care less if your worship is traditional or not as long as your worship is directed at Him with love and sincere affection.
*I have a feeling that there will be more blogs on this idea of "nontradtion"...but here is the first of many.
