the irony of excellence

Can church be so "good" it discourages participation?

Excellence has become a modern buzzword for Christian events and services. I've been playing music in churches since I was young, and I can't tell you how many times I've heard people say things like: "our goal is excellence," or "we need to be polished so we're not distracting to the congregation" or "David played skillfully before the Lord, shouldn't we?"

It sounds like a good thing and a worthy goal because of the contrast. If you're not excellent, you're subpar or mediocre--at best, just okay. No one want those words to be used to describe his craft. But endorsing excellence overtly seems rather silly, because it almost communicates that there might be some other goal--almost as if someone might undertake something in hopes of doing it poorly.

Now I'm all for a good focus on excellence in a team environment. People in charge of things should get together occasionally and discuss ways to improve. But I do question why we make such a big deal of it in church, and that question raises the other I posed in the first sentence of this article.

There seems to be a modern movement in Christianity to try to produce quality stuff--stuff we hope can suffice as Christian alternatives to secular I think there are two noticeable arenas where this movement has become very pronounced: music and church services. I'm going to leave music aside for a moment, although I will point out an interesting blog article I read recently by Michael Gungor of the band "Gungor" in which he discusses at length the bizarre approach Christian artists have taken to music. If you're interested, find it here.

Instead, I'll focus on my area of familiarity: church services. I have participated in hundreds of church services over the years. I know what it's like to be onstage, and to feel the pressure of wanting a flawless presentation. I've also experienced countless services from the pew, and I know what it's like to feel bored at church. It really does feel like we've come to expect our church services to entertain us, at least in the evangelical church. We've done away with traditional liturgy in favor of a more "modernized" service, including updated music, more engaging messages, captivating multimedia presentations, etc. None of this is necessarily bad, and I'm not trying to say otherwise. I'm just pointing out a trend.

There is much we could say about this trend, but to start, I'm curious what happens when we finally attain that excellent and polished service we've always wanted. Will anyone else even want to participate? Or will we be too worried about polluting it with our own less-than-perfect voices, or too engrossed in watching the production unfold that we forget why we came in the first place?

I bring this up because in my view, a church service should be designed for participation. At least, that's what I've been led to believe over the years. Why else do we sing songs together and call it worship? Why are people encouraged to take notes during the message? Why did liturgy ever come about in the first place? The congregation should participate in the service, but they may not feel encouraged to do so if they feel somehow unqualified.

Just trying to explore the thought. There is certainly also a great danger in a haphazard approach to a church service. But it's interesting to me that the very thing a church service should engender could be threatened, at least in theory, when we achieve excellence. And the whole thought experiment begs other questions about the purpose of church, and the irreconcilability between an entertainment mentality and a participation mentality. Another time, perhaps. For now, I just wanted to ask the first question.