Live.Awake

Worship, Brokenness and the Roar of Church Mice

// May 6th, 2009 // Christian Living

I had a peculiar experience today in a worship service.  First, there was a normal worship set with music played by a competent band with a competent worship leader through a more than competent audio system into a room with competent acoustics.  The music was “right”.  The sound was “right”.  The lighting was “right”.  The worship leader led strongly without getting in the way.  Nobody in the band seemed overly concerned with performing but genuinely wanted to help aid us in worshiping Jesus.  I have no criticisms at all.

What was peculiar to me was what happened at the end.  The set ended, the lights went out, the band mostly left the stage, and a large group of men came up on the stage.  It was a choir made up of about 15 or so men from a local Teen Challenge camp.  In case you don’t know, Teen Challenge is a Christ-centered drug rehab program begun by David Wilkerson many years ago.  This choir was primarily made up of men who are former drug addicts.

They sang one song.  I don’t remember the song.  I do remember the worship. And that one song, sung by those broken men, blew me away.  Spiritually speaking, there is a peculiar “sound” to the worship that comes from people who know what it means to be broken.  People who have a deep sense of the magnitude of the debt that was paid for them.  It’s the sound of worship that is not self-seeking, self-exalting or self-aware.  It is Christ-seeking, Christ-exalting, and Christ-aware.  It’s raw and it’s real.

This moment today took me back to the days when I was volunteering years ago in a similar ministry in Britain.  I remember the first time I worshiped while standing in the middle of a crowd of broken men singing to Jesus at the top of their lungs.  It sounded different than any worship I had heard up until that moment and my concept of what worship is changed right there.

I knew right in that moment that the quality of worship for me would never again be measured by what it looks like, how competent it seems, how bold or strong it is, or how loud it is sung (if sung at all).

I spoke to a young man this week who worships much the same way, only he’s quiet and often overlooked by the competent people.  I felt inspired by God to tell him,

“You may think your life and worship is like the squeaking of a church mouse, but in heaven it is like the roaring of a lion.”

I don’t hear the “lion’s roar” often enough.  Either it’s not there like it should be, or I’m not listening. I think the Church needs to make room for the squeaking church mice, and the broken ones.  I think if we don’t, we will soon forget what unsynthesized and unsanitized worship sounds like.