Nostalgia

Every generation has its own media, its own celebrities, its own pop culture. And at some point, that media and those celebrities and that pop culture are replaced with new media and new celebrities and new pop culture. And at some point, those who came of age with that media and those celebrities and that pop culture will all look back and say “oh, remember that? That was the best! I wish it was still like that”

For my generation, this is currently taking the form of movies made from our childhood cartoons and comics (the Marvel movies, Transformers, and Ender’s Game, to name a few), an infinite number of movie sequels (why do it once when you can have many at many times the price?), reboots of old shows on Netflix (Gilmore girls, anyone?), and facebook quizzes set up to determine how much of the ’80’s or ’90’s we remember. It’s about getting “teh feels.”

But it’s not just us; every generation has its own brand of nostalgia.

In possibly unrelated news, finding images for this post was incredibly difficult, in that there were so many from which to choose.

Nostalgia is a tricky thing. Playing to the things of the past gives the player massive culture points - “you understand me!” the masses will say. It pokes at a certain set of emotions associated with the perceived prime of life for that generation. But nostalgia is entirely past- and self-focused; the desire to return to a time when things were different is actually a clever trick of a self-interested, consumer-driven world.

I once saw someone write that every year, American culture embarks on a massive project to carefully recreate the Christmases of baby boomers’ childhoods. I’ve referenced it before, because this is nostalgia at its finest - an entire cultural industry taking a single season of the year and playing it up because it pokes the feel-good bones of those who have the most money. It’s almost like - or maybe it simply IS - selling feelings. And so every year you hear the same songs on perpetual repeat from radio stations. You can even get internet radio year-round that does the same thing.

For a price.

Think about that: Christmas is now an INDUSTRY because of nostalgia.

Planning our worship gatherings CANNOT be driven by nostalgia, but must be driven by a desire to curate space for people to respond to their Creator together. While nostalgia is about evoking self-focused emotion, our corporate worship must give people space for self-abandoning responses to God's mercy. Nostalgia says "I remember how awesome I/we/the world used to be, I wish I/we/the world was still that awesome.” In good corporate worship gatherings, on the other hand, we tell stories of the past that help us remember what God has done, and then use them as a means to invite us to trust Him both now AND in the future. Nostalgia wishes to remain in a warm, fuzzy blanket of positive emotion in which we ignore the needs of others; good corporate worship sends us out to be agents of transformation in the world for the sake of the world.

Why Hire A Worship Pastor?

The two edges of church life that must always remain sharp are the worship gathering and the mission program. This is not to discount student ministries, adult ed, women ministries, or even children's ministries, but it is to say that the common denominator to all of the other programs - to the Mission God gave His Church - are the two things that God commanded us to do as a gathered body: to be a sent people (mission) and to respond to His mercy together (gathered/sacramental worship). The way you GATHER and the way that you SEND will posture your church to thrive. You can't have one without the other, for both are worship. And you can’t have healthy children’s or youth or adult ministries unless you have healthy gathering and sending practices. 

Regarding the gathering, there's a BIG difference between hiring gigging musicians and hiring a worship pastor. Most churches are (sometimes grudgingly) willing to pay for good music, but not good leadership. That's not to say you shouldn’t ever hire a band or an organist or an accompanist (there are many circumstances in which it’s a good idea), but it IS to say that it's important to have a person who understands WHY she’s on stage and is willing to do what helps the congregation respond to God (which includes during the week, not just the few hours on sunday). This this is VASTLY different than someone who is simply there for a paycheck or there to maintain the nostalgia of what we’ve always done. Worship pastors care for their congregations in very different ways than a lead pastor or youth pastor or children's pastor, and those who are good at their job do several things that the gigging musicians or the 5-hour-a-week-underpaid-college-kid-who-picks-the-songs can’t do:

Holistic Thinking 

A worship pastor plans the whole service, instead of simply picking some music to play with the band that sounds good. This gives the planning a new dimension; it means the music s/he does pick can tell a broader story that fits in with the sermon, the liturgy (also picked by the worship pastor), the offering, and even the announcements. Every piece of the service can have its place when it’s being cared for on a big-picture level. The worship pastor likewise brings a big-picture focus to planning services over the course of the liturgical year, rather than working from week-to-week (not that this doesn’t happen occasionally). Christmas? Easter? Festival bands? Five hours a week doesn’t cut it for this sort of planning. 

Additionally, the “pastor” part of “worship pastor” means that there’s somebody thinking through what we ought to do when something big happens that impacts our congregations. We recently had a tragedy in our community when a well-known pastor and his wife were killed suddenly. Many people in our church knew them well, and the shock was noticeable. Instead of going with “plan A” (which would have been easiest), we were able to modify the service to include a time of lament and grieving that ended up being a place the Spirit moved noticeably that weekend. Our services/gatherings cannot be planned in a vacuum, but must take our culture, our congregation, and our teams in mind.

Integration 

Tech ministries, worship teams, choirs, stage design teams … all of these need oversight, but will work better if they have someone who can help translate between them. When a person has the big picture (see point 1), a church can spend its time and resources more efficiently. Case in point, many churches have a properties team who makes decisions about facilities, and yet most of the time, their bandwidth for worship technology is fairly small. A worship pastor can guide decisions made by that team with the long-term picture in mind (for example, “this sound board is going to die sometime in the next five years, we should start saving now”). 

Vision 

The musical/artistic and theological training that a good worship pastor brings to the table helps bring vision to the multiple ministries under her charge. It means there’s somebody looking, not just at the state of what we have now, but the future of what is to come. Where are we going? What are we going to do when it gets here? What processes and mechanisms need to be put in place right now so that when “then” becomes “now”, the road might be a little less bumpy? In my context, I often ask the question, how can our modern people learn from our traditional people, and how can our traditional people learn from our modern people? In what ways can each encourage the other to grow, and in what ways can each encourage the other to remain faithful? Vision is about understanding the WHY of what we do (the PURPOSE behind gathering together) and then applying that truth to the ministries under our responsibility.

A worship pastor is meant to curate environments where a congregation can respond to God’s mercy together. I use the word “curate” here intentionally, adapted from Mark Pierson’s book “The Art of Curating Worship.” Museum curators don’t create exhibits to force change on people, but rather, to invite them to engage and experience the ideas. Curating is an ongoing art form - it does not cease when the glue on the exhibit dries, but is active, subject to change as new minds seek to better experience what the exhibit has to offer. Likewise, worship pastors do not worship FOR the people, and they cannot FORCE the people to worship (if it is coerced, it’s not worship). Instead, we create a space where we can invite people to engage God together and to become the sorts of people that He’s made them to be. The art, the music, the liturgy, the scripture, the message … all are crafted together as part of creating and curating a time in which people can choose to listen and respond to the Spirit in their midst.

Worship is so much bigger than an event, and a good worship pastor will know this. But this does not change the fact that we must still gather together. If worship is simply the act of responding to God’s mercy (Romans 12:1), then a well-curated worship gathering will be a place where God’s diverse, messy, multigenerational, weird-and-wonderful people can respond to that mercy together.

Lenses

I remember when I got my first pair of prescription glasses. I was in seventh grade, and my parents noticed that I’d been having a lot of headaches, that I’d had trouble paying attention in class, and that I was starting to squint a lot. We went to an optometrist, had my eyes checked out. He put me in a chair and had me read letters through a large contraption and sure enough, I had become near-sighted; I could read things close to me, but I couldn’t see things in the distance like chalkboards or conductors. So he showed me option #1, and then option #2, then option #1 again, then option #2 again, and so on about a hundred times until I could read the letters all the way down to the 20/15 row. I’ve worn glasses ever since.

My first set was a huge pair of mostly-circular lenses held together by a bronze frame (that’s right: NERD glasses). My parents actually talked me out of a bigger pair, but when I first put them on, and for the first few months, it was all I could do to keep from playing with them. Their weight on my nose irritated me, the way they constantly slipped down when my face got sweaty, the way that those persistent smudges forced me to clean them all the time (carefully, without scratching). Eventually, the small scratches started adding up and I had to get the lenses replaced; the frames wore out so I got a new and better (and smaller) set; the use of glasses relaxed my eyes, which then caused my eyes to change again and I needed a new prescription. After a while, this became second nature, a constant process of refining my vision as my eyes changed, and in response to the world changing around me. Eventually, I didn’t notice them sitting there; I learned how to keep from getting so many smudges on them; they were adjusted to keep them from sliding so much.

There’s a lot we can learn from glasses.

Our experiences, our culture, our personalities, and our preferences all contribute to the way we perceive the world, like a pair of glasses that we slip between ourselves and reality. Like their optical counterparts, these worldviews guide our experiences in life, help us navigate the world, and to some degree, will change how we experience the events that happen to us. When we use our worldview, it actually influences our worldview to change, to grow in one direction or another like a plant towards sunlight. Or when the world changes around us and smudges or scratches our lenses, we often need to upgrade our worldview to adapt to new situations and new ideas we’d never encountered before. And like glasses, the worldview we choose will tell reality something about us too - many glasses look great, but it’s the lenses that matter, and some help better than others.

But I’ve also learned that our worldviews come at a cost. You can tint, cloud, warp, flip, or otherwise alter a lens, but doing so only changes that which you see, not the world you look at. How often do we go through hard situations to come out on the other side angry and jaded, determined to never let that happen again? We circle the wagons and hunker down, but the reality of the world is that we cannot keep bad things from happening; to think we can control the world otherwise is to warp our lenses and in doing so, we deceive only ourselves.

Furthermore, we wear glasses in the first place because it is our eyes that have trouble making sense of reality. The making of a good prescription requires external help; an optometrist, who already sees reality as it is, writes us a prescription to make our lenses. Likewise with our worldviews, an external voice that can perceive reality as it really is will be the best reference point as we grow, as the world shifts, as our lenses need upgrading. The one whom we choose as our optometrist (reference point) will determine what sort of world we see, and the only way to be sure it’s working out is through time and experience. Don’t be afraid to go through that process of constant evaluation to make sure the lenses are the right ones. As with glasses, your life can depend on it. 

Choose wisely.