Article in Youthwork magazine challenges some trends in alternative worship

THE JANUARY issue of Youthwork magazine contains a controversial article, Worshipping An Unknown God?: Critiquing 'Creative Worship' by Dave Wright. In the article Wright, coordinator for youth ministries in the Episcopal diocese of South Carolina, wrote, "A few years ago at a youth conference the morning worship was very creatively led by a combination of DJ and liturgy. While the music was wonderful and the environment created was well focused, the liturgy itself lacked clear biblical references to God. Within a few minutes a number of us realised that we could have been in a druid service using the same liturgy. While I am not especially fond of trite Christian clichés, using biblical language and keeping a clear focus on Christ is essential to worship. If we wash out the references in an effort to be more accessible, we risk creating worshippers of an unknown God. When our diocese decided to use the 'labyrinth in a tin', one of our leaders who prepared all the supplies discovered that there were very few references to Jesus. She phoned me in a panic stating how we simply could not use this. After talking it through, she decided to modify the experience so that it was clearly focused on Christ. Our labyrinth ended with a person sitting at the foot of a large wooden cross, very different from the materials and instruction provided. Pastor and theologian john Piper commented in a sermon that 'if you alter or obscure the biblical portrait of God in order to attract converts, you do not get converts to God, you get converts to an illusion. That is not evangelism, that is deception.'"