In our lives of faith, it is important to rehearse the many and often mysterious ways in which God has guided and saved us in the past. This enables us to build our courage for the future. Many people have grown more comfortable in bringing their specific petitions to God in public worship. It is far less frequent that we have the confidence to praise God in our public worship for what God has done for us in the past.
Acts of pure praise are largely missing from many of our current models of worship whether we are speaking of the traditional churches or those who have become seeker churches. We alter our music, reduce the number of Scripture lessons, shorten our prayers and reshape our sermons so that they might be more attractive to our audience.
While it is important to structure worship in a way that is user friendly, we seem to have forgotten who is the audience for our worship. Soren Kirkegaard provided the now famous analogy of worship as a play with the actors being the congregation and the leaders of worship being like a director of a play. The audience for our worship is God. True worship is the opposite of narcissism. We come to give not to get. Perhaps an additional mark of the true church should be where praise is authentically offered.
