Consultant Updates

 

About what motivates people to worship…

I am often asked how where the anxieties that drive the quest for God come from. They are called “existential” anxieties because they lie at the roots of human existence itself. These have been defined in different ways in philosophical theologians (like my mentor Paul Tillich) and psychotherapists (like Erich Fromm, Rollo May and Carl Jung). I identify eight as the most relevant for demographic and lifestyle research: emptiness, meaninglessness, fate, death, guilt, shame, estrangement, and displacement.

This is where I bring together my academic teaching as a theologian and my pastoral coaching as a consultant. The rather abstract list above can be translated into more recognizable human needs. Different kinds of people search for God because they feel lonely, forgotten, lost, flawed, aging, trapped, abused, and/or broken. Exactly which need dominates at any given time is largely a matter of the life situation of different kinds of people.

This often sounds negative when we hear it in this way. In fact, it is a very positive way to describe the different ways God blesses people in their particular need. As St. Paul said: And my God fully satisfy every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus (Phil. 4:19 NRS). Those who are lonely are befriended, the forgotten are remembered, the lost are found, the flawed are accepted, the aging are renewed, the trapped are liberated, the abused are cleansed, and the broken are healed.

St. Paul connects these blessings with the incarnation of Jesus Christ. We know that people approached Jesus for different things. In a sense, God is incarnate in Jesus in different ways: companion, spiritual guide, moral example, promise keeper, new being, vindicator, rescuer, and healer. My mentor Paul Tillich described this method of linking human need to divine grace “correlation theory”.

My daughter once drew this picture as a little girl, and I have used it throughout my teaching and ministry careers. It illustrates the point of worship.

Humankind (in all its cultural diversity) reaches up toward God (questions, needs, problems, yearnings). God (in all God’s mystery and complexity) reaches down toward the world (answers, gifts, solutions, blessings). That point of intersection, where you see the hand of God and the hand of humanity touch, is the act or experience of worship.

Now there are two ways to start a conversation about worship. The traditional way has been to do theology “from above”. That means to begin describing grace more abstractly as justification, sanctification, salvation, etc. However, in the secular world that emerged in the second half of the 20^th century, that approach is not meaningful to many people. Instead, we do theology “from below”, starting with real people in community context. Many of the “theologies” familiar to us (liberation theologies, feminist theologies, environmental theologies, etc.) are all forms of theology “from below”. The often start by sounding negative (describing slaver, abuse, disaster, etc.) so that people see its urgency, and then conclude positively with a vision of hope.

When I do demographic and lifestyle research (call it “community exegesis”), I try to show church leaders how the life context of different groups of people are different, and how their quest for God is different, from others. This helps leaders design worship in ways that best help people “join hands” with God in ways most valuable to them.

You might wonder when I first asked myself the question “Why do people worship”. It was not in seminary. One of my speaking and consulting tours took me to work among Presbyterian and Methodist churches in the northwest USA. I was returning to Chicago from Portland, and the person sitting beside me was Ben Scheinkopf. You may know him as “Ben the Barber” who survived the Auschzitz Nazi death camp because he was a barber. The Nazi’s kept him alive so that he could cut hair and protect the camp from lice. Since that time, he had traveled the world telling his story and offering hope to young and old. He had been speaking at the university in Portland and was returning to his home in Chicago. What an interesting conversation! His experience of suffering and survival helped me see the deeper meaning of God’s grace. By the way, Ben died in Nov. 2017 at the age of 98 … never once stopping telling his story.