The Key Ingredient to Successful Worship Services
There is this scene in the movie "Burnt," starring Bradley Cooper that I really love. If you're not familiar with the story, Cooper plays a brilliant chef trying to make a comeback after a huge, public meltdown. In a scene early in the movie, he is trying to convince another chef to come and work for him, but he asks her to meet him at a Burger King. When she arrives, they have this rapid fire-conversation about why their food is worth $500 more per plate than Burger King. Cooper plays Devil's advocate, destroying all the arguments the younger sous-chef comes up with, until revealing the real reason he asked her to meet.
"What you should have said is that the problem with this place is that it's too consistent and consistency is death."
She rightly responds that every chef strives for consistency, to which Cooper makes a crucial distinction, "A chef should strive to be consistent in experience but not consistent in taste!"
"A meal is like sex," he says, "You know you're headed to the same place, but you have to find a new and dangerous way of getting there."
Some people ( like Jesus, for example ) believe that food is holy. Food is not really about fuel for the body… food is about much more. Ultimately food is about God. Over and over in scripture, God is using the sensory nature of food to communicate with people.
The psalmist exhorts to, "Taste and see that the Lord is good."
God sends bread from Heaven in the Wilderness.
The promised land is a place flowing with "milk and honey."
Jesus turns water into wine, and constantly uses seeds, wheat, and yeast as metaphors for the Kingdom of God. Then he goes so far as saying that he himself is the "bread from heaven," and his blood is wine. These are only a few that come to mind right now, I’m sure there are hundreds of more examples.
God is always imploring people to interact with God's self at an experiential level, not an intellectual or moral level. Food is about an experience.
The Romig-Leavitt's love to eat. We love to eat so much that deciding where to eat is increasingly difficult. The reason this is so hard is not any restaurant will satisfy us anymore, we are looking for the right combination of cost, service, taste, and time. Of course, This combination changes based on the situation. When we need to make everyone in the family happy, and we don't have much time or money, we'll probably go to iPie, which is a little pizza place a couple of blocks from our house. They meet our criteria without sacrificing our most significant value, "taste" they source their ingredients locally, and make each pizza from scratch, and most of all, they deliver a consistent experience.
However, if it's a date-night and Christa and I have some more money to play with, we're not going to "iPie" we want to level-up the experience. We want to have a more extended meal, personal service, and great drinks. When we want more memorable experiences, we go to a place like Community or El Five. We don't plan on ordering the same meal every time, but we expect the experience will be consistently excellent.
Consistency is the unconscious reason people choose where to eat most of the time. We even select consistency over taste! Think about it like this: When you arrive at 11 pm in an airport, and you get off your flight, and you're hungry. You see there are two places open, some local "joe's bar-b-cue" or McDonald's, where do you go? My guess is that you will go to McDonald's because you don't have to think about the food. It is what it is. It might be bad, but at least it is consistent.
What's my point with all this food talk? How does this all relate to your worship services?
The Biggest Factor in The Sucess of your Worship Service.
Consistency is maybe the biggest issue in the success of your worship service.
Like it or not, people are choosing your church for the same reason they choose a restaurant. There is a balance of, cost, quality, style, and belonging that they are trying to reach. The biggest question they are asking themselves unconsciously about your church is, "Can I trust these people to deliver on their promise to be a home for me, spiritually?" How far is the drive? How long is the service? Can I grow here? Will I/my kids be safe here? Can I trust them?” “Does the music distract me or engage me?”
The way you can answer this question is with consistency. Consistency is the way we build trust in relationships. Which is what every church wants, right? We want to build relationships with our people, and we want our people to build relationships with each other. It feels wrong when people treat our church like Netflix or Target. We don't believe that being the church can be confined to a box they check on Sunday or only when they have a "God-itch" they need to scratch. We believe everything is spiritual and that The Christ is calling us to live purposefully into all of life. Sure, we’ve all been disappointed by religion or continuously trapped in "the fear of missing out.” There are a thousand reasons not to engage with the church. Consistency of experience is the way to clear a path to a deeper, more meaningful church.
If you're a worship leader or creative leader in your church, I hope you do not think that means you have to do the same thing every week ( same songs, same prayers, same videos ). That is not what I'm saying. As the movie-chef said, there is a life and death difference between consistency of experience and consistency of the product. The challenge I deal with, and I think you deal with too, is, "How can I deliver a consistent experience without killing my creativity? How do I make this experience fresh and new every week, 52 weeks a year?" Inside this question, my friends, is the essence of the creative act.
A songwriter has 12 tones, a painter has a limited canvas and spectrum of color, a preacher, has the same good story to tell over and over. The average church service is one hour. Sixty minutes. Three thousand, six hundred seconds. Your charge, if you choose to accept it, is to listen, watch, read, think, play experiment, and create with these seconds balancing on the wire between novelty and consistency. You must know and love your audience and their expectations, hopes, fears, and joy. You must stay connected to The Christ, The Source of every beautiful and creative act, and then you must hit your mark, look them in the eye and tell the truth.
Your work is courageous.
Your work is precarious.
Your work is holy.
There is no question that this work can be overwhelming at times. It can be tempting to cheat and find a short-cut or disengage entirely and look for a way to automate the whole thing. You probably know just as well as I do, there is the technology that will make almost anything in the worship service automatic. Maybe you've had those Sundays on auto-pilot already. I don't mean to suggest that we should not use any tool available to make us more effective and improve the consistency of experience, but sometimes those tools can be our biggest obstacle. Those tools can limit us and turn our unique churches into one big monoculture.
Monoculture Christianity.
I'm borrowing the term "monoculture" once again from the world of food. As you can see from the name, the word means "one species." Monocultures are developed by some means of human technology to maximize production. In the world of the potato, for example, the Russet potato in America has the most yield per acre, so overwhelmingly, this is the potato that is grown and used in the US (even though there are more than 200 varieties of potatoes in the world.) The problem with a monoculture is that the bigger they become, the more precarious they are. They are more susceptible to disease and infestation. This fact means there is an entire industry (like Monsanto) that spends billions of dollars on more technology to keep this species protected. Anything that would create an adaptation or mutation is an existential threat to a monoculture as well as anything that has become dependent upon it (If you want to read more about what happens when a monoculture fails read up on the Irish potato famine of 1845.)
Monocultures aren't just confined to potatoes, there are monocultures everywhere, even in the church. Just like with farming, the purpose of a monoculture is production. From its inception in the early 1900s, the emphasis of evangelical Christianity has been on growth. Reach more people and add more members. Over time, the science of church has improved and developed time tested practices and methods from the world of business. The para-church movements gave rise to the phenomenon of the mega-churches that exploded in the late nineties and gave way to multi-site churches in the 2010s. There is now a repeatable system that pastors can be trained to make a "successful church" within two years.
I want to be clear once again, using technology and learning new ways to be more effective in the ministry is a good thing. I love well-designed systems that make organizations run more smoothly and grow. My issue is with designing a church (or becoming a church) with the primary purpose of production. A church that only exists to get bigger, add more services, groups and locations becomes very precarious and writes the code for it’s own demise.
We live in a country that has lost its connection to the concept of “enough” and it has made people spiritually sick. William Blake wrote, “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.” I for one have experienced “more than enough” and I’m repenting and trying to find the true path again. Real freedom, creativity, and consistency come from finding your edges, boundaries and unique shape. Each church is, and should be, as unique and beautiful as a potato.
I believe it is the mission of evil to stamp out the image of Christ in the world, what better strategy could there be than to convince each body of Christ to voluntarily trade all their bumps and “wobbly-bits” for a “perfect body.” The hard work of discovering the beauty and genius that exists in your church right now requires a lot of listening. Surrendering to the ways God wants to shape your church and being consistent in the delivery of your gifts is the only way I know of to “do church” well. May you rediscover new flavors and exciting, dangerous ways to get to the same place.