I was surprised when Paul showed up for worship one Sunday. A fellow pastor in our presbytery, he and I did not see eye-to-eye during the great Presbyterian culture wars of the 2000s that led to, among other things, 303 congregations, or 121,383 members, leaving the PC(USA) for ECO: A Covenant Order of Evangelical Presbyterians from 2012-2017. I greeted him warmly, but warily, thinking, “Wow, why’s he here? This can’t be good.” After worship, he approached me smiling, thanked me for the service, and said he really appreciated it.
Later that week our executive presbyter called me: “Graham, I had a fascinating conversation with Paul this morning. He said he attended worship at your church last Sunday, hoping to find potential violations to charge you and your church with. Apparently, the service caught him by surprise because he said it was the most deeply spiritual worship service he’d ever been to.” I never found out what these potential violations were, but this much was clear: he came to our church with the hope of finding fault and left having encountered God in worship.
A few years later, I met with a young couple who were joining our congregation. After a long period of searching for a church, we were their last visit before throwing in the towel, and they both decided we were “it.” I asked them what changed. The husband said, “I finally felt like I experienced God in church.”
Two very different situations, yet two similar experiences of God in worship. During my time at the church, not everyone had these experiences with us, but enough did that our church steadily grew over my 22 years there. What made the difference? We intentionally tried to cultivate the experience of God in everything we did.
That sounds a bit nebulous since people are always having experiences. What was different? We recognized that people in our culture are yearning for a personal, tangible experience of God, and they’ll look elsewhere when they don’t find it within the church.
It’s not like Presbyterian churches don’t invite congregants and visitors to experience God. We do, but the experiences we offer often no longer match what people are seeking. Traditional churches are designed for experiences catering to generations that are passing away, not to people of today. When it comes to reaching out to millennials and Generation Z (those born in the 1980s through the early 2010s) as well as those who have labeled themselves “spiritual but not religious,” we don’t know what they want, we don’t know how to find out, and when we do find out, we’re afraid adapting might mean losing those who are already here.
So instead of asking how the church might grow and adapt so diverse people can experience God with us, we criticize younger generations and “spiritual but not religious” types for rejecting the experiences we offer. Meanwhile, we fail to hear their blunt message to us: we have become “religious but not spiritual.”
The church I worked at, mentioned at the beginning, wanted to find a way to validate both traditional and non-traditional experiences of God. So we began to question everything we did. In worship, on boards and committees, in education, we asked: are people encountering God or something else — tradition, history, pride, etc.?
As a result, we thought about worship in new ways. For example, we noticed that Presbyterians are incredibly “wordy” in worship. Look at a typical bulletin. It’s crammed with words, yet we’re living in a culture where music, art, graphics, symbols and videos are the vehicles for meaning-making. So, we traded wordiness for more reflective, musical and personal experiences. We revamped most of our worship by questioning whether each element of worship helped or hindered the encounter with God, substituting elements that no longer worked for more creative ones we found to be more experiential.
For example, we recognized that the typical written, responsive call to worship often sounds robotic and lacks ardor. We wanted people to worship from a place of prayerful centering. So, we replaced it with a Taizé chant, a 30-second period of silent prayer or a prayer of blessing said over the congregation that emphasized opening to God’s presence. We attempted to craft a more intentional experience.
We also noted that few in our culture only listen to one kind of music so we embraced a variety of music. We integrated contemporary, Celtic, gospel, R&B, jazz, meditative, traditional classical and more. For example, we often began with a contemporary projected song as a first hymn, followed by a Taizé chant and centering described above. After the sermon, we played a meditative song played on the piano to encourage prayerful reflection. We also included a world hymn from a different culture. Our postlude was often a jazz version of some secular song reflecting events from the past week, which included songs by David Bowie, Earth Wind and Fire, the Eagles and others.
We used technology in our preaching, showing film clips, pictures, recorded videos and more. With permission, we shared stories of our members’ experiences of God. We also filled our sanctuary with color, candles, art, crosses, symbols, and special accent lighting to engage the senses. We wanted people to experience something transcendent with their eyes, which flies in the face of Reformed tradition, which usually includes stripped-down worship spaces.
Where did we get the ideas for the changes we made? Each year our worship team and committee visited other houses of worship that were doing something different and experiential. Contemporary, emergent, African American, traditional Episcopal, and even a 2 ½ casual Jewish Shabbat service, most of which was in Hebrew — we made it a priority to step away from our own practices and traditions to see how others worship.
In our discussions after visiting these various houses of worship, we always asked, “Where did you/I/we experience God?” We then considered what might be adapted for our worship. These led to the significant changes mentioned above, and more, including offering communion every Sunday and emphasizing a time for healing prayers once-a-month as part of communion. 15 years of consistent, small changes led to significant, comprehensive, experiential changes in our worship over time. It also meant that over these 15 years we had to help long-time members let go of traditions and experiences they cherished to embrace new experiences.
The inspiration for cultivating an experiential church emerged out of an insight I had in the 1990s after completing my Ph.D. in spiritual formation — a discipline devoted to cultivating the experience of, and relationship with, God. I realized that churches grow when we offer something essential that people yearn for but can’t find anywhere else. Conversely, churches decline when we don’t. Many churches have tried to adapt over the past 25 years, asking, “How can we attract younger people?” or “How do we change but not lose our present members?” or “How do we do more in mission, so people know we’re here?” These are the wrong questions to ask because they ignore what people are yearning for.
When we focus on the experience of God, we become more able to offer a primary, regular avenue for the experience of God in worship, classes, fellowship, ministry, mission and even meetings. A missional focus is important, but we constantly compete with many, many other organizations and efforts that offer what we offer in mission. Almost everything we do missionally has a secular counterpart that may do it better. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be missional. I just think we need to view worship and spirituality as foundationally missional because they’re the experiences people most deeply seek from a church. Helping people experience God, and be transformed through this experience, is our primary mission as a church. We’re setting the context for the Holy Spirit to work in ways we neither fully understand nor control. We cannot direct God to be in certain places or do certain things. But we can, as God’s church, foster an environment that allows us – longtime Christians, new believers, and the faith-curious – to encounter God in intentional ways.
How do we tell whether what we’re doing helps people experience God? By asking and assessing what we offer. Invite outsiders to our worship and church to assess us, and ask afterward, “What was your experience of God in our worship, in our church?”. Create informal focus groups, get feedback from visitors and try to look at your church through others’ eyes. The key is to realize that what people experience with us determines their engagement (or disengagement) with us.
