But what about excellence?

I am really starting to show my age today.  I have been going back and forth to the eye doctor lately because I have new contacts and things just get fuzzy when I switch from looking far to up close.  The end result today was the eye doctor telling me that even thought I have contacts for my massive near-sightedness, I need to wear reading glasses when I am at the computer, or reading-which pretty much means 6-8 hours a day.  So i have a pair of old man reading glasses now.

I have been tying up loose ends this week and thinking about one specific thing involving worship.  Since many of our churches now are getting bigger and bigger, and the "Worship" service is getting flashier every week, excellence is a issue that many talk about.  I went to/volunteered at a church where excellence was a word that came up most weeks.  We checklist after checklist so we don't have technical problems.  I know of some churches that have 4 microphones for their pastor to use on Sunday mornings in case a problem arises.  We want our worship to be excellent so we can show God how awesome he is, because he deserves our excellence.

More and more this is starting to irritate me like having sand in my swimsuit.  I understand the premise behind excellence, but does it really matter?  By continuing in this quest have we distorted what our view of worship actually is? 

How we define worship will influence how we answer these questions.  I want to spend a another day or so with the topic in my head (and notebook), so leave some comments, and I will be working up a better post.

Comments

[Ryan]

This is a very good question and one that I think needs to be addressed. If we're just pursuing excellence for the sake of excellence - there's a problem. If we're pursuing excellence to perfection under the guise of wanting to have "minimal distractions" but we fall apart and lose hope when there is a distraction, there's a problem.

If we're pursuing "undistracting excellence", but yet still being humble enough to accept mistakes and forgive mistakes, then I think it's okay.

We want to minimize distractions so that people can worship God clearly, but at the same time we live in a fallen, imperfect world. If we can't be imperfect sometimes even within a worship service, we're giving a view of our world that is inaccurate. We will never measure up to God's excellence or perfection and we need to accept that. That isn't to say that we don't pursue an environment where technical difficultulties and such are minimal - we just need to be okay with it when (not if) they do happen.