Morganthaler: Film and Worship
Thanks to the folks at Christian Century for pointing out this article by Sally Moregenthaler [see Morgenthaler’s website, sacramentis.com] on the topic of art–specifically, film–in Christian worship today. After exploring some of the motivations for current trends in worship, Morganthaler gives us this lump of coal in the stocking:
Let’s make a simple clarification from the outset. It’s not exactly “film and worship” that we’re discussing here. It’s film pieces and worship: miniscule chunks of digitized human journeys—excised, cut, trimmed, and otherwise amputated from their context, then grafted (sometimes carefully, often not-so-carefully) into an alien format. From the movie theater and/or the cocoon of personal entertainment space to the worship environment, any film clip has a potential range of destinies. At best, it can gleam on the worship screen as a transforming, luminous piece of a larger, sacred mosaic. At worst, a film clip can serve time as a worship bauble: a three-minute diversion in an otherwise lackluster and decidedly unmystical experience. It’s a warm piece of art, and it’s here. Somewhere in between is the realm of normal usage: well under the category of spiritual experience, and at various levels above prostitution.
A few paragraphs later, some of us can hear our own voices in Morganthaler’s painful observations:
Large churches such as Willow Creek and Ginghamsburg train thousands of church leaders each year and, though they may protest this assessment, train them to do as they do. Why else would they hold conferences? The “church-mecca-lab” is no small phenomenon. Forbes magazine reports that 47% of churches over 2,000 hold conferences for ministry professionals.12 What’s fascinating about the worship-training-via-conference trend is that it has truly met a pastoral “felt need.” Seminaries are notorious for what they don’t teach about worship. Only a handful have any kind of worship curricula. In the historical, theological, and pedagogical void, and over the span of nearly three decades, the entrepreneurial church has put its own very big stamp on what we actually do when we go to church, and it has done so while we slept. The result is a tectonic worship shift, the size of which we are just beginning to fathom.
What is worship? Post-shift, it is no longer necessarily about engaging people with the divine. Protestant worship in the new millennium is increasingly about communicating life principles; disseminating information people need in order to gain more control over their lives and insure individual happiness. (Never mind that control is an illusion and happiness is transitory. See Ecclesiastes.) And if a church is up to snuff, it will disseminate this how-to-have-a-great-life information through the most relevant, accessible conduits.
If your church doesn’t work to “disseminate information” necessary to ensure your “individual happiness,” do you feel like your “needs aren’t being met,” in the parlance of our time?
I’m sure are some other windmills around here somewhere… where’d I leave that blasted lance?
–JA