Amos 5:21-24 NRSVUE

I hate, I despise your festivals,

    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

22 Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,

    I will not accept them,

and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals

    I will not look upon.

23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;

    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

24 But let justice roll down like water

    and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.

I’ve been telling people lately that I’ve entered my Amos Era.

And I’m using the word “Era” in the same way that Tailor Swift uses the word “Era.”  As a label for the seasons of one’s creative life.

Because Church has always been a creative endeavor for me.

There’s a lot of art in the mid-century-modern-institutional era of Church that has been my whole experience of Church.

The art of architecture.

The art of stained glass.

The art of banner making and worship decorating.

And of course, the art of music.

The line and curve of melody.

The thickness or nakedness of chord structure.

Rhythms that mimic or subvert the spoken word.

And the way you can feel the base line of an organ all the way through your bones when the organist pulls out all the stops on Easter morning.

I worked for 23 years as a Church musician.  

Trying to coax people into letting down their guard enough to listen to God.

And my younger years were in the midst of the Worship Wars.

So churches would hire me to create a “contemporary” service.

To bring in the “younger people.”

I worked hard to create “excellent worship experiences” in both traditional and contemporary styles of worship.

And I typically produced an 11% increase in worship attendance within the first year…but that was usually due to members attending more frequently because worship was better.

But excellent worship does not grow the church if the members don’t invite anyone.

And excellent worship does not retain young families when the children’s and youth ministries are… not good.

And excellent worship does not disciple people into being followers of Jesus.  

In fact, excellent worship runs the risk of creating fans of Jesus who perceive the church as a membership organization that they belong to in order to receive services – like membership in a yacht club.

And when people start to think that the Church exists to provide for their preferences.

They can lose sight of Jesus’ teachings that the Church is a Community of the Beloved whose calling is to love our neighbors as our selves.

So people tried to fix that problem with “Discipleship Systems,”  with catchy names like Alpha, or the Purpose Driven Life.

The idea being that if you require people to take these classes in order to be a member and receive all the “benefits” of membership, then we can turn “consumers” into disciples.  And the church will continue to grow in excellence as well as depth.

There’s even a church growth book called, “Deep and Wide,” purporting to teach you how to attract the masses while also making disciples.

But the problem with ALL of this, is that it reduces individual people – beloved children of God into nickels and noses.

It reduces real lives into numbers on a spread sheet that defines the professional self-worth of a Pastor.

And soon enough preserving those numbers becomes more important than having hard conversations.

Preserving those numbers provokes pastors, who should know better, to preach messages that are more popular than prophetic.

Preserving those numbers creates a power dynamic where the opinions of  those who are rich in this world start to matter more than caring for the “Least of These,” as Jesus described those most in need of care in Matthew 25: 31-46.

The worship wars were never about worship.

The worship wars were about whose preferences should be centered on Sunday morning.

The worship wars were about trying to keep those numbers up.

The worship wars had nothing to do with the practice of neighbor-love.

The worship wars were all about nickels and noses.

It was all about attendance as a measure of success.

But what does it profit the mid-century-modern-institutional-church to have packed 400 people into the church on Sundays in the 1960’s, 

but to have lost the next 2 generations of our children… 

because we prioritized GOING to Church on Sundays, 

instead of BEING the church every day of the week.

What younger people say to me, especially those who were raised in conservative churches who embraced “contemporary” worship,

 is that they associate that style of worship with their church trauma.

Or that they loved the music, because there aren’t many places where people gather to make music together in our culture.

What they have told me is that they turned away from the church because the people who taught them to love their neighbors also told them not to love their gay neighbors their homeless neighbors. Their immigrant neighbors. Their divorced neighbors, their neighbors of color. Basically love your neighbor with a great, big huge asterisk for all the exceptions of people who didn’t deserve to be loved according to them. 

So they stopped going to church because churches were more concerned about the quality of our worship than the quality of our love.

Essentially I  hear young people say:

I hate, I despise your festivals,

    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.

23 Take away from me the noise of your songs;

    I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

Because you talk about justice in your churches, but you don’t practice justice.

Which was hard to hear.

So hard to hear.

Because I spent decades of my life crafting worship and discipleship  programs and next gen ministries.

But while the ring of truth can be hard to hear,

 it’s even harder to ignore.

So something began to shift inside of me.

Spirit whispered to me about how I spend my time. 

And excellent worship design takes time and resources and the skills of other people and evaluation to see how the community experienced the experience…

And Spirit began to whisper that maybe my time was better spent working to turn on the faucets of justice than working on creating festival worship and hiring harpists.

But streaming righteousness is not showy work.

Streaming righteousness looks like months of conversations with various departments within Portland Police Department to finally, hopefully help our local police understand that we want them to move our local drug dealers slash pimps out of the Montavilla neighborhood because they are victimizing both unhoused and housed folks in our neighborhood!

Streaming Righteousness looks like our Board sitting down with Nathan and listening to his real experience dealing with unhoused folks on our property and reassuring him that we would rather come to church and see a mess in the parking lot, than put him in harms way by expecting him to evict people from our porch by himself.

Streaming Righteousness looks like y’all deciding to start a food pantry for Haven Dinner folks and any other members of our church who are struggling with the price of groceries right now.

Streaming Righteousness looks like combing through mountains of paperwork line by line by line so that we get this affordable housing project right.

Keeping the rivers of justice and the streams of righteousness flowing all week long means that we are extra grateful to Barton and David and Clarice for keeping worship organized because we need our Sunday gatherings to be a pit stop for our busy weeks full of ministry!

We need to sing together.

To pray together.

To re-ground ourselves in the Word together.

To take communion together.

To drink coffee and eat cookies together.

Because keeping the waters of compassion flowing is hard work.

So I’m in my Amos Era.

Not because I think that worship doesn’t matter for the people of God.

But because worship doesn’t matter the most to God.

Because I don’t think God cares how beautiful our music is.

I think God cares how beautiful our love is.

Music and worship are God’s gifts to us.

Not our gifts to God.

Our gift to God is our whole lives spent trying to love our neighbors.

Worship is God reminding us that we are loved.

And we don’t need harps 

or 200 person audition only choirs, 

or fantastic decor.

Mostly, we need someone who is happy to see us every time we’re here.

Because belonging to a community where you are loved and accepted is the beginning of justice.