Worship at an Ed Sullivan Show
November 2nd, 2005 by Travis Swan | Posted in Ministry Philosophy
I was sitting in a hotel room in Utah, watching Ed Sullivan reruns on Vh1, 17 years old at the time, on a trip with my family. We had been driving around Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Utah for a couple of weeks, visiting homeschool groups in small towns. This was the final destination, a larger stop – and I had gone back to the hotel room one afternoon to get away from people. I flipped on Vh1, never actually having seen music videos before. You see, I grew up without cable TV, and actually without TV in general. Suddenly I was seeing my favorite bands on the TV screen, and it totally fascinated me.
At the end of the half hour, the Ed Sullivan reruns marathon began. I saw the Rolling Stones, Elvis, and the Animals. Mostly I just laughed at how high they held their guitars back then. Then the Beatles first performance from 1964 came on.
Wow.
I think that (except for the one time I visited a huge church in an inner city whose church service lasted almost four hours) this was one of the most honest and authentic expressions of “worship” that I’ve ever seen. The audience (girls!) freaked out. They fainted, they cried, they had their hands in the air, they sang along – it was surreal. They were totally un-self conscious, they lost track of themselves, and were fully immersed in the Beatles.
I had been leading worship for a group of teenage kids (about 60 in the group) for several years – and always felt there was something missing. This was it. I knew above all, God is worthy of this kind of adoration – it was such a picture of the natural tendency we have to worship – we are beings created to worship God, to be passionate, to adore, to be in awe. To wonder and be amazed. You take God out of the picture, and something like this spectacle happens – the world is crying out for something to worship.
My next thought was that I can’t wait for Heaven. I can’t wait to be so overcome by what is in front of me that I completely lose track of myself and what I am doing. I need to see God like that now, here on Earth. A God so real that I am overcome in adoration and lose track of myself completely.
“Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by His holiness; the nourishment of mind with His truth; the purifying of imagination by His beauty; the opening of the heart to His love; the surrender of will to His purpose – and all of this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centeredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin.” -William Temple
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I had a similar thought the other day in our small group worship time. It seems that we have a hard time understanding exactly WHAT worship is in the context of church-n-god-n-stuff, but we can say things like “he absolutely WORSHIPS Bono” (I hear that said of me from time to time) and we know EXACTLY what that means.
When someone worships a band, a football team, they pay lots of money, travel long distances, take off from work early to go and see them if they are in the area. They scream at the top of their longs for the team, stand up for them in public against anyone who says anything bad about them, bet money on them, watch them on TV (and yell a the TV when things are going good/bad). It’s amazing..
And yet, we have a hard time singing to God, doing what he asks… which leads me to wonder…
Do we actually worship God?
Hey guys, I’d love to get in on this conversation (contribute, learn, etc)
I am the youth worship director @ Evergreen Comm Church here in Minnesota (bloomington location) and I also am one of the worship leaders for the weekend services.
From what I’ve read you guys seem to be pretty in line with how I do things but also I see the value in having a community to bounce things off of. Let me know how I can become a part of this.
email me at btipler@ylux.org
Are you there?…
I never thought about this ….