How might we know a low view of worship when we see one?

I am tempted to reply by saying that if we were to cram ourselves together in a deep-sea submersible—such as the ALVIN, thoughtfully depicted below—and descend until the glass in the portholes cracks, we will be roughly at our present level of worship. It wouldn't be a scientific measurement, but we would be ballparking it.

Others will disagree, of course. Some, like the president of Soundfroth perhaps, will argue that his gang is shipping some very high quality merchandise this year.

Days later, when I stopped laughing, I might pull out some compositions by JSB, Mendelssohn, Dvorák, Rachmaninoff, or Pärt and ask if his editorial standards committee could detect any discrepancies between their work and that of  JSB, Mendelssohn, Dvorák, Rachmaninoff, or Pärt. I'm quite sure I will get the answer I have always gotten and we would get into a long-and-heated about the fact that these men were not high-ranking separatists, or that none of these men wore an eye-patch or travelled with Steve Pettit long enough for them to assure us that these gentlemen "checked". They would probably put red dots on all the sheetmusic of JSB, Mendelssohn, Dvorák, Rachmaninoff, or Pärt.

So rather than rummage through all those flea-market opinions again, I will suggest a different answer. Let's not compare the bad to the good (as this presents all sorts of difficulties for uncritical minds), let's instead observe the effects of their work.

Go to church. Take with you a printout of the paragraph below. Try to finagle a seat on the platform. If that's not possible, try the balcony. Then watch the people. Watch them when they sing. Watch them when the offering is taken. Watch them when they read Scripture to themselves. Watch them when they pray. Now compare what you see with Tozer's description of worship:

"A humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder." It is delightful to worship God, but it is also a humbling thing; and the man who has not been humbled in the presence of God will never be a worshiper of God at all. He may be a church member who keeps the rules and obeys the discipline, and who tithes and goes to conference, but he'll never be a worshiper unless he is deeply humbled. "A humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe." There is an awesomeness about God which is missing in our day altogether; there's little sense of admiring awe in the Church of Christ these days.

As I said before, the hearts of the people are turned to all manner of wretchedness and profanity so that what is offered as worship is in fact self-indulgence. Self-indulgence is the exact opposite of worship: we have it precisely backwards. We do not care about God or the perfection he demands of us, we care about us and what we prefer, what we can "relate to," and "what it means to us".

I shouldn't have to belabor this point: we have had numerous people, some of them evangelicals, some of them fundamentalists (who, by the way, think the sun rises and sets on their separation and their "Christ-honoring music"), say explicitly this. And there is no arguing with these people. They will quibble with any standard of goodness or beauty you can find in the Bodleian and the Library of Congress both.

They have written book after book about what is wrong with the music they keenly dislike, so we know the concept of "inadequate" or "defective" worship exists in their minds. But they have no objective way of telling us what that is. And when they try, they tell us about plants growing slower or cows giving less milk when they listen to rock music.

Or flashbacks. Rock can give you flashbacks.

So I will suggest that until we are prepared to speak intelligently about the good and the beautiful, we should ask ourselves why those people in our churches give no evidence of awe and admiration.

I think that could be a practical place to start.

I must offer a caveat, though: this is not the right thing to do. In fact I think it is a stupid thing to do; it's like telling someone to re-invent the wheel. But until one is prepared to take the advice of wheelwrights, I suppose this is the only alternative.

Maybe we will have to start with large round rocks and jam tree trunks in the middle.