Ohio State University just experienced an unusual commencement speech.
More than 12,500 graduates gathered in the football stadium. The speaker, Chris Pan — a “social entrepreneur, musician, and inspirational speaker” — admits that he was high on ayahuasca, a psychedelic liquid, while crafting the speech with the help of artificial intelligence. As he wrote drafts, he posted them on Instagram. In an early draft of the speech, he planned to remove this shirt.
In his speech, he led the crowd through two brief musical numbers. He promoted Bitcoin and promised everyone a free bracelet from his company. At one point, people groaned and booed as he spoke.
“The commencement committee failed at its job to screen the candidates,” writes one man. “The university failed in its job to attract a more noteworthy speaker. It also failed to prevent Pan from hawking Bitcoin.”
There was a time that a commencement ceremony was solemn. I’ve been to a few that were boring. Ohio State’s commencement wasn’t boring, but we lost something in the process.
The stakes are even higher in the church. Standards of decorum have changed within the church over the decades. I’m in favour of some of these changes: a gathering of believers today should look different from one that took place fifty years ago. But I’m also sometimes concerned that, as we’ve relaxed standards in society, we’re sometimes in danger of relaxing them too much when it comes to our corporate worship.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not arguing for one particular form of church or standard of dress. I’ve visited countless churches, and appreciated a variety of styles. When it comes to our corporate gatherings, the issue is not always about surface issues like dress and musical style. The issue goes much deeper.
The issue is how we see God. As we gather, there must be some sense of weightiness in our worship. As Martyn Lloyd Jones writes in Preaching and Preachers:
We are dealing with the most serious and the most solemn matter in life. We are dealing with something which we believe is not only going to affect the lives of these people with whom we are concerned while they are in this world, but also with their eternal destiny. In other words, the very character and nature of the subject is such that it cannot possibly be placed in any context except that of the most thoughtful and serious atmosphere that we know, or can create. Certainly it should never be approached in a light spirit, or in a mere debating spirit; still less should it ever be regarded as a matter of entertainment.
I’ve sensed this in all kinds of churches. We need churches that take God seriously and that refuse to resort to gimmicks to keep people interested.
There is no golden age for how a church service should be run. Anachronism doesn’t make a church service holy. Holiness does not demand that we check our humanity at the door or squelch appropriate expressions of humour.
But it does demand that we take God seriously and communicate this in how we conduct ourselves in our gatherings.
One of the dangers of our particular cultural moment is that we sometimes treat serious subjects flippantly. If previous generations clung to tradition too tightly, we’re in danger of discarding it carelessly.
When we gather on Sundays, our focus should not be on innovating or entertaining. It should be on the simple things the church has always done: greeting, singing, praying, hearing God’s word, baptizing, and coming to the Lord’s table. As we gather, we should pray that we’re captured with a sense of the weightiness of our God. There’s lots of room for how that solemnity can be expressed in terms of music styles, dress, and liturgy, but the end result should be unmistakable: these are a people who take God seriously.
