loyalty placement

my friend dennis made an observation about why people become miserable in churches, yet refuse to change environments...

"they are victims of their own standing loyalties."
BAM!
nailed it there.

it seems like people generally place loyalty somewhere... a cause, a church family, a pastor/leader, an organization, a principle...even if it is simply loyalty to their own convictions on things. this loyalty is a stability of sorts, causing one to feel grounded and sure.

the problems seem to make a break for it when the balance of reason and resolve is somehow upset by 'lower' factors (like any leadership change- particularly in style or personality) that fly under the radar and then catch us by surprise. we find ourselves unwittingly embroiled in a situation that causes us to feel compromised or otherwise inconsistent, simply due to either unfamiliarity or negative familiarity (a bad experience or strongly preconceived opinion) with the agent of change.

music, particularly worship music, is often a flashpoint because of the important role it plays in our (churched) culture and how strongly emotive a change in music can be. we get on this thing where our personal aesthetic is somehow spiritualized and we buy into the lie that there is good and bad music, when in fact music is predominantly contextual... it is a language unto itself.

the truth about most worship music arguments is that the music simply FEELs unfamiliar and people draw spiritual conclusions from those feelings.

i felt uncomfortable, months ago, attending a worship service in another (more 'mainline') denomination. the service was set up according to the lectionary, with prescribed readings and passages and hymns (the combination of which was all already light years from my personally comfortable worship zone)

now, i love hymns (particularly as a devotional or songwriting aid) but these hymns were songs that i had never heard before which were written according to a whole different set of musical and lyrical rules than any with which i was familiar. i was lost, even though the directions and page numbers and colours of the books were printed in the program that i was handed at the beginning of the service.

but it came to me, as i was about to dismiss the whole experience as 'someone else's thing' that i simply needed to sort out how to engage. i stopped singing and started reading the words while everyone around me who was already familiar sang instead. the poetry was breathtaking. the biblical truth was purely pronounced and worded in (irony of ironies) a 'fresh new way.' without the personal distraction of musical style and inaccessible melody, i was free to worship- it was a personal pentecost and i was suddenly hearing the truth in my own language.

it occured to me that this difficulty finds its symmetry whenever someone from a church like this one comes to ours to visit. it strengthened my resolve to frame things in in such a way that people are free to access an awareness of the presence of God without feeling disloyal to who they are or what they hold to be important about their own worship experience.

ultimately, as dennis put in much fewer words, we are responsible for the placement of our personal loyalty because if it is misplaced then God fails to receive the worship that is his.