Seeker Services

In 1975, Bill Hybels, a Chicago youth pastor with roots in the Christian Reformed Church, started a movement to bring new people into the church. He proposed a style of service stripped of anything that might put unchurched people off: no crosses on the walls, no old hymns, not much scripture. A message focused on wisdom for everyday living; Everything tightly produced, sermon timed to the second. No wasted words. Hybels called them “seeker services.” If attendance counts as success, the services were highly successful. By 2017, weekly attendance at Willow Creek Church was 25,000 people. 

Not only were people streaming to the South Barrington campus, but Hybels succeeded in spreading his seeker sensitive gospel to other preachers and church leaders through conferences at Willow Creek and his Global Leadership Network. The conferences were catnip for pastors and churches looking for a way to grow. To them, Hybels offered a strategy and philosophy: do the Willow Creek thing, and you too can be successful. What the conferences and strategy sessions didn’t say is that it helps if your church is located in a fast-growing exurb like South Barrington and your pastor looks and preaches like Bill Hybels. When the Willow Creek credo was brought back to local congregations, it often didn’t go well.

The evangelical church has long since moved on, including Willow Creek itself. Bill Hybels resigned under pressure after several women accused him of sexual abuse. No one uses a stopwatch any longer to time sermons; the messages in larger evangelical churches now stretch towards an hour in length. Hymns have crept back into the liturgy. Instead of the cool spare services of Hybel’s vision, services are designed to stir the emotions of the worshipers. Seeker services are disparaged by a younger generation as “attractional church,” a watering down the gospel to attract uncommitted boomers. But what of the original idea: making worship accessible to those who come newly to church without much background in the faith? 

A Conversation about Worship

The question recently came up in an after-church conversation with a group of old friends who were attending church with us. In Tucson, we attend an Episcopal church with a high church liturgy. Well, medium high. Smells and bells light. Incense, yes, but the clergy face rather than have their backs to the congregation. Kneelers in the pews, but congregants rarely use them (except at evensong); too many creaky knees. Bells at all the appropriate moments in the liturgy, but Southwest casual dress for all but those with official roles. You get the idea: a service not seeker sensitive but its opposite.

At lunch after the service, I asked our friends, “What did you think of the service?” They were polite—it was after all ourchurch, and they are friends—but they expressed some dismay about how hard it was to find their way through the liturgy. Some time ago, the church dropped its practice of including everything in the bulletin—the prayers, the creed, the texts of the kyrie and other elements of the mass ordinary—and instead now cite in the weekly bulletin page numbers for the Book of Common Prayer and the hymnal. The church did so, I suspect, because they wanted the congregants to learn the liturgy by heart. The Nicene Creed means more or, at least, differently when you recite by memory rather than reading it off the page. So too for other elements in the liturgy. It’s worked for us. We’ve learned to recite more of the liturgy, although we both confess to occasional strategic mumbling.

Calvin and the Impulse to Explain

In our conversation, my friends were concerned about seekers: how would someone exploring the faith find their way through the liturgy to Jesus and to faith? Shouldn’t the church explain the liturgy for those who come? I allowed that the answer to these questions is probably yes, but I added that it’s not a simple yes. The question about making the liturgy seeker sensitive is more complicated than it may at first appear. There are perils that are worth exploring.

We should begin with Calvin. The impulse to explain—to talk people through worship—comes directly from Calvin and the Reformed wing of the Protestant movement. Calvin believed that in worship it’s the head that leads to the heart. If someone is to worship God, they need to know what they are doing. So says Calvin in his preface to the Geneva Psalter:

 . . . if we really wish to honor the holy ordinances of our Lord, which we use in the Church, the primary thing is to know what they contain, what they mean to say, and to what end they tend, in order that their usage may be useful and salutary, and consequently right ruled.” 

He has little sympathy for symbol apart from explanation in the church: 

And when the matter is examined with common sense, there is no one who will not confess that it is a pure frumpery [French bastelerie, “a circus act,” “juggling”] to amuse the people with symbols which have no meaning for them.” 

The result of such frumpery, Calvin thought, was superstition: “And in fact, one may see the superstitions which arise from such practice.” 

Ever since, a basic Reformed principle is that there should be no frumpery in the service. Calvin wanted worship to be simple and unadorned and in the language of the people, accessible to all. It was Hybelian before Hybels. What resulted was a simple and sturdy liturgy. The services Calvin put together for Strasbourg and later Geneva were pretty much the service I grew up with. The pattern is recognizable still in many Reformed churches. 

Notable in this style of worship is not just what it includes but what it leaves out. In the liturgy with which I grew up, there were a very few fixed elements: the votum and salutation (“Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth. Grace be to you and peace. . ..”), the Ten Commandments, and the benediction—there may have been others of the same kind. There were other elements which, while not fixed, were drawn from specified sources: the hymns and psalms (from the Psalter Hymnal), the scriptures, and (depending on the church and the service) the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles’ Creed, and the Heidelberg Catechism. The order itself was fixed. Adding an element or changing it occasioned vociferous arguments among the congregants. It took a brave act by the church council to include a silent prayer at the beginning of the service.

Gradually, over time, those fixed elements became less fixed as churches became more evangelical. The formal votum and salutation were replaced with an informal greeting from a member of the worship team. The Ten Commandments were dropped for a confession service designed around a theme. In a service I recently streamed the confession service was structured around the temptation “to go it alone,” a singularly modern temptation, it would seem. In many churches, the service has come down to two basic elements: an extended time of singing, sometimes coordinated with the message and sometimes not, and the message itself. A prayer for the congregation and an offering often serve as a liturgical hinge between the singing and the preaching.

When You Throw Something Out, Something Else Takes Its Place

This pattern leaves out almost everything that characterizes the mass—the pattern of Christian worship reaching back to its earliest history. I’ll come back to that below. When you leave things out, you need to fill the space with something else, and the something else in evangelical worship are the creative efforts of the preacher and the worship team. Since they are attuned to the needs of the congregation, it’s not surprising that worship comes to center on the concerns of the people who attend.

It’s common for this sort of worship to be focused on themes, and for the themes to be focused on the anxieties of the congregants. The confession service I mentioned above, based on the temptation to go it alone, led directly into the message.  The preacher riffed on the words of Jesus in John 16:33: “In the world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (NIV).  A good text, given the state of the world in which live, and the preacher delivered a creditable sermon based on the text. But how does this play in the pews? What is the message they hear? The worship songs used in the service might give us a clue: lots of words about sorrow and pain and woundedness—about our sorrow and pain and woundedness. Such services soon become about us, and in the emphasis on us, we lose God, except as someone to help us in our daily troubles. It comes to don’t worry; God’s got this.

What we need in worship is some way to bump up against the weirdness, the mystery, the capaciousness of the Christian faith. Take just these lines from the Nicene Creed:

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
    the only Son of God,
    eternally begotten of the Father,
    God from God, Light from Light,
    true God from true God,
    begotten, not made,
    of one Being with the Father.
    Through him all things were made.
    For us and for our salvation
        he came down from heaven. . .

These lines build from Jesus of Nazareth to the uncreated Son of God and back to Jesus. This Jesus is about something as large as all creation. What’s more, these lines connect us to 4^th century church and such luminaries as Athanasius and Gregory of Nyssa. We are in the company of our betters. The ancient liturgy stuns us weekly with what we cannot entirely know or understand.

What’s more, the very idea of worship is different from stripped down modern services. There is a muchness about it. The ancient liturgy includes copious readings from the scriptures. It includes a reflection on those readings, though the reflection is far less important than the lengthy sermons of evangelical churches; the worship does not center on the preacher. It includes the elements of the “mass ordinary” (“ordinary” in the sense of “ordered”): the kyrie, sanctus, benedictus, and agnus dei. And more. Collects and set prayers. Weekly recitations of the Nicene Creed and the Lord’s Prayer. Music: the chanting of the psalm, the hymns, the anthems and motets. And all these are prayer—directed to God. We do this not for ourselves but for and to the Lord. 

When Explanation Falls Short

Could this be made more accessible? Probably. And could it use, from time to time, more explanation for those new to church? I should think so. Could there be less frumpery? Probably, although frumpery has its purposes. But we see around us the alternative: services, often massively popular, that proclaim a gospel that has little to do with Christ or with the Christian faith. Unmoored, the church drifts into heresies like Christian nationalism. When you get rid of the traditional elements of Christian worship, you are thrown on the impulses of the preacher and the congregants who gather around the preacher. And this is too much for a preacher to bear. The church breaks under the weight of making it up.

What we need in this age, as in every other, is worship that resists explanation, that requires an admission that we don’t entirely understand what we are doing. Near the beginning of worship in the church we attend we sing the kyrie: “Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy.” It’s a prayer for the Lord to receive what we are about to do, even though we have no idea what we are doing. Worship is prayer. In prayer, we are transformed. In prayer, the world is transformed.

And if some of what we do is frumpery, as I’m sure it is, then give me frumpery.

Clay