Worship comes alive at New Life Fellowship in Phnom Pehn, Cambodia. People from all walks of life gather here on Wednesdays evenings and Sunday mornings and find themselves free to honor the Lord by dancing, shouting, or any other method they feel called to.
Admittedly, most of these louder forms of worship are a bit out of my comfort zone. I grew up in fairly conservative churches (excluding a brief stint in a charismatic church when I was young), where worship was something done by a band at the front of the sanctuary. The congregation was only passively participating on any given Sunday morning. When I really got into worship, I might have been inclined to raise my hands to the Lord, but never anything more “extreme”.
Training camp for the World Race in April really stretched me in that respect. Bringing together about 30 people from all kinds of Christian backgrounds is bound to do that. I experienced worship like I never had. I heard people speaking in tongues, saw some dancing before the Lord, and frankly, most were being quite loud. Honestly, it all made me feel very uncomfortable, and I spent a majority of the week processing through those feelings. I wondered why they couldn’t just do worship in a less dramatic manner. Why is there a need for all of those emotions to fly around?
Having been on the Race for about 5 months now (has it seriously been that long?), I have been exposed to more than I could have ever imagined. For instance, living in Africa for 3 months has made dancing during worship a completely normal activity. But I find myself being stretched here, once again.
Last Sunday night, we attended a service at New Life Fellowship that welcomed back about 30 Cambodians back from the “Encounter,” an intense weekend retreat aimed at sparking an intimate relationship with the Lord. The welcome-back service got started by having all of the participants enter down the center aisle and take a seat at the front. All of this was done while confetti was falling from the ceiling, silly string was being sprayed, and the fog machine was on full blast. Ok, I guess that was fun. Nothing terribly out of the ordinary there.
But then worship began. It was the most intense worship I have experienced in a while. I don’t want you to get the impression that I am against intense worship—there is little I love more. But it was very emotional for many people, which immediately pushed me out of my comfort zone. I prefer to show as little emotion as possible, if I can help it. That is not right, wrong, or indifferent, just the way I am wired. But it made me feel uncomfortable, and I couldn’t explain why. The more I began to try to figure out why I was uncomfortable, the more frustrated I got. This continued into a downward spiral, so much so that I was unable to worship, which again frustrated me.
I left the service feeling very annoyed with myself that I was feeling the way I was feeling. I realized that a huge part of it was probably Satan attacking me so that I would be distracted from worshiping the Lord.
I have been working through this for about a week now. I went to a youth service at the church last night. God showed me a few things while I was there. First, He told me that it’s okay that I don’t get emotional; He showed me that there is freedom in Him. Second, the Lord told me that if we all worshiped the same way, it would get really boring. Worship is just another way to see how we are all created differently, but we are all beautiful in those differences.
Bottom line: emotional worship is not my cup of tea, but that is not something to beat myself up over.
