Worshiping with Happy Feet

Here is a quote I saw on twitter the other day, “If you don’t like really long worship services, you probably won’t like heaven.”

I immediately pictured a church service with the lights dimmed in the crowd, bright lights on stage, a couple guitars and constant singing. I thought “Well I was looking forward to heaven till I read that.”
Confession: Unless something really special is happening, I don’t usually love really long worship services.

Happy Feet

This may be because I sing like Mumble in Happy Feet. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie, I highly recommend that you do. In the movie all penguins have a “song.” When mating season comes along they sing their song, and they find their mate when the song harmonizes with someone else’s. The solo becomes a duet! It’s beautiful, it makes you want to shake your grove thing, but then there is Mumble. When Mumble opens his mouth to sing, a horrible awful screech comes out and all the other penguins laugh at him.

I relate to Mumble, I sing like a dying tone-deaf bird, but the movie is called Happy Feet for a reason. Mumble can tap and dance with his little thumping feet like no one else. I took tap for ten years, I can make music with my feet. If you just let me do my thing in a worship service, I wouldn’t sing I would dance. My life long, alter boyish dream is to be a sway leader of a choir but not really have to sing.

I have always ended up in churches where lifting your hands is really radical, so my sway leader dreams actually look like a slight rock not a dance. Usually, I’m perfectly okay when sing time is over. (Right here you could insert the high school peer pressure lecture about stepping out and not worrying about others, or you can just hang on for my overall point and trust that I’m working though this issue.)

My point is. It is right to sing to the Lord regardless of our talent. “Sing to the Lord a new song, sing to the Lord all the earth” Psalm 91:6 But the way we do “worship” services limits worship to music, and to someone who isn’t naturally gifted or who doesn’t enjoy singing, the idea of a never ending worship service doesn’t sound like a very pretty picture of heaven.

Even if in heaven we worship for eternity, that doesn’t mean that worship is only limited to singing. Yes, music is a part of worship, but it is only a piece of the pie not the whole thing. Worship is much broader than what we see in worship services.

Worship leader Josh Via recently wrote a blog about worship http://joshviamusic.com/. He looks at Mary anointing Jesus’ feet. I love how he difines worship through the act of anointing Jesus’ feet and not through music or art.

So Yes! let’s keep singing! Let’s keep the music! But I want you to share some other ways that we can worship corporately outside of singing. Let’s be creative! Think outside of just reciting liturgy, what are other ways that we can praise and worship God together?