Ep. 193: Is Your Worship Really Worship?

Kourtney Cromwell:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast where we explore the challenging topics that young adults often face. Each week we talk with guests who help answer questions of faith, life, and culture. Connecting them to our daily experiences and God’s Word. For more info on indoubt visit indoubt.ca or indoubt.com.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Hey everyone, this is Kourtney! On this week’s episode, Daniel, and guest Johnny Markin discuss five things that we do that tend to shift the focus onto us instead of the amazing God that we serve. They go through these five pitfalls and discuss the good and the bad with modern contemporary worship. With the songs that we’re singing at church, and the songs that we hear on our worship playlists or on Christian radio, it’s important that we allow space to talk through and examine our worship. So, take a listen, and I hope that you enjoy this episode with Daniel and Johnny Markin.

Daniel Markin:
Welcome to the indoubt Podcast my name is Daniel Markin and I’m one of the hosts here with indoubt, and today I’m joined with Johnny Markin. Now those names sound familiar, but Johnny is actually my dad. But this wasn’t an episode where I’m just bringing on my dad for the sake of bringing on my dad. But he actually has a lot to say regarding the topic we’ll be discussing today, which is modern contemporary worship, and some of the good things that are coming through that, and some of the bad things that also we are seeing in modern contemporary worship. Of course, there’s always good and bad with anything and so it’s important though that we sing good songs and that we engage this and think rightly about music. So welcome here Johnny.

Johnny Markin:
Thanks Daniel.

Daniel Markin:
Or dad, welcome, good to have you here. Let’s just let the people know who are listening a little bit of who you are.

Johnny Markin:
Sure.

Daniel Markin:
So I have written down here that you are a Seahawks fan.

Johnny Markin:
I am indeed.

Daniel Markin:
And not only are you a Seahawks fan, but we also cheer for a Premier League soccer team.

Johnny Markin:
Some people might think they’re actually an obscure team, but they’re a long standing English Premier League team, which comes from the fact that having lived in the UK for many years, our mutual acquaintance, a good friend of ours, used to take us to Aston Villa Park in the North side of Birmingham to go on watch the Aston Villa Villains who have just recently gone back up to the Premier League. And you and I will have to put our scarves on in support of the team this coming year.

Daniel Markin:
And so other than cheering for, I mean you and I cheering for teams that causes lots of stress and pain and a lot of heartache. You have spent many years in ministry, and the reason that you were in England in the first place, was the Lord had brought you there through ministry. So, can you tell us a little bit of what you did there?

Johnny Markin:
Yeah. I came to faith in Christ, not growing up in the church, through Christian music. The late seventies was a time where Christian contemporary music was beginning to find its footing and being able use something culturally relevant, like modern music, blew people’s impression of what church music was. People like Larry Norman and Randy Stonehill, Phil Keaggy were singing songs about Jesus and putting it in a cool package. And so, this more than the music converting me though, it was the message of the gospel that truly struck me and I found that I wanted to take music to use to do the same thing, to share the gospel with my peers and my friends. And over the year’s opportunities kept opening up so that, doing concerts with bands and then later on as a solo artist, we were invited to go and spend a year in Great Britain working with Youth for Christ back in the late eighties.
So Darlene, my wife, you’re a mother we were married 1987 and 1988 we got in a plane, and we headed over for a year and that turned into 12 years of opportunity, of working across Britain and Europe and even in Africa and then several times back here to North America doing both outreach through music. Then over the years, God transformed the ministry I was doing and gave me a heart for leading worship, being mentored by some key worship leaders in the UK and I wound up becoming a writer of worship songs, and a producer of worship albums and then touring my own CDs and stuff, conferences and festivals. But one of the most rewarding things was to be rooted in a local church in the city of Lincoln for eight years where we were involved in that church. Where God forms you through ministry and forms you even in worship. Now, I was on staff there as Youth Director and then as a Worship Director and then in 2000 God called us back to Canada and I’ve been working as a Worship Pastor for 19 years now at Northview Community Church.

Daniel Markin:
Wow. Two decades.

Johnny Markin:
Yeah, I know.

Daniel Markin:
You’re old.

Johnny Markin:
Seasoned.

Daniel Markin:
Seasoned, I know that’s a really good experience you’re a veteran, but you are also doing something else now, you are at Northview still, and that’s been a long time there, but you’re moving into another venture. Currently you’ve just finished your Master’s degree and now you’re working on your Doctorate, but also while doing your Doctorate, you decided it was a good idea to also become a professor.

Johnny Markin:
Well, there was an opportunity opened up when Trinity Western launched their Worship Arts Program about three years ago, and they approached Northview about bringing me on a loan kind of like English football. Can we borrow Johnny for this? And there’s a partnership set up between Northview and Trinity Western and which I’m seconded to go and teach Worship Theology and History and teach Song writing and just mentor students in the ministry of worship.

Daniel Markin:
Well, I want to move into talking a little bit about what you’re teaching, especially at Trinity Western and we find ourselves today, you’ve had lots of experience in the worship world in England, which has a very charismatic worship scene. Then here in Canada with the conference that you’ve been serving in the Mennonite Brethren, which would be less charismatic, not that either one is bad, not that either one is better than one another. Just very different. But I wanted to know in your research, let’s just go here with what are five modern pitfalls that we see in contemporary worship? And by pitfall, I mean things that could really become a problem maybe already are becoming a problem in modern contemporary worship in the songs we’re singing, in the songs that we hear on the Christian radio.

Johnny Markin:
One of the things I wanted to say is that, as you mentioned earlier, there’s good things happening as well as potential pitfalls and dangers and these aren’t actually things that are just for the 21st century. We have seen these things rear their heads throughout church history in some forms or another. And I think when we talk about the things, say for instance that I’m teaching worship theology is really associated with ecclesiology and with discipleship. You can’t really separate those disciplines out because-

Daniel Markin:
And by ecclesiology you mean the church?

Johnny Markin:
Yes, the study of the church and what the church does when it’s together. What is the church, who is the church in fact, and what is God’s purpose for the church? Of course, the most important thing that the church is here to do, is to worship God. And there’s always this discussion, is it about preaching the gospel or worshiping God? And the idea is yes, both.

Daniel Markin:
Both.

Johnny Markin:
By worshiping we should be declaring the gospel and we can get into that a little bit later on. But this is the sense that there are good and bad things I guess that we can talk about. One of the ones that I think stands out in my mind is this sense that we tend to focus on feeling a lot in music and music’s a great vehicle for that, right? It comes from the inner most being, the soul, it really resonates from deep within us. And musical it’s song allows us, it gives voice to some of the messages and the things that we want to say and I think that can be good. In the first great awakening, Jonathan Edwards saw people showing emotion in this congregational setting in New England that was just a lot of preaching, a lot of teaching, a lot of Bible reading, and you know the odd hymn. But they weren’t fervent kind of revivalistic meetings and suddenly as the Holy Spirit invaded their meetings, strange things began to happen.
And Jonathan Edwards was trying to manage this whole revival thing and saying, “Well, it’s a good thing.” While some were criticizing that people were abandoning the traditional church and trying to find churches that were more like this, he was saying, “Look, people have grown up with a knowledge of the gospel, it’s all been in their head, and it’s about time some of it reached their hearts.” It’s not so far from what John Wesley said. John Wesley another revivalists from the 18th century from England, and then who ministered in America as well, as the Methodist church grew out of the revivals that he did. He was one who said that after a year or two in ministry in Savannah, Georgia, when everything just torpedoed, went South and it didn’t go well.
He went back to England with his tail between his legs, fell in with the Moravians, a group of Pietists out of Germany. And as he was going into their meetings with a head full of knowledge of the Bible and of the gospel. One day in prayer, the message of grace impacts him so much that he writes in his journal about what transformed in his heart, and he says, “My heart was strangely warmed.” So, the history of revivalist and of the evangelical movement is that of the heart and the head together.

Daniel Markin:
Absolutely. It’s interesting because I tend to fall more in the head camp, but God created both our mind and our emotions and both are good and I’m just amazed that actually, yes, both are good, but I think we have to let our mind guide our heart. Because often if we just trust our heart, that can really lead us astray in many ways. So, I get why there are so many Pietist movements – people just saying, “No, we can’t show emotion we must be very disciplined and just know the things about God because yes, we don’t want to trust your emotions.” But also, our emotions are a really sweet thing and we see that displayed in the Psalms through David a lot. And then in scripture, because we are human beings who display emotion.

Johnny Markin:
Absolutely. And I think this is where we need to try and find the balance between what feeling is engendered in music and what content is displayed in the music we sing at churches. There is a great deal of merit in being able to assess the songs that we sing in church. It’s one of the tasks that we try to do, not only at Northview but with our students over at Trinity Western to look at the content of what we’re singing. Is there more than just singing about what I’m feeling? I mean everybody likes to emote, well, some people like to emote, but there is a good sense of being able to say things that are going on in me because it’s a reflection of testimony.
These are testimony type songs they might not even be prayer songs, but when we gather together for worship, is there a bigger picture that we should be painting? Should we be doing what Paul said when he said, “Sing to one another in Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs.” However, you define those three categories, there’s a sense that… In Colossians he used the same phrase, but he said, “Let the Word of Christ dwell in you richly.” There’s a sense that we communicate something in the songs that we sing about Jesus, about the faith, and this is what edifies the body.

Daniel Markin:
We are gathering together in the local church together, and it seems to me that another pitfall of modern worship is that, it’s just hyper-personalized and that it’s just about me and my faith and that you could sit in that worship service surrounded by all of your brothers and sisters, by your friends and your family. But you’re just having this miniature God moment between you and God and as if no one else is there and it’s a weird balance because that is important. Those moments are really important, but if that becomes the only thing that you’re there for, then you’re missing out on what it means to be part of the body of Christ, part of the local church.

Johnny Markin:
Absolutely. And we are saved into the body of Christ. We are converted, baptized. Paul uses the Word by the Holy Spirit into a body of believers, the body of Christ. And that is something that we often forget when we think about, I’m supposed to invite Jesus into my heart, I need to personally appropriate the faith. And again, this is the evangelical story for the last 250 years is that this tension between the church, the we and the me, the I and the us and we have, at times, often boiled down the gospel to that personal transaction. What is the gospel? It’s about me getting saved and that is true.
I love the way that N.T. Wright writes about it. He writes: “Now listen, we have trivialized that message. We have reduced it in scale. We have brought it down to our level to make it bearable. We have thought that it meant simply that I should repent of my sins and you of yours and that God would forgive us and of course it does mean that and without that there is no personal gospel, but it means much, much more. What is the announcement that the church must make to the world? It isn’t simply that every individual is a sinner and needs to repent. True though that is, it is that the way the world lives is out of joint with the way that God intends, and that God in Christ is holding out a different way to live, a way which is characterized at every level by forgiveness.”
And that quote really speaks to the sense that we are not only about getting right with God, is that even in the Lord’s prayer: “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” There’s a sense that there’s a not only a vertical but a horizontal relationship at play, and God wants us to remember that, even in that basic prayer, the Lord’s prayer that He has taught us. So that when we are gathered, we should be expressing we and us language because we’re a people engaging in dialogue with God.
If you examine the scriptures, the biblical pattern of worship is that God calls the people together for a meeting like Exodus 24: “We’re going to confirm the Covenant that I made with you.” Or you could look at Isaiah 6 where it’s God initiating this and the Host of Heaven are involved, but often it’s the sense that God is bringing the people together and these are special moments.
So that weekly pattern of gathering is about the people of God coming together to dialogue with God, to remember who He is, to remember who they are. And if we view it just as something in which I go to get personally invigorated about my faith and the things that I believe, well that should be a good by-product. But God is the one calling us so that He can speak to us, so that we can engage with Him and we can encounter Him. But it’s going back to the idea that worship isn’t primarily about just how I am with God, it’s about how we are. In Ephesians 4, Paul is writing about coming to maturity. He’s not talking about individual people, even though that’s a part of it. He’s talking about a mature church, this living organism that represents Jesus on earth. Are we coming to maturity? And so, it’s the me in the we in the He.

Daniel Markin:
Say that again.

Johnny Markin:
It’s the me in the we in He. So, this is how we need to view worship as something which has these, it’s me and God but also me in the body and we’re all together.

Daniel Markin:
Yeah. So, you’ve impressed that upon me many times, talked about this over the dinner table, and you’re so right. And one of the things that I have taken to do every once in a while, is when I’m gathered at church, I will sometimes just stop singing and just be encouraged by everyone else around me singing.

Johnny Markin:
Oh, that’s beautiful.

Daniel Markin:
Yeah. And whenever you find yourself at a local church, or maybe if you’re not currently in a local church, when you attend, listen. And just listen to the people sing around you because it will amaze you at what happened. There’s something very amazing about singing together and also like in culture, where else do we sing together? Which is a very interesting thing, it’s maybe a concert, but people don’t gather to sing and church is a cool place for that.

Johnny Markin:
I would also encourage the converts as well is that we shouldn’t go with just a sense that we’re spectating in worship and just listening. Oh, I’m going to be blessed via everybody else. The church calls together each other so that we can use those gifts. Again, we’re back to Ephesians 4: “Each one using their gift to build one another up.” The process of maturity again is each one using that gift. So if I’m standing and I’m declaring in creed, in song, in prayer, in confession, something about God, the person who is in the room with me is hearing me say that and that’s encouraging to them because it says I’m not alone.

Daniel Markin:
Absolutely. And it’s funny because you will sometimes hear people say, “Well I didn’t really enjoy the worship today right. The worship. I just didn’t really like it today.” And I always want to say like, the response should be, “Well that’s good because we weren’t worshiping you.” You’re not gathered there for your feeling and I think it’s a good way of putting it. It’s a by-product that and perhaps you are encouraged-

Johnny Markin:
Emotion isn’t bad at all.

Daniel Markin:
Emotion isn’t bad, but you are not there to worship yourself, to get a God moment. You’re there to worship the living Christ and the living God so that’s a really great thing to add. So, that was two pitfalls there. We had the focus on feeling over content, the hyper-personal faith. Another one that you had is worship needs to connect with the non-believers. Anyone who attends and if they’re not a believer or the person coming to church for the first time, they are seeing a covenant people worshiping God together and that is a profound image. And I mean even the people who are not believers, aren’t yet Christians, maybe they drive past church they see a lot of cars there and, they might wonder, well, what’s going on inside of there that all these people would gather together to worship? That must be a pretty fantastic God that all these people would take time out of their day to do that.

Johnny Markin:
Yeah, it speaks to something quite bigger than people’s selves. Now I think what we need to clarify is that there are two streams of thought regarding why churches should have services and there’s a movement that grew out of the evangelistic kind of revivalist period again with Charles Finney and DL Moody and others like this that says that people should get together for the prime purpose of getting people to know Jesus-

Daniel Markin:
To get people saved.

Johnny Markin:
To get people saved. And of course, that is part of the great commission, but the great commission is go and make disciples. And so, it’s not just making converts, it’s making disciples. And so when you look at some portions of scripture, Paul is very clear in 1 Corinthians 14 that the prime purpose of the church gathering together is for the edification of the believers and so that’s why he says, “I worship in spirit. I worship in understanding.” Or I pray in spirit, I pray in understanding if you want to use that terminology. And so, there’s this sense that head and heart together, but also that’s the way we’re edified. And so, the edification of the believer and worship historically gathered around the table. Like for 1500 years… around the communal, the Lord’s table, the Lord’s supper, and the altar mysteries, whatever you want to call them historically and that was the focus. And it was only believers who would partake in these elements. That’s how Jesus said, “Remember Me this way.” So, when we realize that it was primarily about the gathering of believers to be built up-

Daniel Markin:
To be discipled, to be-

Johnny Markin:
That’s right. Now, that doesn’t mean we cannot welcome non-believers in our midst and again, Paul points to this and says that you may have people in your midst who don’t know Jesus. That’s why it’s more better for them to hear three good words in a language that they understand than a thousand words that they can’t understand if it’s done in tongues or in a language or in a way, in a manner that they don’t understand. So, what we want to do is understand the prime purpose for making disciples is that we meet together; that the gospel it forms us. What does that mean? Is that the things we do in worship, as we rehearse the gospel, as we talk about it, as we sing about it, as we pray, as we confess these things, all of these things are forming us spiritually. It’s the Holy Spirit using those things to shape us into the image of Jesus. And that’s why we say it’s the believer gathering it’s not just an outreach meeting.
And so, yes, people will come to Jesus if they hear the gospel and it’s John Piper who says that the best salesman is someone who’s passionate. And so walking in and seeing a group of people passionately worshiping Jesus, whether that’s with their arms raised or vocally very loud, or whether that’s on their knees, or maybe it’s the fact that they’re humbled enough to walk, to take the Communion wafer and cup and these things that they do together. But that’s all a testimony to the non-believer who will come. And we should be inviting people to come and see what we believe and how can we explain what we believe. Come and see it in our songs and hear it in our preaching and hear it in the Bible being read itself.

Daniel Markin:
So what I hear you saying is, let’s make sure we are accommodating to those who would be non-believers, we’d say on the outside of church, but never forsake those on the inside who are being discipled. Because that’s the temptation, right? So just make it, always want to get people in and make it really attractive and have people come in and get saved. But you’re neglecting those who need to be discipled for the long haul. It’s not just about the beginning of the race, discipleship it’s about the entire race and the most important part is crossing that finish line.

Johnny Markin:
Yeah, that’s it. The persevering in the faith as Hebrews encourages us to. One of the great things about the gospel and the challenging thing is, it calls us to die to our own preferences, to die to ourselves. And when we want to just segment ourselves as Christians off with one particular type of people, whether that’s an age category or a music category or something like that, we are actually doing a disservice to the greater message of the gospel. This intergenerational, that we are all so different from different backgrounds, every tribe and tongue and nation as it says in Revelation, “Will gather around the Saviour on the last day.” And so, what we see is that we could be guilty of worshiping our own preferences and not being biblically faithful in our worship.

Daniel Markin:
Would you say that is God doing a new thing or is that different language? Because we have new forms of worship but that it’s connected to an old belief. How would you?

Johnny Markin:
Yeah. This is where … I mean a current buzzword in the last 30 years or so has been the ancient future movement in which people are looking at things from the past to do in the present because it points to the future. There’s a great Greek word about worship called Anamnesis. I love the aspect that it speaks of this great big story of God. We look at what God has done, but by doing something ancient in the present, it pulls that past into the present because it points to the future. And the perfect example of that is when we do the Lord’s table, this is something Jesus did in the upper room and so as we do what we’re doing, we’re doing it with Him.

Daniel Markin:
And what you’re saying is anamnesis it’s like amnesia, right?

Johnny Markin:
It’s the opposite. It’s kind of built on the same ground and the reason we do anamnesis is, so we don’t get amnesia.

Daniel Markin:
Yes. So, we don’t forget. So, what’s the main way that we remember?

Johnny Markin:
Well, it’s action. It means doing things because it’s in doing things regularly that you begin to be formed and things become not just remembered, but second nature, but not in a sense that it’s something that doesn’t mean anything to me. Empty ritual is one thing but understanding the nature of why you do something… Saying grace over your meal every meal should not be an empty ritual. It should come from an effusive heart full of grateful thanks. If you’ve ever gone hungry for a time and then you’ve been given a good meal, you really do appreciate that. Now we’ve grown up in a Western world where everything’s at your behest, but you know what? It’s a great lesson to go without, which is why fasting sometimes is a really great spiritual discipline.

Daniel Markin:
Well, I think every college student relates to that. You’ve eaten up a bunch of Mr. Noodles for however long and then someone from church invite you over for a real meal, and it’s actually one of the greatest things in the world.

Johnny Markin:
I address the ancient future, but the idea is that what is this new thing God is doing? The context of what and when I’m saying God is doing a new thing biblically had to do with God is bringing Jesus to be … He’s the future promise for the Old Testament and God is going to do a new thing, and He has done that new thing. He’s still recreating since Jesus’s death and resurrection. The process of recreation has begun and will terminate in the last day when Christ returns. But we often take that phrase, God is doing a new thing as though it’s some new outpouring of the Spirit that’s directing us in a new way. Some new revelation that God’s giving us, and we better run down there because it’s the new thing.
The new isn’t always the greatest because sometimes we can be led astray by new things and this is the case with the history of the church. When people came around and started preaching Gnosticism, we must get to the point where we’re not tossed around by every new thing that comes around. Yeah. God is doing a new thing of renewal in our hearts and in our lives, but it’s through the ancient story of what God promised through Christ and by the Holy Spirit.

Daniel Markin:
Wonderful. Then I would say something to add to that too is with these new things we shouldn’t be looking, and this is kind of been a thing that’s been … we’ve seen Marty Sampson just say, “His faith is on rocky ground.” You can think of Michael Gungor, worship leader, worship writer, who has walked away from the faith and is following this new spiritism right now. But it’s just a good reminder another pitfall is we tend to have there’s an over reliance on music and not a reliance on the Word of God. And we can look at the worship leader as the shaman, as the one leading our spiritual experience as if he’s the one cultivating all of that. And in a sense, he does have a role to play.

Johnny Markin:
They could be channeling the Holy Spirit through their music or something.

Daniel Markin:
But again, it’s just a reminder, and I like what you’re saying. I feel like we should talk about this more maybe on another episode about the idea of what we sing, and the creeds that we sing that reflect the Word of God. Worship music is good and that is a way that we can connect with God and be grown in grace. But I mean I think you would agree that primarily is going to happen in reading the Word of God together in community and singing the Word of God.

Johnny Markin:
Amen.

Daniel Markin:
Amen. Well we are out of time. Thank you so much for joining us dad, Johnny.

Johnny Markin:
It’s been a joy, Daniel.

Daniel Markin:
We look forward to having you joining us again.

Johnny Markin:
Sure.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks for joining us for this episode. It’s so important to give space to a discussion like this one, and I’m really glad that Johnny was able to join us. Daniel did mention that they’d love to continue and do a second part to this episode, so we will be bringing Johnny back and recording part two and that’ll be coming up in the next few weeks. If there’s anything that you’d like to share with us, I’d encourage you to send us a DM or you can email us at info@ indoubt.ca. If you’d like to keep up with us for daily content, you can follow us on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook.
There’s two things that I want to let you know about. So last week I talked about another ministry that we partner with, Truth and Life Today. So, all three of our hosts, Daniel, Isaac and Joshua, were guests on a recent episode and you could watch that by going to the YouTube channel or on truthandlifetoday.com. And the second thing that I wanted to add is just a quick reminder about our app. You can download it in the Play Store or in the App Store if you’d like. We’re also on Spotify and Apple music, so check us out there as well.
Thanks again for listening and I hope you join us again next week where we’ll have Isaac talking with guest, Kevin Schut, Professor of Media and Communication, giving a Christian perspective of video games in culture.

Kourtney Cromwell:
Thanks so much for listening. If you want to hear more, subscribe on iTunes and Spotify or visit us online at indoubt.ca or indoubt.com. We’re also on social media, so make sure to follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.