Week 10: Research Wrap Up and Reflections

Its hard to believe this ten week journey has come to an end. Over two months ago, I set out to learn about the churches in my hometown. To be honest, I figured I would come away from the experience with a favorite church or with a worship style that I preferred or ministry structure that I believed would work best. But I could not have been more wrong.

Over a year ago I was in the beginning stages of developing this project. In its earliest form, the idea lay mixed up within feelings of uncertainty about my own worship choices. At school, I was attending a traditional church service, while at home I went to a contemporary one. It wasn’t until I saw John Crist’s Church Hunters video that I knew what would fuel my curiosity: the need to eradicate the superficiality of Church Shopping.

Society is often a superficial place. And christian culture has dug into that superficiality to appeal to secular culture. But in doing so worship has become a thing to be consumed. Like entertainment, Sunday morning has been viewed as a production to put on. But to what end are we allowing secular society dominate our christian one?

It was with those questions in mind that I began my research, hoping to make sense of the madness. As a result, I have discovered that the solution is not to get rid of all the things that churches are doing to appeal to secular culture, but rather to change people’s perceptions of them. For there is a great difference between intention and perception.

During my junior year of high school, my AP Language teacher Mr. Rossi challenged us to put together a presentation about contrasting entities. Naturally, my partner and I decided to pick the broadest topic possible and discuss human perception vs. reality. Little did I know of the complexities that lay beneath, and still, to this day, I have barely scraped the surface. Needless to say, our topic of choice did not warrant an A, but since that presentation, I haven’t been able to shake those burning questions.

In many ways, this project dealt with that very question: How does peoples’ perception of a worship service differ from the reality? How does it differ from the original intentions?

Since I am not a psychology major, I am in no way qualified to dive into a deep and critical conversation about the human subconscious, but based on this summer’s research I can definitely claim that social situations, social patterns, the worship leaders, and even the worship space itself affect the perception of worshipers in the pews and seats.

Just by asking pastors and worship leaders about their worship services is enough to reveal that their God-filled intentions are not always perceived by their congregation. This caused me to question my own assumptions about christian culture that served as the foundation of this project:

Do churches really try to be more superficial to appeal to a superficial society? Or are we as people apart of a superficial society perceiving churches as being more superficial because that is what we are trained to expect?

The answer is not simple nor clear to me, even at the end of this project. But I’d like to think that it falls somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. I went into this project making generalized assumptions about church shoppers and the churches that cater their worship to those shoppers. But upon completing my field research and an extensive reading list, I’m sitting here wondering whether part of the problem with church shopping is miscommunication.

Above anything else, this experience has taught me that church shoppers should be mindful of their assumptions and strive to rise above them and that churches should be mindful of how their community and worship experience fits within the their local context.

This project has taken me in new directions and put me in uncomfortable situations. It has forced me to think critically about who I am as a christian, while also thinking objectively as an observer of different traditions within the christian faith. I am so incredibly grateful for every single moment of the 400+ hours spent on this project, and hope to continue asking (and trying to answers) many of the hard questions that have popped up along this wonderful journey.

So, to my faculty mentors that have helped me process through my curiosities and all of my observations and helped me find the right direction, to my friends and family members that have listened to me and even helped me vocally process through the hard questions and observations, to the 12 wonderful pastors and worship leaders that met with me and answered my questions and simply talked to me about their love of God, worship, and their congregations, and to all those who have followed this blog and are simply along for the ride, THANK YOU. I hope that in some way you have learned more about your own worship experiences, or even, perhaps, began to ask your own difficult questions in response to mine.

This project has certainly been a huge and monumental chapter in my own spiritual journey. I only hope that my final product will be informative and impact your own.