Don't Forget Combined Services

There was a sort of combined worship service tonight at the Whit. I love going to events at other churches because I love to see how other churches do things.

Important note: I almost always walk out being happy that I am at the church I am.

They do these "combined" type events every now and then. The latest iteration is "new hampshire" churches. There were maybe 2,000 people in the arena, and they said about 170 churches were represented.
Pretty cool, especially since the vast majority of churches in our area are in that sub-200 congregation size.
Now there are lots of people who like to advocate for churches "getting together" and I honestly agree. America's church is very fractured, there are denominations inside of denominations, and it keeps me up at night that there are probably 20+ churches in Dover who do not communicate or collaborate or anything together.
HOWEVER, I am convinced that there is a good reason why we don't do combined "worship services" very often.

I walked into the Whit and saw what I was hoping to see: good sized line arrays, a Venue and a grand MA at front of house, and IMAG on a stage that could have been 60'x30'.
The music was familiar but mostly not what i'm used to.

Here are details that rubbed me the wrong way:
1/2 the stage was a choir.
the other 1/2 of the stage contained 3 percussionists, 2 or more acoustic guitarists, 3 keyboards, 2 violins, a bass, an instrument that I can't even identify, a varied smattering of vocalists, and possibly some others. Amongst all that I only ever heard 1 electric guitar at a time. Now there is nothing inherently wrong with 3 percussionists in a band,
But I have a personal vendetta against crowded stages and sloppy instrumentation.
All of those musicians were probably very good.
However I don't think I would have noticed if you had removed 2/3 of the people on the stage.
Another way to say it: You give a church a bigger stage and they figure out how to fill it with more people.
I don't have anything personal against choirs. I think they are pretty neat.
However I do not like my ears being pierced with the sound of 40 amplified voices that are louder than the entire 6-person rhythm section.

I think it all boils down to culture.
My church has gotten away from the culture of hanging flags inside our auditorium and waving streamers around. This event contained more than one middle-aged man waving a streamer and also 2 hand-held flags for the entire music set.
There was a dance element, which is cool except it was during a worship song which just felt weird. There was a kids choir complete with kid solo which always make me feel uncomfortable and weird. There were kids on stage waving streamers/flags/ribbons, which triple-whammeyd the squirmy-kid feeling inside of me.
There was a song in spanish. I have ALWAYS made fun of people who sing worship songs in other languages, because I speak ENGLISH and do not know what spanish words mean, therefore there is no point in having lyrics. I will let this one slide because I'm sure there were hispanics in the room and it was a pretty fun latin song.

The lighting director harshly reminded me of church volunteer techs. I did not appreciate his use of the blinders on the top of his rig, and the rainbow pixel-map across his backlight rig that he aimed at the crowd was just plain silly.

There are more things, tons of little details that I just plain didn't like.

It sounds like I'm being harsh.
And yes, I am.
But I can do that, because these people like what they do.
And I like what I do.
I'm not going to tell you that anything at this service was wrong, because there are very few wrong ways to do anything these days. And THAT is why there are so many different churches.

If there's any big problems in the evangelical or charismatic or non-denominational church in America, the biggest one is an identity problem. So many churches just plain don't know what they're going after.
They don't have a vision for the music, so they let 3 people play percussion: no vision = no reason to say no. But if we are able to define our identity, we can work towards fostering that identity. And different churches develop different cultural identities, which is good.

It just makes combined "multi-church" gatherings really awkward.

Any further conversations I have with people about "combined church" events will be about how we need to ally our ministry and forget about church services.