In my church tradition—the conservative end of the British new church movement or ‘reformed charismatic’—it’s normal that we engage in what we call ‘contributory worship.’
Essentially this means that at the same point in our worship when we’re singing songs, members of the church will pray, read from the Bible, and use spiritual gifts. Lots of churches do this, but the key thing to note is that this is spontaneous.
The band will go quiet enough that you can hear someone from across the room and then people will start to bring their prayers of praise to God, read passages from the scriptures, speak in tongues and bring interpretations, sing spontaneous songs of praise, and later in the meeting once we’ve lifted our eyes to the heavens in praise bring prophetic words with some sense of what God would specifically remind us from his word that day. The Spirit speaks amongst the people’s praises. The elders in the room are listening to what’s going on, discerning if there’s a thread that God is calling to our attention, and correcting when need be.
It’s wonderful, and I think what 1 Corinthians 12-14 (or 11-15) require of us. It takes a congregation a lot of time to learn how to do this, it takes significant leadership to continue in, and it takes sustained belief over time: it’s easier to just sing some songs.
However, while some churches still continue in this, lots have stepped away from it. Often for ‘missional’ reasons (repackaged seeker-sensitivity for millennials), as though Sunday worship were primarily about those who don’t know Jesus, rather than primarily about worshipping God.
Some continue in but in modified form by requiring contributions to be spoken into a microphone. This is what I’d like to explore. I think this is often adopted without careful consideration of how changing the technology (unamplified voice from the floor to amplified voice from the front) changes the act.
Why change to a microphone?
There are, I think, 3 reasons that churches do this.
It can be a function of size. Once your church has grown beyond a certain point you can’t hear each other contributing. You therefore switch to a microphone. This happens roughly when you top 200 people in a room, but factors of the room’s acoustics make a difference here. There is a serious practical consideration to be made, but I think the choice is made without thinking through alternative options. Perhaps it’s time to plant or start a new meeting if you can’t hear each other? These are complicated and not to be done lightly (and don’t always reduce the size of people in the room!) but should be considered carefully.
It can be a function of oversight. 1 Corinthians 14 describes the need for prophecy to be weighed by elders and that all these wild contributions should be orderly. One interpretation of that is that if they all come through a microphone you have to first talk with an elder before you bring them. There’s something to this and particularly with prophetic words it can be sensible to act like this. However, you can provide oversight without using a microphone.
It can be to make it less weird. If you visit a church and the person next to you starts shouting out, it’s a bit strange. If it’s all in the microphone, then it’s less strange. I’m not convinced that true, but I don’t think we should be scared of strangeness. Make Christianity weird again.
How does a microphone change things?
If you go to a church that uses a microphone you’ll notice two things: less people will contribute, and the kinds of contributions will be different from those that don’t use a microphone.
It’s daunting to get out of your seat and walk to the front, and then tell someone what you wanted to say, and then say that in front of everyone in a microphone. It’s daunting enough to just do it from where you are, and then people aren’t looking at you. It takes time for people to work up courage and they will talk themselves out of it most of the time. The microphone significantly raises the bar for contributions.
If you use a microphone, you’ll notice that most contributions will be prophetic words, or occasionally testimonies of how God has moved in their life. You won’t get many prayers of praise, which is mostly what we get in churches I’ve been an elder in that don’t use a microphone. It’s odd to go up to someone and say what you want to pray because you don’t really know you just want to start praying. What’s said into a mic is usually directed at the people rather than at God. What’s said from the ‘floor’ is directed at God. No, we all know that God isn’t ‘at the front,’ but people will perceive that in their bodies however much you tell them otherwise. Our contributions are praise to God that we all join in with. Microphones tend to mean we just get prophecies.
It also raises the perceived bar for the perceived ‘quality’ of a contribution: it would be odd to walk to the mic and say, “thank you Jesus that you love me,” and then sit back down. But I covet those prayers in our gathered worship. Contributions into the mic are going to be longer; they’re going to tend to be the kind of thing you listen to rather than join in with.
For all it provides an opportunity to ‘vet’ contributions, I actually think that’s weird. Stop vetting people’s prayers. When they make a theological mistake (“thank you Father for dying on the cross for us”) just correct it by praying the true thing yourself into the mic. A microphone carries perceived weight. Everyone thinks you’ve just vetted what’s been said which means you feel the need to do that. If the floor is open then no one thinks the slightly strange thing someone said is what the church thinks, though you may have to gently respond to it in some fashion. The microphone creates a need for oversight as much as it provides an opportunity for it.
There’s also the problem of the person who loves being long-winded or has gone strange and won’t stop. It’s much easier to gently redirect the congregation to the Lord when they aren’t amplified and your mic and your band are (or even if not, your instruments can create noise more effectively than most voices). If they’re talking into a mic and it all goes weird that’s a tougher leadership situation. All the oversight wins you get with a mic are tempered with oversight challenges too.
What to do next
Of course, if you’ve gone to a mic it’s harder to go back. That may not even be possible. Certainly, if your church is too big to hear each other then this isn’t a call to arbitrarily split it in half! That wouldn’t work even if you tried it. But we shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders and carry on.
Have you ever considered putting the mic at the back of the room? Or having a few different microphones around the room? There are attendant challenges here too about how you run your meetings, but it would remove the ‘front’ element and reduce the ‘authority’ element.
Or, depending on your architecture, perhaps you can mic the room such that your PA guys can pick up people from where they are. This is difficult, but I’ve seen it done. A church I used to be part of, in the early days, was renting a room with very low ceilings and sound deadening ceiling tiles. It wasn’t many people, but it was hard to hear each other. So, they purchased a kind of microphone that could be fitted to the ceiling with tape (yes, they did sometimes fall down…) and the team would turn up the relevant one to catch the contribution. It was a long way from perfect, but it was a creative solution rather than jumping for the easy one. Perhaps if your room’s architecture could work with it you could rig something like this?
Even if you don’t change the technology, notice how it shapes you. All our technologies shape us in some way. Deliberately model the sort of contribution you’d like to hear more of—I’m assuming Bible readings and prayers—but don’t do it from the front or the stage so it looks like leading the meeting. Model what you want to see. Teach what you want to see. Find some instigators and get them to have a go on a few Sundays, others will get the idea.
I don’t present these as cut and dried solutions—I can see some challenges with each to be worked through—but as a suggestion that what we often see is not the only option. Even if these wouldn’t work for you, do consider what we’ve lost.
Don’t settle, we didn’t grow out of it, we can have more.
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