A W Tozer on modern worship

Aiden Wilson Tozer — better known as A W Tozer — was a 20th century evangelical pastor, author and public speaker.  He was born in western Pennsylvania in 1897 and grew up in a small farming community.

When he was a young man he moved to Akron, Ohio to work in the tyre industry; at the time, Akron was the fastest-growing city in America. One day on his way home from work in 1914, he heard the words of a street preacher: ‘If you don’t know how to be saved … just call on God’.  He duly did so.  Those words changed his life.

In 1919, he accepted his first post as a pastor and would continue in that role in various churches for the next 44 years. He was affiliated with the Christian and Missionary Alliance (C&MA). (C&MA churches are sometimes called Alliance churches.) In addition to writing several books, Tozer also edited the C&MA magazine Alliance Weekly (now called Alliance Life). C&MA has an affinity, but no direct affiliation, with the Holiness Churches.

He and his wife lived simply. They never owned a car and travelled by train or bus. Tozer often gave proceeds from his books to those in need.  He died in 1963, survived by his widow, Ada Cecelia Pfautz, and their seven children.

Tozer preached often about the tension and loneliness of being a Christian in an increasingly secular world.  It’s hard to believe that his words are decades old — they are even more relevant today.

Tozer’s main concern about 20th century worship was that it was more man-centred than God-centred.  Many YouTube videos discuss his writing and broadcast clips of his sermons.  One, called ‘Christian Entertainment: An Evangelical Heresy’ is well worth watching.  You won’t need sound — all the text is on the screen:

The Christian composer and founder of Audience One Ministries, Steve Camp, recently compiled a selection of Tozer’s thoughts on evangelical worship, which he (Tozer) put to paper in the middle of the 20th century. You can read them in full in Camp’s post ‘Entertainment — An Evangelical Heresy? … challenging words from Tozer’s pen’.  A few excerpts follow.  As you read, compare what Tozer says with the services you have had the misfortune to read about or, even worse, attend — those which are more like a Siegfried & Roy spectacle rather than solemn, reverent worship of God and His Son.  Goodness knows what he would say if he were alive today.

IN OUR DAY WE MUST BE DRAMATIC ABOUT EVERYTHING.
We don’t want God to work unless He can make a theatrical production of it. We want Him to come dressed in costumes with a beard and with a staff. We want Him to play a part according to our ideas. Some of us even demand that He provide a colorful setting and fireworks as well! (The Tozer Pulpit, Book 8, pp. 48-49)

Entertainment Is a Symptom
This is the cause of a very serious breakdown in modern evangelicalism. The idea of cultivation and exercise, so dear to the saints of old, has now no place in our total religious picture. It is too slow, too common. We now demand glamour and fast flowing dramatic action. A generation of Christians reared among push buttons and automatic machines is impatient of slower and less direct methods of reaching their goals. We have been trying to apply machine-age methods to our relations with God. We read our chapter, have our short devotions and rush away, hoping to make up for our deep inward bankruptcy by attending another gospel meeting or listening to another thrilling story told by a religious adventurer lately returned from afar.

The tragic results of this spirit are all about us: shallow loves, hollow religious philosophies, the preponderance of the element of fun in gospel meetings, the glorification of men, trust in religious externalities, quasi-religious fellowships, salesmanship methods, the mistaking of dynamic personality for the power of the Spirit. These and such as these are the symptoms of an evil disease, a deep and serious malady of the soul. (The Pursuit of God, pp. 62-63)

Pressure on Religious Leaders
Pastors and churches in our hectic times are harassed by the temptation to seek size at any cost and to secure by inflation what they cannot gain by legitimate growth. The mixed multitude cries for quantity and will not forgive a minister who insists upon solid values and permanence. Many a man of God is being subjected to cruel pressure by the ill-taught members of his flock who scorn his slow methods and demand quick results and a popular following regardless of quality … They are greedy for thrills, and since they dare no longer seek them in the theater, they demand to have them brought into the church. (The Next Chapter after the Last, p. 8 )

Does Not Belong in Church
A church fed on entertainment is no New Testament church at all. The desire for surface stimulation is a sure mark of the fallen nature, the very thing Christ died to deliver us from. A curious crowd of baptized worldlings waiting each Sunday for the quasi-religious needle to give them a lift bears no relation whatsoever to a true assembly of Christian believers. And that its members protest their undying faith in the Bible does not change things any. “Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.” (The Next Chapter after the Last, p. 14)

I pray that one day praise bands, liturgical dancing and stage-like pulpits will be a thing of the past.  Nothing could draw us further away from a knowledge of Christ than these abominations.