“The fightin’ Missiourians….” I’ll never forget someone telling me that our Lutheran church body was nicknamed this in the past. It makes sense. Lutherans can be a contentious bunch, it’s in our DNA. We told the Roman Catholic church to go fly a kite over indulgences, and we haven’t necessarily worked out all of our belligerence since then. And if you REALLY want to see Lutherans fight, throw worship into the ring. Argue for contemporary worship in a Lutheran setting that doesn’t do it, and you’re likely to end up in a knife fight in the fellowship hall. Argue for liturgy in a contemporary worship setting and what proceeds might make the battle of Fallujah look tame in comparison. We may think it’s normal if we grew up Lutheran, but if you ask people outside of our tribe, they will tell you it is often weird and confusing to witness our hand-wringing over worship. 
So I thought it was interesting when I asked what questions people had about liturgical Lutheran worship, some brave soul asked the really good question of “why do we fight over this stuff so much?” It’s a fair question, and a question that I think comes from a similar kind of hurt that a kid asks when his/her parents are fighting. Sometimes the answers are righteous, and sometimes not so much. I think it’s the same for us. So I’ve compiled a few of the reasons that we fight about worship:
1. We fight about worship because worship is important. We Lutherans actually believe that communal congregational worship is a top 3 level issue in our churches. We believe that our worship should align with a faithful understanding and practice of God’s Word. There are other church bodies that wouldn’t put it as high, but we sure do. We believe things about worship like that it is supposed to be beautiful, precise, concise, and orderly. (Not that you would always accuse us of all or any of those things if you went to the average church in our denomination.) But we believe it is important. It is valued.
2. We fight about worship because it brings us definition. When Jesus was speaking to His disciples in John 13 about how people would know them, He is famous for having said, “they will know you are my disciples by what kinds of songs you sing on Sunday and how long the sermons are.” Well, not actually. He said that it would be love, but then again, He wasn’t talking about showing how you were different from Baptists (or Episcopalians). And honestly, we care about that. We care about it because we do feel like we have something else to offer, something distinct, and worship is a part of our “brand”. You can put a Coke in any glass you want, but if you pick up a can of Coke, you know what you’re getting. So we want people to know what they’re getting with us, and a good signal of that for us is how we worship.
3. We fight about worship because it is a great distraction. People dropping out of your church body like flies? No problem, just start talking about the rightness/hipness of the worship services and you will receive instant justification, a plenary indulgence that will cover all of your sins. Don’t want to learn a bunch or continue to grow in your knowledge and faith? It’s probably easier to do that when your worship service upholds that decision. It’s a lot easier to argue over a hymn than it is to step into leadership and discipleship or to love your neighbor.
As good or as bad as our reasons for fighting about worship might be, they are missing the point. The point of worship is worship, the action and acknowledgement of God’s inestimable worth being given to overestimated human beings. It isn’t that this isn’t important enough to fight over, it most certainly is. However, we may also consider that it may be so important that it may even be too important to fight over. Maybe it’s not, maybe we do need to fight over this, but let’s not do it with logs in our own eyes. I know someone who said that was probably a bad idea.