Mountaintop Experiences: Pursuing Spiritual Highs

by David Miner

I am tired of them. I don’t want to go to them anymore. I won’t participate in them again. I don’t even want to hear from anyone else about them. What am I talking about? Some people enjoy them as worship experiences. Others value them as mountaintop experiences. I call them Christian pep rallies. The pep rallies that so many churches and Christian groups hold in the name of God. You know what I am talking about. These pep rallies often center around top name Christian singing groups, all of which have a strong high tenor or a strong high soprano, or both, whose voices are quite powerful. A song starts out in a normal key so most of the audience can sing along. But each verse transitions into a higher key so that, after four or five verses, only a handful of tenors and sopranos in the country can sing that high and that strong. And then the final chord of the final verse is held so high and so strong and so long that it raises the hair on your arms and gives you goose bumps. When the song breaks, it leaves you so excited that you absolutely MUST shout something. So you shout something spiritual like everyone else around you. And just then the group starts another verse in an even higher key. After a few of these songs, everyone is so emotionally jacked up that shouting spiritual words and phrases is almost impossible to resist. And then the worship leader starts a slow, soft song, accompanied by some sort of announcement that “the Holy Spirit is in this place.” The leader often says something like, “Raise your hands if you can feel the presence of God.” Of course, nearly everyone can feel SOMETHING, so nearly everyone raises their hands. And the worship leader leads the audience through several verses of that slow song so that everyone gets the chance to feel God. And often this whole process is repeated two or three times more, so everyone can go home claiming to have participated in such an awesome worship experience. But was this truly a worship experience?

19 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 4, 2016