Silence

I (Chip) am usually very quiet. My personality or disposition often results in people asking me, "Are you okay?" 90 percent of the time, I am doing well; just thinking and observing - listening.

When I am around people I am really comfortable with, however, I can get fairly loud (at least to my ears) and verbose. Sometimes I get to the end of a night with friends and realize how much I spoke and how little it seems I listened. I am usually hit with regret. Not that I said the wrong thing, but that I may have missed a moment - a profound or needed comment or statement from someone else in the midst of my continuous monologue. . . I will get back to this shortly.

Last weekend, I traveled to Lancaster, PA with some of the Shiloh Place team to lead worship for the Heart of Sonship Encounter at Sanctuary Vineyard Church. The first night as I was leading (sort of from the hip with a song pool, but no real planned order other than the first song), I reached a few points when I literally had to stop playing. Not because of pain in my hands or because of time or for lack of songs, but because the tangible presence of God was so thick in the room that it felt wrong to continue in that moment. So, I stopped playing. During these moments, I sensed that God was speaking to people in the room. I sensed that He was speaking to me. And then we would move into another song until the next one came along.

Moments of quiet reflection or silence in worship are not unusual or unwelcome experiences for me, but by the time we were heading home, I realized more than a couple of people thanked me for taking time for silence. Many said it is something they miss in a corporate (i.e. church) setting and some seemed to be asking me, “What’s your secret?”

It was then that I began to reflect and realize that many churches have become uncomfortable with silence in their services, much less worship times. I think there are many reasons for this - sometimes it does feel awkward, and sometimes people have had terrible encounters with silence they correlate to a mistake, a bad transition, or embarrassment. Some have been told that silence is “bad” or infers that you are unprepared. Some are uncomfortable with the state of their heart and don’t want to risk the quiet.

Silence in worship is like ending a statement in a conversation, and then awaiting a response from the other participant. Descriptors ranging from odd to downright rude would be fitting if we just spoke without ever taking a pause. I know God wants to speak to us, and if He has placed corporate worship as a priority, why wouldn’t He want to speak to His children in those moments? 

This is something I believe God wants to restore to those churches that have lost the ability to corporately wait in silence for Him. This is something I am thankful to be able to incorporate when we lead and it is my prayer and hope that churches become comfortable with silence again.

“For God alone my soul waits in silence; from Him comes my salvation.”

                                                                                                                 Psalm 62:1