Raise Your Hands And Worship The Lord?

A loyal blogger here that goes by the screen name (CM or Christian Mom) wrote this in a previous thread: "New thread idea's for you Jeff. The raising of the hands as soon as RW or someone says's Lets Have Church!"

Well I thought that was a good idea for a topic. I was a song leader while with the NTCC and of course between each song everyone was prompted to raise their hands and worship the Lord. Service would always start out that way as well. I must have made that statement about 5000 or 10,000 times, "Why don't we raise our hand and worship God."

As time went on, I realized that the practice of raising our hands and hollering out to the Lord had become nothing more than a heartless ritual. With their hands raised, half the people didn't say anything and the other half said the same things more often than not, over and over. We would sing a song and then after the song, "raise your hands and worship God", and then we would sing another song and immediately after "raise your hands and worship God", and then after the preaching, "raise your hands and worship God", or the preacher would get physically exhausted because of all his yelling during the service and to give himself a break he would say, "raise your hands and worship the Lord".

What was really happening there folks? Was that practice truly spiritual or had it become merely a learned ritual? I would say the latter for certain. I would periodically glance at the congregation between songs and some folks would be just looking at me with their hands raised, others would have their hands raised with a grimace on their face like they were getting ready to give birth, others would be screaming and hollering the same words over and over and yet others would be doing absolutely nothing but looking very uncomfortable. I went to visit Barnes church in Mississippi on a few occasions and his congregation had essentially discontinued the practice of raising their hands between songs or before service. I'm not a big fan of Barnes or any other NTCC pastor for that matter, but I can understand why Barnes would have decided not to make the raising of hands a ritual in his church.

The point I'm making here is that many of the NTCC ritualistic practices were fake as the day is long. For example, NTCC pastors would stand up behind the pulpit and get all excited while screaming, spitting, blowing and crying service after service. It was more often than not nothing but a show. Mayers would do it constantly and Oberhauser didn't even start doing it until right before we left the NTCC. It was obvious that it wasn't easy for Oberhauser to get all excited but he would try his best to make it happen. To the left is good image depicting NTCC preachers as they got themselves all worked up behind the pulpit while quite often verbally abusing and mistreating their congregations. I'm confident that you can figure out what species of animal that is because there is no better animal and probably no better picture that could effectively and accurately depict an abusive NTCC preacher.

The fact is, the NTCC was very often just as fake and overly charismatic as the Pentecostal church that the NTCC regularly spoke against. That was certainly an example of the pot calling the kettle black.

Jeff