Open Concept

I’m pretty hooked on home improvement shows—at least the good ones.

It started in earnest with Fixer Upper. I even think I’ve watched all of the preview shows on the Magnolia Network. Their tagline is “Time well spent,” which has been my experience.

My current fave show on HGTV is Home Town, in which this couple (a woodworker and designer) is restoring their small town in southern Mississippi one home at a time.

Regardless of the specific home show, there’s a huge trend. They take house after house and remove walls, especially between the kitchen and dining room or living room. It’s called “open concept.”

The thought seems to be that since the kitchen is often the hub of the home, rather than closing it off to the rest of the house, locked away in its own room, you’re able to connect and interact with others while cooking.

Thankfully, the 700 square foot apartment we’ve lived in for over a year (as a family of 8) has an open concept kitchen, dining, and living room. Otherwise, the tiny rooms would feel constricted and disconnected.

“Open-concept homes create interconnected spaces without barriers, so people can flow from one room to the next without feeling disconnected.” (pacesetterhomestexas.com)

It turns out we’ve done something awful in the church. It’s like we’ve taken a house of worship and divided it into 168 tiny rooms. And the worst part is that we only use one of the rooms.

One!

We leave the other 167 rooms largely empty, unused.

Hear the scripture in Psalm 113:3 to understand:
“From the rising of the sun to the place where it sets, the name of the LORD is to be praised.”

Or as The Passion Translation punctuates it, “From sunrise-brilliance to sunset-beauty, lift up his praise from dawn to dusk!”

We let the worship leader and the worship team lead us in worship at the worship service, singing worship music.

It’s like we’ve jammed our whole lives of worship into a tiny room on Sunday mornings. We live like the hour of worship is enough, and the rest of the 167 hours every week are in separate rooms.

We need to make our worship services last longer. Like 24-7 longer. Like we need to remodel our minds (Romans 12:2) and design open-concept lives that don’t limit our expressions of worship, our declaring the worth-ship of God to those beautiful moments on Sundays.

“Dear, dear [Worshipers], I can’t tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn’t fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren’t small, but you’re living them in a small way. I’m speaking as plainly as I can and with great affection. Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!” (2 Corinthians 6:11-13)

-Dave Helmuth
(purchase my book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)

Open Concept (Nº 289)