J. Michael Jordan

Theology professor and Wesleyan pastor J. Michael Jordan believes worship shouldn’t imprison God within a particular emotional experience. In fact, he believes that so much he wrote a book about it: “Healing Worship in an Age of Anxiety.” In it, he critically analyzes historical evangelical preachers who have used anxiety as a tool for conversions, the negative repercussions of such a strategy and how authentic worship offers opportunities to release our anxiety to God. Join us as we dig deeper into some of those ideas today — plus other fascinating topics like Philly comfort foods, the spiritual power of empathy and the benefits of Christian communities that accept us as we are.

QUESTION #1: ACQUAINT

There’s much more to food than palate and preference. How does a go-to meal at your favorite hometown restaurant reveal the true you behind the web bio?

I’m a junk food legalist. I’m originally from the Philadelphia suburbs, but I now live in western New York. When I want to experience home, I want a cheesesteak, but I need it to resemble the Platonic ideal of a cheesesteak. I need to know the intentions and training of the person who is making it. I don’t trust anybody north of Allentown to advise me on cheesesteaks because they probably don’t know the rules — how the steak is chopped, the proper kind of chewy, crusty roll, the right toppings (bell peppers never go on a cheesesteak). Imposter cheesesteaks make me sad and angry.

Anytime my travels take me back to the Philadelphia area, I need a proper cheesesteak, preferably with Herr’s sour cream and onion potato chips and a black cherry Wishniak soda. It’s fine if I can eat with friends, but I also don’t mind eating alone and reconnecting with where I’m from and who I am. And only when I’ve eaten this can I really feel like I’ve come home.

When I can’t get home, I’ve learned to make passable versions of my Philly foods. So anytime the Eagles make the Super Bowl or the Phillies are in the World Series, I put together a grand feast of Philly foods. I invite friends over for roast pork sandwiches, cheesesteaks with garlicky greens, scrapple and Tastykakes. It’s my cholesterol-rich way of sharing my home and my heart with them. Sometimes, a friend will bring a salad or fresh fruit to offset the sodium onslaught — I know they mean well, but I skip it. Those days are for celebrating home.

QUESTION #2: REVEAL

We’ve all got quirky proclivities and out-of-the-way interests. So what are yours? What so-called “nonspiritual” activity (or activities) do you love engaging in, which also help you find essential spiritual renewal?

I’m a crossword puzzle fiend — I have done the New York Times crossword puzzle every day since December 24, 2017. There have been a few close calls with the streak, but it survives thanks to some tenacity and good luck. Crossword puzzles always relax me. I like clever wordplay and a discrete task I can accomplish, usually in 3-15 minutes. Crossword puzzles also let me use words just for fun. As a preacher, professor and writer, I always feel like my words are so serious. Crossword puzzles let me enjoy words for their own sake.

I also love to run, and I think I’m a little unusual in that I run to zone out — the more monotonous, the better. I don’t mind running on a treadmill or laps on a track. I also mostly dread other people inviting me to run with them. Even though I enjoy the company and am so thankful to be asked, I really like running by myself and letting thoughts and feelings surface that would otherwise stay buried.

I’m also a degenerate Philadelphia sports fan, although I’m not at all athletic. I’m solely into sports for the civil religion aspect. A highlight of my ministry was getting to speak at my beloved Philadelphia Eagles’ pregame chapel service before they played the Buffalo Bills in 2019. I talked about Henri Nouwen and the Prodigal Son and how growing up meant moving into the role of the father in the parable, who was generous with his two sons, both of whom were works in progress. Coach Doug Pederson talked with me afterward and told me, “Being a football coach means you have a lot of sons.” It was a beautiful glimpse into his heart. The Eagles proceeded to stomp the Bills, 31-13, and I, of course, take full credit. I’ll take the team’s call anytime they want me to come back to fire up the players with some Henri Nouwen.

QUESTION #3: CONFESS

Every superhero has a weakness. Every human, too. We’re just good at faking it. But who are we kidding? We’re broken and in this thing together. So what’s your kryptonite, and how do you hide it?

I have a deep worry that I will not be seen and loved for who I am, which leads me to have unreasonable relational expectations for other people. My friends and especially my wife, Jill, all know how easy it is for me to worry that I have somehow fallen out of their graces if they don’t say or do just the right thing to reassure me. Self-doubt creeps in pretty easily for me.

Sometimes, I feel guilty about this self-doubt because of the way it complicates others’ lives. But I’ve discovered that it’s really important for me to accept this instead of beat myself up for it. It’s just part of my story — and part of lots of people’s stories in the hyper-individualized, postmodern West. Because of my personality type, I feel this pain pretty deeply sometimes. I think it bothers lots of people, but many haven’t allowed themselves to feel it, or they don’t really have words to describe it. The fact I feel this deeply and can describe it well allows me to talk about it in my preaching and writing in ways that invite others to think about this in their own lives.

Of course, it’s also important for me to know when this feeling is taking over and spiraling out of control. Then, I have to find ways to remind myself that I am seen, known and loved more than I feel just then.

QUESTION #4: FIRE UP

Tell us about your toil. How are you investing your professional time right now? What’s your current obsession? And why should it be ours?

I’ve been curious about the role of emotions in worship for a long time. How are we supposed to feel when worshipping, and who told us we should feel that way? How are these feelings tied to an evangelical-industrial complex that, like any industry, benefits from loyal consumers? If you’re good at creating a feeling of deep internal resonance, then you can create quite a customer base among Christians by telling people that deep internal resonance is the Holy Spirit. But there’s a lot of collateral damage to doing that — it stunts our understanding of the Holy Spirit’s identity and role, it teaches contempt for ways of worship that do not create those feelings, it enshrines novelty so that we lose touch with the way habit and tradition shape us, and it makes those who do not experience those feelings wonder what’s wrong with them. No doubt, these questions take on a special urgency for me because of my time as a teenager when I couldn’t ever quite seem to feel what others felt in worship.

In the last decade, as I’ve worked with college students, I have also seen another bit of damage from that message: Young people really bifurcate their emotional and spiritual lives. They are learning from mental health professionals to accept their feelings and not to live as if their inner experience is an objective reality that has to govern their lives. Yet many young evangelicals go to churches where there are very clear messages about what feelings are and aren’t desirable and where one’s inner feelings about God take center stage and appear to be of utmost importance. Some young people live happily with a foot in both worlds, apparently unaware of the disconnect, but others simply assume that the church is not a safe or healthy place for them. This breaks me, and it’s why I teach worship and why I wrote “Worship in an Age of Anxiety.” In a way, I hope it’s a little piece of a much larger discussion about how to integrate mental health and spirituality conversations.

QUESTION #5: BOOST

Cashiers, CEOs, contractors or customer service reps, we all need grace flowing into us and back out into the world. How does the Holy Spirit invigorate your work? And how do you know it’s God when it happens?

I think my spiritual gifts are somehow related to empathy — a broad understanding of what others are thinking and feeling mixed with a compassionate desire for God’s best for them. There is a dollop of tragedy in empathy, though, because true empathy also acknowledges that there is something unique about every person’s suffering and that, while I might broadly understand, I can never actually experience another’s suffering in just the way they experience it. In my opinion, a truly empathetic person has to understand that. Without it, we may run over another’s experience without seeing and honoring the real person we are talking to and their uniqueness.

The Spirit invigorates my work when I’m putting that empathy to use, when I’m looking at the people I’m preaching to and seeing them with those eyes or when I’m preparing a sermon and I’m imagining the characters in the biblical text with that Spirit-led empathy. I even felt it when writing “Worship in an Age of Anxiety” — I felt like I was contending for a group of people who are largely ignored in an increasingly consumer-driven industry, and even more so, I felt like I was writing for the anxious self that lives in all of us that yearns for something more honest and humane in worship.

For me, that sometimes means working when I’m in significant emotional pain. I used to think I had to put that pain aside before writing or preaching, but I have learned that the experience of emotional pain sharpens my writing and tunes it to my empathetic vocation. The great danger, though, as with most vocations, is that I’ll use those gifts to take care of myself, which is more likely when I am in pain. So while sermons or writings can benefit from the clarity of a painful experience, I shouldn’t write or preach when it becomes a way to medicate or self-soothe.

QUESTION #6: inspire

Scripture and tradition beckon us into the rich and varied habits that open our hearts to the presence of God. So let us in. Which spiritual practice is working best for you right now?

Your question is causing me a little bit of agita because I have been trying to stop framing the spiritual life through the question of what “works for me.” I grew up in an evangelical subculture that venerated “devos” or “quiet time with God,” and I realize that has not totally abated. Don’t get me wrong — there’s a lot that’s good about it, and I encourage the young people I work with to have quiet time. But there’s so much guilt about it and so much expectation that it will somehow solve a lot of problems that my first instinct is to try to lay aside the question of what works and reframe the idea of practice altogether.

So from that angle, the most helpful spiritual practices are those that get me out of my head instead of further into it. For the last 18 months or so, I’ve been listening to the “Daily Prayer” podcast from the Church of England. These are about 20 minutes, morning and evening, every day. Most days, I listen to at least one of these; many days, I listen to both; and occasionally, I don’t listen at all. Sometimes, I stop everything I’m doing, go to a quiet room and light some incense as I listen. Much more often, I listen in the shower, while I’m running or while cooking dinner, and my attention is divided.

Would it be better to pay closer attention? Maybe. But since so much of my life is thinking about God and others, I’m learning that it’s OK to have this particular time with God that is less about judging and accomplishing and more about experiencing and refreshing. It’s good to have the words of God pouring over me for 20 or 40 minutes a day, even when my attention is divided, and it’s good to remember that my own little prayer life is just that — little. It’s subsumed in a much larger conversation that the whole church is having with God around the world and throughout time.

QUESTION #7: FOCUS

Looking backward, considering the full sweep of your unique faith journey and all you encountered along the way, what top three resources stand out to you? What changed the game and changed your heart? What radically altered your life? What changed your reality?

1) Christian liberal arts education — specifically at Houghton — changed my life.

It’s stunning to me how many people value Christian education or even home-school for their children up to age 18 and then simply believe their kids will continue to grow as Christians when they leave home and go to State U. or wherever Dave Ramsey has told them they can go to get educational credentials without debt.

My journey was just the opposite — public education while I still lived at home with my parents to help me process what I was experiencing and then a Christian context when I moved away, which gave me a whole host of mentors and guides to help me think more broadly. I don’t understand why Christian colleges are so undervalued by evangelicals today. Connect with a Christian college as a student, to audit a class or to go to concerts or lectures.

2) Henri Nouwen’s writing changed my life.

Everybody feels like Henri was writing just to them, and I’m no exception. He helped me understand a new way to process my gifts as a feeler and thinker and to find a place in the church and academy. Read Nouwen — start with “The Genesee Diary,” his diary of seven months when he lived as a kind of “temporary monk” at The Abbey of the Genesee, which is about 45 minutes from my home.

3) Discovering the Black church changed my life.

My seminary alma mater, Palmer Theological Seminary, was about evenly divided between Black and white students during my years there, with a few international students as well. I was struggling as a rising pastor because, in my majority white contexts, pastors always seemed to be either salespeople for a product that nobody wanted, event planners, nondescript chaplains or purpose-driven CEOs. My Black friends saw different possibilities for leadership than I saw: Pastors could be lead truth-tellers, community leaders and advocates. I have tried to incorporate this into my own leadership style.

We all have things we cling to to survive (or even thrive) in tough times — times like these! Name one resource you’re savoring and/or finding indispensable in this current season, and tell us what it’s doing for you.

I teach at a Christian college (Houghton University), and I spend my summers serving as a chaplain for the staff at a Christian camp in the Adirondack Mountains (CAMP-of-the-WOODS). I am drawn to these types of places because colleges and camps are evangelical experiments in Christian community. They are not churches and have a little more flexibility for hospitality and exploration than churches, but they are distinctly Christian and so rely on faithful leadership, worship and prayer, clear direction, and rules of belief and practice that set the parameters for that hospitality and exploration. In my work, I have the chance to engage with young people who are trying to figure things out who would never come to church (or at least not to my church), and I have clear Christian parameters and directions to work within. There is so much potential in places like this to extend the ministry of the church beyond its walls, but it’s so hard — constituents are always worried that you’re drifting left or drifting right.

I love this kind of community, and so there’s nothing I like more than to visit a more ancient experimental Christian community that complements the local church — The Abbey of the Genesee. I sink into the rhythms of prayer at all hours (3:30 a.m. is my favorite!) and benefit from the space to breathe, think, read and rest. And I leave with new inspiration for what my experimental communities can do by centering on Jesus and inviting others in. Finding a restful, non-anxious Christian community that could welcome me as I am and offer me the fruit of a life with Jesus has helped me immeasurably.

QUESTION #8: dream

God is continually stirring new things in each of us. So give us the scoop! What’s beginning to stir in you but not yet fully awakened? What can we expect from you in the future?

My big professional shift right now is moving into a season of more public ministry and influence through my book and other opportunities. This is weird for me because I am basically a Eugene Peterson type who values local accountability — and during my time serving in campus ministry, I was always fending off “speaking circuit” types who seemed to chase fame and wanted what seemed to be insane amounts of money to come and speak. I was very reluctant to write or enter a more public kind of ministry because I was afraid of valuing people I could not see over those I could see and knew I was called to serve. In some ways, I still am afraid of this.

But I also know, undoubtedly, that God has called me into writing this book and has given me other new opportunities, even like this interview. Saying yes to them is not saying yes to a theoretical life of chasing influence and fame — it is simply saying yes to an invitation to share the heart and mind that God has given me with people I don’t know yet. And it is also saying yes to meeting so many new partners in ministry! I’ve met lots of new people who are “my people” and have helped lift my horizons — so many authors and staff at IVP, new friends at Christianity Today, podcast hosts and others. All of these folks help me take these next steps into something new. I want to keep stepping into everything God has for me and wants to do through me. Another book? More academic and popular articles? Devotional writing? Yes, yes and yes. So stay tuned.

J. Michael Jordan brings up interesting points about anxiety and worship. His thoughts beg the question: Why do we worship? Is it to satisfy a desire for emotional stimulation? To meet the approval of someone else? To feel like a good person?

The Bible gives us one reason: “Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy mountain; for the Lord our God is holy!” (Psalm 99:9, ESV, emphasis added).

Before times of personal or corporate worship, it may help to search our hearts and ask, “Am I worshipping God simply because he is holy and worthy? Or do I have another motivation?”

As we continue to refine our motives, may we experience more of the kind of worship Jesus described: “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (John 4:24, ESV).