Reflections on Christian worship

Our Lord cares for the whole of this wounded and struggling world. His people should do the same.

Marguerite Shuster, PhD,is Harold John Ockenga Professor Emerita of Preaching and Theology, and senior professor of preaching and theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, United States.

The worship wars”: the phrase evokes images of generational conflict over styles of worship and, especially, music and impassioned references to the demands of a changing culture marked by increasingly uninterested youth and disaffiliated former church members. The discussion tends to assume that there is something very peculiar about our own time that demands radical and maybe unprecedented action. It seems to fail to recognize that debates over the virtues and hazards of extemporaneous versus liturgical forms, and the admissibility of this or that form of musical expression, go back centuries. Indeed, the Pauline epistles make plain enough that even the early church was not of a single mind about, say, what spiritual gifts might appropriately be exercised in corporate worship (note, for example, 1 Cor. 12–14). “Worship wars” are not new news!

Since, though, worship is, or should be, determinative of our whole lives as Christians, perhaps we can take a step back from these contemporary debates and ask ourselves more fundamental questions about what we think we are doing, or should be doing, when we gather together as a worshiping community. A worshiping community: when we worship, we intend to come together before a holy, loving God to offer our reverent devotion. We might rightly hope to be met and addressed by God and expect to be called to respond with hearts and minds and lives, both in the service itself and when we go out into the world. We need always to remember, however, that nothing of eternal worth will take place if God’s Spirit does not enable it. We may be energized and inspired, but this is not a venue for motivational speech enabling a better grip on our bootstraps. We may be instructed, but this is not mere lecturing where the goal is a firmer grasp of facts and principles. We may be helped in the living of our lives, but the service is not an embodied advice column. We may experience emotional healing, but much more is at stake than pop psychology can offer. We properly experience fellowship, but not on the same grounds as those provided by a service club or a gathering of friends with like interests. We may, we hope, appreciate the quality of the sermon and the music, but the service is not fundamentally a performance to be rewarded by applause. In short, while our worship may include features of any of these experiences, it is destroyed if it is, one way or another, reduced to them.

How, then, might worship be shaped so that the primary focus remains on our Lord’s address to us and on appropriate, reverent response on the part of the congregation? These two characteristics are so woven together that they cannot be torn apart in the service itself, but we can separate them for the purposes of discussion and can look at common (not exclusive or exhaustive) components of each.

God’s Word to us

Let us take first, then, God’s Word to us. Beginning at the beginning, it is fitting that the service start with a biblically shaped call to worship, making clear by its very form and content what those gathered are there to do and are called to do by God Himself. God is the Initiator. Contrast the increasingly common “good morning” opening with a sufficiently loud response sometimes extracted by main force from the congregation—an opening that, at best, taps into simply human fellowship but has no reference to God at all and fails altogether to set a worshipful and attentive tone. At best, a casual, secular welcome can fit a service where announcements and such precede the real beginning of worship, though a sharp shift in emotional tone can still be difficult; and a human welcome is not a manifestation of God’s Word to us.

A call to confession, with the prayer (which is itself part of our response to God) followed by a biblically framed assurance of pardon, may suitably come early in the service, in order that we may be reminded of who we are as needy sinners forgiven and redeemed by a gracious Lord. The impact of the assurance is greater when the worship leader speaks it in the second person to the congregation than when we tacitly forgive ourselves. True, appropriation, perhaps indicated by an “amen” or the “Gloria Patri” or a suitable chorus, is good; but we need to hear again and again from outside of ourselves what we may know but have trouble believing. Human words really can be an important means of grace. Some leaders will prefer to state the assurance conditionally (e.g., “if you have truly confessed your sins”) as a way of avoiding cheapening God’s grace in a culture more prone to defend moral and spiritual failures than to grieve them.

The reading of Scripture—good solid chunks of it, generally from both testaments, and preferably passages that inform one another—can hardly be overemphasized, not least given the vast biblical ignorance of too many congregants. Many will have their only exposure to Scripture in the service of worship. Furthermore, Scripture properly informs and judges the service as a whole. The reader needs to rehearse the readings, not to provide a “dramatic reading” that calls attention to itself but, to read accurately and with feeling so that the living character of God’s Word comes through. Longer readings must not be rushed through to save time, which conveys the impression that the reading is not really very important.

Of course, we often think especially of the sermon when we consider God’s Word to us in the service. Let it be indeed God’s Word to us and not an address merely jumping off from a text to arrive at a tear-jerking presentation of an especially good anecdote or a view of the preacher’s personal experiences and agenda. Wherever it falls on the wide spectrum between the word-byword exegetical and the topical, there should be no possible question that it is firmly grounded in Scripture. Over time, it properly ranges over the whole body of biblical revelation. Always, though—somehow, somewhere—the gospel (good news) needs to appear, for who knows when this will be the very last chance someone in attendance will have to hear it. And, of course, suitable connections of biblical truth to daily life must be made, and the whole presented coherently and attractively, if hearers are not to suppose that the very thought of a sermon is very bad news indeed. Make no mistake: preaching well takes far more preparation time than most preachers regularly give.

Beware of the “children’s sermon”! Not that having one is a bad thing, but it threatens to be a real hotbed of heresy that is often well remembered and taken to heart by adults as well as children in the congregation because of its clear, graphical nature. For instance, the eggshell/egg-yolk/egg-white analogy for the Trinity teaches tritheism; the ice/water/water-vapor analogy teaches modalism. Both of these takes on the Trinity depart seriously from orthodox faith.

The benediction conveys God’s Word of blessing. While it may be preceded by a charge, it is not itself instruction or a demand but a gift of grace. Most congregants’ lives are in one way or another hard. They need strength for the journey as they are sent out—not just additional burdens to carry.

Baptism and the Lord’s Supper may serve as a transition between discussion of God’s Word to us and our response. Whether we see them most fundamentally as indeed God’s Word to us—the Word made visible—or as our response to the Lord’s explicit commands to practice them depends on whether we come from a sacramental tradition that emphasizes grace (somehow) actually conveyed by them or from a tradition that sees them as ordinances, in which adherents seek faithfully to be obedient to Christ’s commands. Very few traditions, in any case, do not observe them at all. At the very least, they give a bodily, sensory experience of deep truths of our faith, engaging us as whole persons. Their deep symbolism and communal character should be clear in their observance, never cheapened or sentimentalized by, say, a coke-andpizza Communion service for the youth group, or a couple’s romantic bite of leftover roll and sip of wine at the close of a candlelit dinner. We sense that we are dealing with holy things when we recognize our resistance to playing Ping-Pong on the Communion table or putting goldfish in the baptismal font or pool.

Our response to God’s Word

When we turn to our response to God’s Word, we might think particularly of prayer, music, and the giving of tithes and offerings—the first two usually scattered throughout the service. Some traditions put heavy emphasis on the simple saying of the “amen” by the congregation; others may be characterized by a vigorous “call and response” style. One way or another, whether formally or informally, worshipers are properly participants in the service, not mere observers.

Prayer—including presenting our sins and needs, our praise and thanksgiving, to God—has a sort of primacy: we need to speak to God, and he has taught us to do so in the Lord’s Prayer (used regularly by most congregations). The prayer of confession, by contrast, has fallen on rather hard times, with many worship leaders fearing that reference to sin will be off-putting to seekers. Yet to fail to recognize our desperate need for redemption is to make a mockery of the whole of what Christ has done for us. Thus, if a printed, unison prayer of confession is used, it properly focuses on real sins of omission and commission—not on vaguely stated oversights, stresses, and needs for growth that imply we really deserve to be excused for understandable missteps—rather than the need for forgiveness.

When time for private confession is given, the leader should give enough time, most of us have more sins than the leader’s tolerance for silence accommodates. Pastoral prayers naturally and properly take up the particular needs of the local congregation but should not stop there. Christ’s kingdom is not a merely local one, and Christ’s followers need to pray for concerns beyond their own. Our Lord cares for the whole of this wounded and struggling world. His people should do the same. How we pray will tell us much about our understanding of God and of how God does and does not work in the world and in our lives. Examining our prayers could lead us to examine not just our theology but the whole of our practical faith.

Music is a famously common sticking point, given the variety of musical tastes. It should go without saying that musical forms, including instruments employed, should be appropriate to the culture, not imported from outside as if forms themselves were normative. Still, some expressions are more suitable for worship than others. One Christian college reportedly has a rule that if a song could just as well be sung to one’s boyfriend or girlfriend as to Jesus it does not belong in chapel. The point, of course, is where the worshipers’ attention is actually likely to be drawn, whatever their pious intentions might be. But especially important is what the words of the song or hymn teach theologically. Like children’s sermons, lyrics can be a hotbed of heresy, and words linked to music are especially well embedded in our consciousness. In fact, since they utilize a different part of the brain than spoken language, they may remain accessible to those suffering from brain injury or dementia. We should strive to make sure that what sticks so well is worth keeping! Early on (mid-third century) the orthodox sought to suppress the writing of new compositions because heretics were so effectively communicating their beliefs through hymnody. Similarly, Martin Luther famously valued the hymnal second only to the Bible and held that he would be glad to let his theological opponents preach the sermons if he could write the hymns. Today, one may, upon close theological inspection, judge that occasional verses even of established hymns might better be omitted; and if musicians are not well trained theologically, their choices of songs and choruses might best be reviewed by those who are. The catchier the tune, the worse it is if the meaning it carries subtly or blatantly misrepresents what the Bible teaches. And while truly unskillful musicians disrupt everyone’s worship, if a wonderful choir or band supplants the song God asks from His people (Col. 3:16), something still more serious has occurred.

Turning to the offering, it is curious indeed that we might sing piously, with Isaac Watts, “All that we have is thine alone, / A trust, O Lord, from thee,” and stick on the actual contribution of our tithes and gifts. Watts’s theological point, not some more self-serving“health and wealth” philosophy, rightly grounds our giving. Thus, no embarrassment need attend the passing of the plate and the presentation of the offering to the worship leader, though of course manipulation of any kind is altogether out of place, and churches must be scrupulous and transparent in their handling of finances. Jesus did not hesitate regularly to put devotion to God and devotion to money as alternatives. Faithful stewardship is not a merely optional Christian grace, and Christians’ relationship to money deserves more attention than it generally gets.

Conclusion

In short, if our worship, in lifting our hearts to God and being instructed by Him, does not shape our entire lives, something has gone seriously wrong—with our worship and lives. An ancient Latin phrase, lex orandi, lex credendi, usually translated “the law of prayer is the law of faith,” teaches us that what we do drives what we think: our practices in worship end up influencing our doctrine, what we believe. And what we believe must surely drive our behavior. If it does not, we might rightly ask whether the belief itself has roots. It follows that what we do on our day of worship is of enormous importance. It deserves the most careful theological thought, the most careful planning. The idea is not that it must be rigidly scripted (though liturgical traditions have much of worth and beauty to offer) but that it be genuinely, intentionally focused on listening to God and responding to Him, rather than being seduced by secular agendas of whatever sort. Our concern is not attracting an audience but nurturing faithful disciples who need to gather together as Christ’s body (Heb. 10:24, 25) and express their love of the Lord. If the body is alive—attentive to the Lord, engaged with one another and the world, full of praise and selfsacrifice and genuine integrity—the rest will take care of itself


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Marguerite Shuster, PhD,is Harold John Ockenga Professor Emerita of Preaching and Theology, and senior professor of preaching and theology, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California, United States.

July 2016

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