More on worship

I think I ended up being more narrowly focused in my post on worship than I intended. My point when I started thinking about this was not to throw mud at the RPW, but instead to question the more broad sense of worship in the church. I have long sought a more pure worship form in Sunday gatherings (which I defined as being more “Reformed”), and I am still sympathetic to that desire, but that is not the end all of the Christian worship experience. I am concerned by an attitude in myself that if we “go to church” on Sunday, we have fulfilled our worship quota for the week when nothing could be further from the truth. This is kind of my synopsis of what I am thinking:

I would say that we expect too much from corporate worship and not enough from worship outside of Sunday morning.

What does that mean?

One, but only one, expression of a life of worship is corporate worship. That statement is not to denigrate or diminish the value of corporate worship, but to recognize that culturally and traditionally we expect to see the pinnacle of our worship to take place in a church on Sunday morning but that may not be the reality and probably shouldn’t be. We may affirm the idea of constant worship being a part of our general lives, but we still use the term “worship” in reference to corporate church gathering and focus our worship attention on the corporate expressions which I believe has led to an unhealthy delineation between worship and “the rest of the week”.

The disconnect between Sunday morning piety and the other six days where we live differently are crippling to the church. We have far more opportunity for witness and service in the time we are not in “church” than we do when we are “at church”. Again, not to discount the value of the Word preached, corporate expressions of the Lord’s Supper, Sunday school, corporate prayer etc. but even if you are a really churchy type of person, you are still only spending 4-5 hours a week “in church”. I see far more opportunity to worship in family life than I do in organized church life, and in a more meaningful way.

I definitely still see a vital place in the Body of Christ for particular and purposeful gathering, even meeting in a “church” with a planned our service and order of worship.

But that is only part of the worship life of the Body of Christ. My hope in this conversation is to get us away from the dichotomy between “worship” and “the rest of life”. Not so that we diminish the value of corporate worship but that we magnify the worship exhibited in a life dedicated to glorifying God in all that we say and do.