Tuesday, February 17, 2009

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.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Quick, completely unrelated comment: I am not dead, but I took on two new children to watch last week, so most of my time was spent adjusting to that. Also, I have been out of town celebrating my first anniversary with Mr. Hubby. I will be back to blogging this week!

Alan Knox said...

Arthur,

So, how would following the regulative principle affect the way I worship God when I'm at work? What about the normative principle? How would these be different? (Again, I'm not being smarmy... I'm really interested in what you think about this.)

-Alan

Arthur Sido said...

Alan,

Believe me, you are not even in the ballpark of being smarmy. Take it from someone who has been described as having "sarcasm" as a spiritual gift.

Again I think we need to be more clear on what the regulative principle means. I think the distinction between the two, esp. as it relates to "normal" life is pretty thin. We do not have specific instructions on where to work, where to live, what to drive, what to eat but we are given general principles of what is and what is not pleasing to God.

If the RPW is narrowly interpeted as specific elements of worship, then I don't think it has much application in life outside of corporate worship. But I don't buy into that notion, and I am not sure that the labels regulative or normative are terribly useful at all.

Arthur Sido said...

April,

I was getting worried! I was going to get bethany to send out search parties into the hinterlands of Missouri.

Bethany W. said...

Arthur,
This is a great post. I completely agree that there is way too much distinction between what we do every day and when we "go to church." I think those times of gathering with other believers are extra special, and I look forward to them. But, I completely agree that we are to live a life of worship. It is not an easy thing to do.


April,
You have been missed.


Bethany