What is "Worship"?

-
"All of life is worship"

 I've heard it so many times I couldn't count it. It is true that every moment of our lives is to be spent glorifying and honouring God, but when I hear this I want to ask a follow up question.

"Why, then, should Christians gather for worship?"

I can sing worship songs on my own, read and interpret the Bible on my own, pray on my own and do much of what occurs in the communal gathering on my own. So why should I gather with other Christians for communal worship? 

Unfortunately, many times when people say "all of life is worship" they are actually lessening the importance of communal worship, hence my follow up question. This occurs either intentionally, or unintentionally, but the lessening of it does happen nonetheless. This is just one more negative consequence of the individualism that is so rampant in much of Western society. 

This is a really important question, much more important than I think most evangelicals would consider it to be. It comes down to defining what we mean by worship, and specifically the communal gathering for the purpose of worshipping together. Brent Peterson, in his new publication Created to Worship, has provided what I think is a breathtaking definition of communal worship. There is much in this that I love and I think it  lays some helpful groundwork for further exploration on this topic; something I plan to do here in coming weeks and months. For now, I end with his definition.
Christian communal worship is the glorification of God and the sanctification of humanity as a divine-human event where God offers transformation and healing to help people become more fully what God created them to be and do. God breathes (inhales) and gathers in individual Christians to heal, transform, and renew them as the body of Christ to breathe (exhale) them out to continue the ministry of the incarnation that participates in the kingdom of God more fully coming. The consummation of the kingdom will come and God will be all in all.[1]



[1] Brent D. Peterson, Created to Worship: God's Invitation to Be Fully Human (Kansas City: Beacon Hill Press, 2012), 11.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Inerrent, Infallible, Inspired... Interpreted?

-
Image
I love Chopin. I love listening to his music, but I especially love playing his music. His Nocturnes in particular. There's something very satisfying about playing Chopin. He was a pianist, and every piece of music he wrote was for the piano, and so he "gets" what it's like to sit at a piano and wrestle with those 88 keys in front of you. He was a genius who knew how to get the most out of this instrument, and to challenge those who would want to call themselves a pianist (ever tried playing 12 notes at once with 10 fingers?). Perhaps what I like best, though, is the opportunity that playing Chopin gives me to really express myself through the music. It's like nothing else that I know and taps right into the depths of my emotions and indeed my soul. For me, it's very much a kind of prayer to play this music. Anyone who plays a musical instrument well understands (or should understand) that it's so much more than just the notes on the page. In fact, the b...
Read more

Sermon: Mark 1:29-39

-
Image
  Do you think you can keep a secret? I have an important secret. A secret so powerful that it will change your life forever. Can you keep a secret? You probably already know this secret, but I want to make sure you know it. Really know it. Can you keep a secret? Here’s the secret. Jesus Christ is the Son of God. It’s a good secret isn’t it? Do you know it? I mean really know it? Mark shares this secret at the start of his gospel account. “The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (1:1). Mark wants to make sure you know this secret too. There is general agreement that Mark is the earliest of the four gospel accounts. It bears so many similarities to Matthew and Luke that scholars also agree that those other authors used Mark as a source for their own accounts. More recently, it’s been suggested that Mark wasn’t written to be read but rather to be performed. That makes sense given only a few people were actually able to read anyway. Mark is short, sharp, and...
Read more

An end and a beginning...

-
Image
At about 4:30pm on New Year's Eve (2023), I submitted my PhD thesis. It was a quiet moment, with my wife by my side. It was a simple moment, with only an email disappearing off my screen to confirm the disappearance of year's of work into the hands of the examiners - no printed and bound copies, no physical copies of any kind. Just a PDF attached to an email. Gone.  It was the end of years of work, struggle, and wrestling. Throughout my candidature, I encountered many doubts and fears. Was my idea good enough? Was I being heretical? Was my idea new enough? Could I do this? Then there was the inevitable imposter's syndrome and writer's block. Wow, did I struggle with these two. There were too many times to count when I sat at my computer with barely more than a paragraph added to a document because I couldn't get the ideas out of my head and onto the page. This, of course, fed the idea that someone was going to figure out that I really didn't know what I was doin...
Read more