Thanks for the thoughts posted and emailed to me yesterday.
Perhaps yesterday's post on worship will make more sense if we go back to the beginning.
Question: Why did we even start a new church?
Answer: Connections is a church for people who are not into church.
This would be a preposterous purpose statement if we were not utterly convinced that all people need God (Rom 3:23). That all people need to know God as revealed through Jesus Christ (Rom 6:23). That God loves people so much that he desires that all should know Him (2 Peter 3:9). And that people will come to know Him through worship.
That said, we can affirm the following about worshiping God:
First, worship, and the church, exist for the glory of God. We worship God because He is worthy!
Second, let’s ask ourselves, “What brings God the most glory?” I think the answer is people- God desires more people worshiping Him. So a worship service that brings God glory is a worship service where lives are surrendered to God. This happens by the power of the Holy Spirit and through the proclamation of the gospel.
All Christians have a strongly held opinion on worship. They have a preference for style and format. But not all Christians are commitment to sacrificing themselves to improve a worship service and structure it to be more attractive for those not already into church.
That may be the single most important difference between Connections and most other churches: Our most committed folks are most committed to thinking about what others want/need, instead of what they want or feel they need.
How would you structure a worship service that remains faithful to the purpose of glorifying God and faithful to the mission of reaching out to the "unchurched?"
Do those 2 things happen separately, or is the whole point of being a church bringing those 2 seemingly different goals together?
I think a common mistake is failing to differentiate between "praise" and "worship." In as few words as possible, I'd describe praise as a selfless act of a believer, directed towards God. That's not to say a non-believer can't praise God, but that a time dedicated to praise needs to be with the heart of the believer in mind, more so than the heart of a non-believer.
ReplyDeleteI see this as being different from worship. We often refer to "praise time" as "worship" as though they are the same. Praise is a form of worship. Witnessing is a form of worship. Meditation, bible study, teaching, evangelizing, fellowship, our jobs, our games, our daily activities... all of these CAN be forms of worship. (They aren't always, but they can be.) We can worship God in our work, by doing what scripture calls us to do in our work: to work for our employers as though we were working for God. And that holds true everywhere in our lives.
But when we meet on Sunday, are we meeting to worship, to praise, or to do both? Often I think that referring to the Sunday service as the worship service, tends to convey the message that worship only happens there and then. Similarly, holding a praise service suggests praise can only happen there and then. I think a lot of why this get confusing for so many people, and why we feel like we need to adjust our services to suit our culture so much, is because we (and I'm referring to we meaning the church in general) tend to see the Sunday service as the primary church event, so we try to do everything for everyone there.
In our specific case, it tends to be the service and the home groups (they have equal value, and this is great), yet for the unchurched, the Sunday service becomes the only real point of connection. But whose fault is that? Not theirs. It's our faults for failing to honor God everywhere, and to bring Christ to the world. For failing to worship and praise God in our work, in our activities, in our games, and so forth. And then we (church in general) tend to compensate for our laziness so to speak, by structuring a Sunday service in such a way that we expect the service to do all the "dirty work" for us. We expect the service to evangelize, teach, praise, preach, witness, and so forth, when it reality, that's our job.
So it begs the questions... why are we meeting? Why do we meet on Sunday mornings? Why are we trying to cram 168 hours worth of worshiping into a 1-hour session? Why are we trying to praise, preach, teach, learn, evangelize, and witness in a single hour? The early church met daily to accomplish those goals. Maybe we just try to do too much as a collective, and not enough in smaller groups.