I’m the strange one, no really, I am. At church I’m on the rota for singing in the ‘worship band’, I enjoy music and the last time I was given the opportunity for leading the bit of the service called Extended Praise I chose about eight songs back-to-back. However, I don’t think the stuff we sing in church expresses me fully, there are a number of songs that I borderline hate, and quite a few that have been written for people with the ability to sing high notes.
Yesterday in home group we were talking about how our whole lives should be lived in worship to God. It was based on Romans 11:33 – 12:2, where we recognise that God is amazingly worthy of praise, beyond our understanding and because of this we should give our lives as a sacrifice.
Romans 11
33 Oh, how great are God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How impossible it is for us to understand his decisions and his ways!34 For who can know the Lord’s thoughts?
Who knows enough to give him advice?[l]
35 And who has given him so much
that he needs to pay it back?[m]36 For everything comes from him and exists by his power and is intended for his glory. All glory to him forever! Amen.
Romans 12
1 And so, dear brothers and sisters,[a] I plead with you to give your bodies to God because of all he has done for you. Let them be a living and holy sacrifice—the kind he will find acceptable. This is truly the way to worship him.[b] 2 Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.
Anyway, I ranted a bit about how annoyed I am that worship seems to be the thing that you do within the walls of the church, with special moments when the worship band (a term that I really hate) gets involved. I probably should have kept my mouth shut because we then proceeded to have a conversation based around music in church, which wasn’t really my point.
Two questions that I do have. Are we called to corporate worship? It’s a term that keeps coming up and I just don’t know. I know we’re called to meet together and worship God, but how has that become corporate worship?
Also, does ‘corporate’ mean us all doing the same thing? What I mean is, we all get together and sing, but usually only one person prays. Technically, one person praying would still be worship, which I’m OK about, but why can’t one person sing and we all listen and say ‘amen’ at the end – would that still count as corporate worship? (I don’t necessarily mean the bit about saying ‘amen’ at the end of someone singing – or maybe…)
Is one person praying and the rest listening really corporate worship? Yes, one person praying aloud and the others praying silently is. And one person singing and the rest worshipping God silently is also corporate worship – and I have seen and heard this happen. But one person singing and the others admiring or criticising the performance is not corporate worship. The difference is whether the congregation as a whole personally interacts with God, during whatever is going on, or simply watches and listens.
I think some of the answer to what you are asking here can be found in this quote which I’ve knicked from David Couchman’s blog.
Although the whole activity of Christians can be described as the service of God and they are engaged throughout their lives in worshipping him, yet this vocabulary is not applied in any specific way to Christian meetings. It is true that Christian meetings can be described from the outside as occasions for worshipping God and also that elements of service to God took place in them, but the remarkable fact is that Christian meetings are not said to take place specifically in order to worship God and the language of worship is not used as a means of referring to them or describing them. To sum up what goes on in a Christian meeting as being specifically for the purpose of ‘worship’ is without New Testament precedent. ‘Worship’ is not an umbrella-term for what goes on when Christians gather together.
http://www.facingthechallenge.org/wordpress/?p=137
I don’t think there is anything inherantly “right” about the type of meetings we have today. I’d guess the reasons we do it like we do are more tradition than bible.
In fact, I’d say there is as much unhelpful about them as good, mainly to do with the way following Jesus is modeled. I’d like to think we can be more holistic.
It’s interesting since we have stopped going to the service every Sunday. We get the distinct feeling that if we just turned up on Sunday and did nothing else that would be fine. But to get involved in lots of other things but not turn up on Sunday essentially equates to leaving the church.
I don’t think it matters how many sermons are preached saying that the whole of our lives matters, that the church is the people not the building etc. We don’t model it. And the way we act is so much more powerful than the way we talk.