Why We Worship the Way We Do…
We are two weeks into a 4 week class on Worship which we’re teaching on Sunday mornings before our Sabbath Worship at Trinity Church Denver. Below is a summary of what we covered week one.
One of the great gifts of our modern age is that I can be sitting in my living room having a conversation with Dr. David Rainbow, historian extraordinaire, and when he suddenly mentions an obscure but fascinating chapter in a book on Russian demographic changes in the late 19th Century and how that impacted religious and political sensibilities, I can quickly find the book (which I now have to read) and have it delivered to my house before 7am. If a few extra folks show up to watch the football game on a Saturday, I can tap a few buttons on a screen and have an additional pizza delivered before halftime. Modern conveniences abound in a market economy designed cater to our desires and needs. This is all well and good in so far as it goes. There is, however, a not so subtle danger in all of this modern convenience. I'll illustrate it this way:
We have a cat and we have a dog. We feed both animals. We clean up after both animals. We give the occasional treat to both animals. Our dog responds with eager affection. The service we provide our aging dog cultivates, if I can use the expression, a kind of divine attribution in him towards us. In the language of the meme, "The humans feed me, they walk me, they pick up after me, they must be gods." Our cat is the opposite. Should we leave her food bowl unfilled or alter any of her routines, she expresses a general irritation that comes in various feline forms. "They feed me, they clean up after me, they provide me a place to sun, I must be god."
The whole structure of modern society and it's almost complete orientation towards our comfort, efficiency and convenience is designed to make us think like dogs or cats, and subsequently to approach God in the same way. Either we think God exists primarily to meet our emotional and physical needs, or we subtly begin to think that we're God and things in our world exist for our comfort. This way of approaching the world has seeped into the church's approach to worship as well. Music that is designed around our tastes and our good feelings. A "liturgy" that is organized around efficiency and what I might find personally gratifying. When we turn to the Scriptures we find an entirely different set of concerns.
We don't simply find in the Bible a primary concern for God's pleasure and glory in worship, we find an exclusive focus on God's pleasure and glory in worship. There is almost no regard for what man wants or intends in worship and the highest precision in attending to God's commands in how we ought to approach Him. The worship of the church is to be defined by God - God's word, God's commands, God's character - the whole of worship is to be oriented towards Him.
Another obstacle in our approach to worship is the almost complete loss of covenantal categories in our worship. We approach the world as an individual, at best, as a collection of individuals. When we go to church this means that the questions I am asking in evaluating the worship of that church is largely focused on how the service will benefit me and those I'm with. Are my kids individually getting a good experience? Will my wife like the preaching? We have a hard time thinking in categories that are not focused on our own individual benefit, let alone in thinking of our selves belonging to a covenant family or belonging to a covenant community called the church. Modern churches have followed suit with programs designed to maximize each individual's benefit. Kids programming with activities and teaching that is age-appropriate. We separate families during worship so that each individual can efficiently benefit from their time on a Sunday. But again, the focus is not on God's pleasure and God's glory, but neither is it on the collective good of the covenant community and the covenant family.
The most fundamental things we are committed at Trinity Denver is to worship together for God's good pleasure and according to God's instructions in how that worship is to be done. This is the most important task that has been given to us by God. It is, truly, what we were made for. Such worship will always take into account a robust and biblical anthropology. We are not lone individuals gathering in a room for worship. We are households reconstituted as the church of the living God, or as Paul says in Ephesians 3 - the temple of the living God - being built together as living stones to serve Him. This means we don't separate into various age groups when we gather for worship. This means we aren't coming together looking for some new personal development scheme. We gather, together, in the presence of God and for the good pleasure of God. We gather as a people to glorify God. This is the "Why" behind the decisions we make when it comes to our Sunday worship. This is why our children join us for worship. This is why we sing the way we sing and the songs that we sing. This is why the Word features so prominently in every part of our service. This is why our liturgy is shaped the way it is.
Tomorrow, we'll talk about that liturgy...