Yesterday’s post about worship and my recent appointment to a second congregation has me thinking about the elements of authentic Christian worship on the Lord’s Day.
Hoyt Hickman’s Worshiping with United Methodists has an early chapter that attempts to answer the basic question: What is Christian worship?
His answer includes five basic principles of worship:
God’s word is primary: Scripture is the primary way we discern who God is. Reading, proclaiming, and responding to Scripture are at the heart of worship. Using the words of Scripture deepens worship.
Active congregational participation is crucial: As the Word of God is heard in the congregation, the congregation is called to response. People need to be able to share of themselves and their gifts in worship.
Spontaneity and order are both important: Rigidity and chaos are both harmful.
Worship should be relevant and inclusive: All are called to worship, so all should find points of connection to the service.
Worship is communion: It brings together what was separate into one. It unites God with humans. It ties humans to each other. (Here he stresses Communion as a regular centerpiece of worship.)
These principles do provide food for thought, but they are a long way from an actual order of worship. Our United Methodist Book of Worship, of course, provides a pattern for worship with ample discussion of its parts. But in order to discern whether the worship services I lead are serving their purpose, I am trying to get beyond liturgical legalism and understand what it is worship is meant to do and be.
What are your thoughts?
It is not liturgical legalism to accept and use the liturgy of this Church.
Rather we call ourselves to use it. See Article XXII of the Articles of Religion.
At its heart, worship is sacrifice, our communal offering of ourselves, our souls and bodies, to God. Our ritual represents the ways we have communally discerned to do that in continuity with the whole church throughout its history.
Believe me, Taylor, I understand that. But if I cannot explain or articulate the reasons, then it comes across as legalism. The book says it. That’s why we do it. So, I’m looking for more understanding.
And, in point of fact, most UM churches I have been in do not consistently follow the basic pattern. Most of the “reasons” for this have more to do with inertia and habit than ideas about the meaning of worship, but if I am going to engage in conversations about such things, then it is incumbent on me to do more than wave a Book of Worship at people — especially in a denomination where “following the rules” is, to say the least, not a point of great emphasis.
I don’t think individual blogs or online responses will generate what you are seeking. But the front matter of The Book of Worship, Hoyt Hickman’s book, and the book The Worship Resources of The United Methodist Hymnal do answer these questions in a more extensive way. These are provided to help pastors and congregations teach and learn our ways of worship along with our ritual and our sacramental theology in By Water and the Spirit and This Holy Mystery.
Well, I have hope that conversation will illuminate some things. I appreciate the homework list. As you may have discerned, I’ve been reading Hickman’s book again.
I find social media conversations help my reading, so I like to do both at the same time.
You may also find the Alban book, The Work of the People, helpful.
I’m a little funny about calling what we do sacrifice, probably because my blog is called Mercy Not Sacrifice and I’ve got the book of Hebrews ringing in my head about Christ being the one-time all-sufficient sacrifice. And we don’t really have anything to offer since what we are and have is already God’s. Christ makes the sacrifice that we receive. We come to be incorporated into His sacrifice, but the gift that is offered comes from Him. I’ve been really struggling with this lately because it’s stewardship season. I don’t like the way that people talk as if it’s magnanimous to tithe; it’s just obedience.
John, another good resource is Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down by Marva Dawn. If there is a besetting sin in worship today it is anthropocentrism, a focus on us and our needs rather than God and God’s glory. Dawn names the vapidity of much that passes for worship in some striking and helpful ways. As Leander Keck points out in The Church Confident, much worship renewal is not much more than the replacement of the ossified with the trivial.
And Hickman is right, the Eucharist needs to be returned to its rightful place at the center of our worship. Pastors who will not do this should be tarred and feathered.
What we need to do at next General Conference is BAN JOYS AND CONCERNS FROM EVERY METHODIST CHURCH FOR THE REST OF TIME.
I think that the key comes from what the congregation says after the service. Did the way the service went, its music, its words, the message, the environment, speak to that people in such a way that they came to know God just a little bit better.
This is the key. Connectional ministry has been put more in the hands of the local church down here, (S. Carolina) We are workig towards finding keys to what the people would be more blessed in service, especially music venues. It is a work in progress, the Lectionary has been in use down here for a long time and the older folks enjoy and are used to its format. The young people not so much. So again we are in transition.
To me, the Lectionary are the three readings plus the psalter/psalm. When I am planning a particular worship service, I start from there. The music, the prayers, and the message all come from the Lectionary readings. While traditional music and scripture translations may work for some, it doesn’t work for others. I have been using the Message as the basis for my scripture readings, simply because it is a more modern translation.
I am not saying that we have to cater to the tastes of a particular generation but what is said and done has to be more that what has always been done. Don’t sing a song because one’s grandmother sang that song; sing it because it means something to the people and to the message. If the message focuses on something that happened two thousand years ago, it is going to be out-of-date. But if what the scriptures say relates to what is happening outside the doors of the church today, then that is where the message must go.
I would also add that we need to think about the order of the worship. Right now, if we are not doing communion, we end the service with the offering. That is hardly the way to have people answer the call to follow Christ. If given half the chance, I use the pre-1968 order of worship where the message/sermon closes the service and you get a chance to call the people to respond with more than their finances.
The order in the hymnal without communion includes a call to discipleship following the sermon, then prayers and acts if thanksgiving including an offering, then a robust act of sending. So the offering is not intended to be the immediate response to the sermon nor the final act of worship before dismissal.
Will Willimon’s With Glad and Generous Hearts is an excellent commentary on our current order.
Couple of things –
I will have to get a copy of Willmon’s book.
I will admit that I missed that section of the order of worship. Admittedly I am more comfortable with services that end with the sermon, in part because of how I was raised and in part because, in my own mind, I see the call as the beginning of the ministry. If I were not doing communion, I do not want anything to distract from that call.
Now, having said that, I wonder how many pastors know how to make an altar call as opposed to an invitation to discipleship. I know that when I am scheduled to go somewhere as a lay speaker I have never seen such an invitation in their order of worship.
Also, as I look at the section in the Book of Worship that deals with the response to the word, I don’t read the Invitation to Christian Discipleship as an altar call.
And this leads me back to what I said at the beginning – if you make a call to the people to come to the altar and accept Christ and then you do something else, you totally ruin the moment. I have seen a United Methodist pastor do just that, make an altar call, complete with the appropriate music, and then totally ruin the moment because he had to deal with the offering.
If worship is to bring us to God, then we have to think about the path we take.
Tony, my experience as well is that it is hard to the Word and Table order of worship well when you do not have the table (Communion) that day. I’ve had members of congregations say exactly what you have said here about the offering being the last thing they do before they head out the doors.
When the service is built around two big tent poles (Word and Table) and one of those is missing, the service does kind of sag at one end.
Don’t let poor practice by others deter you from better practice yourself!
You’d be exactly right about the possibility of ruining the flow if you went from “altar call” (or however a call to discipleship may be embodied) to offering. Huge mistake.
So the question becomes, what DOES make sense in terms of flow after a sermon-altar call sequence? Prayers of the people might make a lot of sense just then. Then from those prayers, a time of thanksgiving. Then from that time of thanksgiving, including thanksgiving for the work the Spirit is doing in the lives of those who responded and offering integrated into this as a sign of our thanksgiving. And then sending.
It’s important as we consider the altar call, however, to remember that Wesley’s altar calls were designed to lead people to join a trial class meeting. Why? Because “there is no religion but social religion, no holiness but social holiness.” Whatever was begun in the “crisis of decision” is likely to be stillborn or experience “spiritual infant mortality” if these persons are not immediately connected to a community that will sustain and challenge what has been begun to continue. See my piece on this, here: http://emergingumc.blogspot.com/2010/11/end-spiritual-infant-mortality.html
It would appear that I replying to myself but I wanted to reply to Taylor’s comment about practices. My response is “Altar Call – The Rebel Version” @ http://heartontheleft.wordpress.com/2012/11/06/altar-call-the-rebel-version/
I really think we need to get back to weekly communion. Here’s the only challenge with it. If you do the full blown Word and Table liturgy, it takes 20 minutes so the sermon is going to be hardly a 10 minute meditation which is an amount of time in which I have never been able to say much of anything. In our traditional worship service, monthly communion Sunday is always rushed and feels less worshipful than the other Sundays because there’s so much anxiety about getting done with the first service with enough time for the parking lot to be empty enough for people arriving for the second service.
At our contemporary worship service, we do weekly communion. I preach about 20 minutes and then celebrate. Before the epiclesis, I connect what I preached to the Table but without the entirety of the Great Thanksgiving. I think connecting the message and table is more important than sticking with the Sursum Corda, but I imagine that my brother Taylor would disagree.
I do disagree, Morgan, because our teaching does. The Eucharist is not messaging to the people, but the sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving by the people. If this is taking 20 minutes, perhaps you need to add stations. The entire Great Thanksgiving can be done and even sung in less than 5 minutes.
Yeah that really rubs me the wrong way theologically. Jesus is the sacrifice. We have nothing to offer Him that isn’t already His. Perhaps there is a semantic difference going on here, but to my understanding, communion serves the purpose of incorporating us into the body of Christ, which is His sacrifice to us. It is where you “become what you eat,” as Augustine says. I’m very suspicious of a Pharisaic kind of piety that’s at play when we pretend not to be receiving anything from God in worship but instead “doing it all for His glory, etc.” Help me to understand what you mean by sacrifice. It’s a stumbling block for me because Jesus quotes Hosea 6:6 twice in Matthew, “I desire mercy not sacrifice,” and Hebrews 10:14 says, “For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.” I’m not trying to be an obnoxious proof-texter. I’m just really bothered by the notion of presuming to give a gift to God.
“And so we offer ourselves in praise and thanksgiving in union with Christ’s offering for us.”
I don’t hear “sacrifice” when I hear that. Christ offers the sacrifice, our eucharisto is only the acceptance of that sacrifice. The Catholics say, “It is our duty and our salvation always and everywhere to give our thanks to you, our Father almighty.” Thanksgiving is salvation not because God rewards us for “giving up” something; thanksgiving is salvation because it’s also already the pistis that surrenders to God and accepts the gift of grace. I’m very suspicious of the supposed dichotomy between theocentrism and anthropocentrism. It seems like a ruse to me. Even though we are worshiping God, we are not somehow absent of self-interest when we engage in thanksgiving. Gratitude is the purest form of self-interest because it leads us to the beatific vision which is our deepest if unknown desire.
W&T I simply paraphrases here the even more explicitly sacrificial language of W&T IV. Our sacrifice of ourselves in praise and thanksgiving is in response to Christ’s sacrifice for us.
This is classic, catholic (small c) Eucharistic theology. It is part and parcel of the liturgy given us by John Wesley and Charles’s hymnody.
So why do you personally think it’s important to call it a “sacrifice” and why tradition trumps “For by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy”? I come from an evangelical sola scriptura background so I need more than “the liturgy given us by John Wesley and Charles’s hymnody.”
The whole of the Christian Eucharistic tradition as we have it documented from the first century (Didache) on understands the Eucharist and worship generally as sacrifice.
For my personal view, read my paper, “How the Mass Is a Sacrifice.’
http://twbe.webs.com/euxsacr.pdf
Cool. Thanks. I’ll read it.
“Wesley, more than the Anglican tradition, was concerned to make it clear that Jesus was the sacrifice, not our offerings and not the
eucharistic elements themselves.” I think that’s all that I am contending. The problem is that the word sacrifice has been bastardized in our language to mean “giving up something,” in other words, an act of magnanimous condescension, which is the sense in which it is offensive to me as something we do for God’s benefit.
If by “sacrifice,” what you mean is simply that we participate in Christ’s passion indirectly and receive the Holy Spirit in the process, that’s fine, but then we’re not creating some kind of false “altruism” from us towards God in our sacrifice — it is making ourselves available to receive a gift from Him. I really dig the Apostolic Tradition liturgy; I might read it at my contemporary service and see what they do.
By the way, thanks for the stimulating conversation. I hope I wasn’t too much of a smarty-pants. I just want to really understand the concept. I’m probably going to blog about your paper, Taylor, if that’s okay, because it’s very interesting to me to think about what sacrifice really means.
Prepare for Worship. You are in the presence of a Holy God.
“And Moses said to Aaron, “This is what the Lord spoke, saying: ‘By those who come near Me I must be regarded as holy; And before all the people I must be glorified.” Lev. 10:3
“let us draw near with a true heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water.” Hebrew 10:22
If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 1 John 1:9
The study of Gods word is worship.
Obedience and submission to God is worship.
“I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” Romans 12:1
God is glorified.
The church is edified, transformed and made acceptable to this Holy God.
“But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord. 2Corinthians 3:18
‘You shall worship the LORD your God, and Him only you shall serve.’ ”John 4:8 Worship the Father:
Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe Me, the hour is coming when you will neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem, worship the Father. John 4:21
Worship the Son:
Therefore, if You will worship before me, all will be Yours.”Luke 4:7
Worship the Holy Spirit of God.
For there are three that bear witness in heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit; and these three are one.1 John 5:7
Luthe had this to say: The Difference Between True And False Worship 1522, and 1646.
233. Now the worship of God consists in this: that you confess, honor, and love God with your whole heart, put all your trust and confidence in him, never doubt his goodness, either in life or in death, either in sins or in right living, as the first commandment teaches. To this we can attain through the merit and blood of Christ alone, who has gained for us and gives us such a heart, if we hear and believe his word; for our nature cannot have such a heart of itself. Behold, this is the chief worship of God and the greatest thing, to wit, an upright Christian faith and love to God through Christ. Therefore the first commandment is fulfilled by us through the precious blood of Christ, and God is faithfully served from the heart.
234. In the second place, if you honor God’s name, and call upon it in need, and openly confess it before the tyrants and persecutors of this true worship, not fearing them, but punishing the Herodians and guarding, as much as you can, that they do not dishonor God’s name, which is truly a great thing and takes the burdens of the world upon itself. See, this is the second article of worship which is kept in the commandment.
235. Thirdly, if you bear the holy cross, and must suffer much because of such faith and confession, that you must risk for it body and life, goods and honor, friend and favor; this means rightly keeping and hallowing the Sabbath, since it is not you, but God only who works in you, for you are but a suffering, persecuted man. This is the third article of worship, and is included in the third commandment. See, here is the first table with the first three commandments, which are contained in the three articles, faith, confession, and suffering. By this the present life and the world are renounced and God alone is praised.
236. Fourthly, we come into the second table, and henceforth you serve God, if you honor father and mother, are subject and obedient to them, and help them where they need it before all mankind, and if you do not without their consent, go into orders, when they are in need of your services in some other way.
237. Fifthly, that you injure no one in body, but show kindness to everyone, even to your enemies, that you visit the sick and prisoners, and give a helping hand to all needy, and have a good, kind heart for all men.
238. Sixthly, that you live chastely and temporately, or always honor your marriage vow, and help others to honor theirs.
239. Seventhly, that you do not deceive or injure anyone or take advantage in business; but that you lend and give to everyone or exchange with him, as far as you can, and protect your neighbor against injury.
240. Eighthly, that you guard your tongue, and injure, slander, or belie no one, but defend, excuse, and spare everyone.
241. Ninthly and tenthly, that you do not covet any man’s wife or property.
242. See, these are the parts of truly good worship. This and nothing else God requires of you; if you do anything more, he does not value it. This is also clear and easy to be understood by everyone. Now you see that the true worship must be common to all classes, and to all men, and only this alone dare be found among God’s people. And, where another worship is found, it must certainly be false and misleading; as that is what will not be common to all, but limits itself to some especial classes and men. Thus far we have spoken of the true, universal, and only worship.
Morgan, what occurs to me is that you have kind of an NT Wright thing going on. You’ve taken one stream of Scripture and seek to drive it through the whole of the Bible and the tradition. That’s OK, it just seems from an outsider view that you are very tied to this idea of us not having any sacrifice to give. I think the ascetical tradition, besides the Eucharistic tradition already discussed, would beg to differ.
“Gratitude is the purest form of self-interest because it leads us to the beatific vision which is our deepest if unknown desire.”
Surely the beatific vision as a a desire is one that must be restored to us; a great degree of self-abnegation co-operant with the Spirit’s work within must occur for us to get to that place where the Image of God is restored to such a degree that the beatific vision is indeed our highest desire. We will lay down a lot of other, less worthy, desires along the path to that ultimate destination of Christian perfection. Therein is a great degree of sacrifice. In terms of worship, the distinction between anthropocentrism and theocentrism holds, but you are right to be suspicious. It is possible to be theocentric in a way that is still focused on what we can “get” from God (contra Augustine’s teaching that God can only be enjoyed but not used) – but then this is theocentric in name only. We may indeed try to turn our worship into a way to manipulate God, but it is also possible to worship God purely for God’s own sake and not some utilitarian end.
@Morgan– Feel free to quote my paper– but before you publish what you quote, please run it past me first. That’s something all of us in general agencies are expected to ask of folks. I wrote that long before I was at GBOD, but I think you understand the issues involved. Best email to reach me: worship@gbod.org.
Thanks!
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