The Worship Service is Worship Too

Some time ago I read a post by Arthur Sido on The Voice of One Crying Out in Suburbia titled What is Worship? and I’ve been intending to respond ever since. The problem is that the topic brings up so many different issues that it threatens to become an incredibly long blog post. Those of you who have read this blog before know that wordiness is my besetting sin!

So I’m going to try to give a few thoughts and I’ll write about details later if it seems the thing to do. I will obviously fail to cover all my ground. I’d suggest you read Arthur Sido’s post first. I’m not going to respond point by point. In fact, I consider most of his suggestions excellent, even though I take a different approach to the texts. Instead I’m going to just put forward a few ideas about worship, and particularly about the relationship of the Old Testament to the New on this topic.

Before I get to the question of how much of what the Old Testament says about worship applies to the church let me comment on the definition of the word “worship.” One problem is that worship can mean different things in different places. I first encountered this problem talking to people who thought only part of the church service was worship. They would refer to the musical portion as “worship” and would complain that they had not been allowed enough time to worship at a particular service because too many other things took place. Worship would generally be defined in those conversations as the portions of the service that particularly engaged the emotions.

We might see this as something similar to the biblical phrase “bow down and worship.” It’s a particular act of worship. I don’t have a problem with this special definition, so long as we realize what’s happening. You can define one piece of the worship service as “worship” and the rest as, well, something else, and lose the the broader meaning of worship. I recall some people who started to make a large distinction between “praise music” and “worship music” and had particular times for these things. Again, one can appropriately make a distinction between the word “praise” and the word “worship” in particular contexts, but that doesn’t mean that’s all of worship.

On the other side, we have those who see the worship service strictly in terms of conveying certain facts. There is no expectation of poetry and emotional engagement in the service. The preference is for a few songs to kind of set off the time of preaching, the proclamation of the word. For these people the point of a church gathering is to get educated.

Most people, of course, fall somewhere between these points. I think all fall short of the best concept of a service of worship. And no, I don’t have a problem using a term that is not explicitly used in the New Testament. In fact, I find the argument that something was not mentioned in the New Testament and thus must not be something we should do or believe to be one of the worst arguments. But that is another subject.

Yet it is important to understand that worship can be broadened to cover everything that we do in life. I have learned a great deal of this while studying the book of Leviticus (read some of my notes on Leviticus), and also the rest of the Pentateuch. The overarching theme, I would suggest, is that God wants to bring everything into the realm of the sacred. We make some things sacred; God wants to sanctify everything. We make some places holy; God wants a holy world. We set aside sacred time; God claims rule of all time.

The scriptural bookends for this view are found in Exodus 19:6 “You will be a kingdom of priests to me, a holy nation …” and then in 1 Peter 2:9, which alludes back to Exodus. What happened in between? Well, things didn’t happen that well at Sinai. God couldn’t make Israel a nation of priests and chose instead a priestly family, and the tribe of Levi to serve the temple. Instead of a holy nation we had a holy shrine.

But the rituals of Leviticus see God moving into our profane spaces and trying to make them holy. The direction in which God is leading people is away from the scattered bits and pieces of “holy” and to a holy, consecrated life. I call this one of the trajectories of scripture that helps us understand how various texts apply, in this case texts related to worship.

There are two commonly accepted ideas about how we apply Old Testament texts to the church. On the one hand there are those who think that if it isn’t restated in the New Testament, it doesn’t apply. There are others who believe it applies unless it was explicitly changed in the New Testament. As usual, these extremes don’t happen that often in practice, and there are certainly other views, but those provide the general outline.

I would suggest instead that the Old Testament applies to the church wherever it does so based on the principles espoused in the text. We do not offer animal sacrifices in the church, but it is not simply because the New Testament says that was to end. Rather, the New Testament says that was to end because it’s function was completed. We can discover whether the function was completed by asking whether the situation that called for a particular activity, ritual, or law still applies in the time of the church. I would suggest that this question often needs to be answered differently for different people or groups.

What does this mean for worship? I think it will suggest that it means that worship services are worship too. Those who think we worship only in the worship service should come to realize that obeying is better than sacrifice (1 Sam. 15:22), while those who think the worship service is unimportant should spend some time with those Old Testament passages that speak to the importance of ritual in engaging us with God.

I think there is a great difference between individual needs. While worship is about God, it is about people worshiping God, and that worship experience means different things to different people. But there is that corporate need to worship together. Leave off either the acts specifically directed to God, or acts of service to others (which should be directed to God as well),  and one’s spiritual life will be unbalanced. (One can learn a great deal about worship from 1 Corinthians 12-14, especially 14.)

Thus my title: It’s not “The Worship Service is Worship,” but “The Worship Service is Worship Too.”

I can certainly see a number of lines of discussion I haven’t followed and perhaps should have, but I think I’ll wait to respond to comments–or until I again feel it’s a good idea to follow up.