Worship with the Church - Who Needs It?
“Look man, I just worship as I’m driving along. I sing & say a prayer. I don’t need church.”
“I listen to a podcast sermon, so I don’t see the point of going to all the trouble of attending a service. It’s not that big a deal.”
“I worship with my family by spending time with them at the beach. That’s what God really wants anyway.”
Heard anything like those reasons for not attending public worship? Maybe said something like that? We’re all very familiar with these and other reasons many Christian people have for not meeting with others to worship.
Is worship on a Sunday with a congregation really all that necessary for people to grow in faith? Many people today don’t think so. Nevertheless, I continue to contend that those public services are not only necessary but actually the primary means of our spiritual formation and we need to embrace them with great expectation and joy.
Yes, many people dismiss any regular attendance to a sacred gathering of God’s people for worship and it’s a challenge these days to assert that such a gathering is the primary means of spiritual formation that God has given to us. In fact, even among those who would still support regular attendance to worship there is a tendency to subordinate it to small groups, Sunday School classes, or private prayer and reading when it comes to the way by which one grows in Christian Faith and conformity to Christ’s image.
I am certainly all for small groups of many kinds and personal devotions as well, but there’s no getting around the fact that God ordained gathered worship as the first avenue for our growth in grace.
Does discipleship really begin with public worship? Yes, it really does. Even our baptisms are acts of public worship rather than moments of private spirituality. We can’t baptize ourselves! Communion is a shared meal as well. If you look at it, God has created community as the norm for being fully human from the very beginning. This is hardly surprising since God made us in his image and God is himself a ‘sweet society’, as the Puritans used to say.
Looking Back to Look Ahead
The Sunday School movement started in Britain in the 1780s, and these were actual schools, teaching impoverished children rudimentary education. It developed into a form of Christian discipleship during the 1800s. The small group movement is a relative newcomer as well, a focus of late 20th century emphases on church growth. What was the church doing for spiritual formation before 1800?
A look at the architecture tells the story. While the vast majority of modern Christian congregations wouldn’t build a church without a fellowship hall or education space, old church buildings had neither. The church building was for gathered worship, precisely because that’s what the church did. The congregation knew themselves to be priestly people, a spiritual house formed to offer spiritual sacrifices to God (see 1 Peter 2:4-5,9). It gathered for worship and then moved from the holy of holies into the world and society to conduct its mission.
Now again, I’m all for fellowship halls, education wings, kitchens, and youth ministry centers - the tools we use in our mission have changed along with the changes in our cultural context. I’m simply pointing out that for almost 2000 years the way the Church approached discipleship/spiritual formation was through the ordinary means of grace - prayer, sacraments, and Scripture read and preached - served in the Lord’s Day gathered worship of the congregation.
We also need to remember that for the vast span of Christian history most Christians never owned a Bible. Like our ancient ancestors in the Synagogues of Israel, our access to the Scriptures was in worship, hearing them read to us. There’s also remarkably little ‘private prayer’ in the New Testament; almost all of it is in a community of people, lifting their petitions together with one heart and voice. The same is true of Psalm singing, and confessing the Faith. Again, all for owning - and reading! - your own copy of the Bible… what a gift! But again, are we more spiritual today than people were 600 years ago because we print and own so many Bibles? Do we really think we are more spiritual today than they were?
An Ancient Voice
Let’s listen to the ancient Christian leader Justin Martyr on the subject. Here is his remarkable description of ancient Christian worship, written around 150 AD:
And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succours the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead. For He was crucified on the day before that of Saturn (Saturday); and on the day after that of Saturn, which is the day of the Sun, having appeared to His apostles and disciples, He taught them these things, which we have submitted to you also for your consideration.
Sunday worship was certainly both unique and full! It can be today as well.
Gathering for Worship is a Renewal of Our Baptisms
There is the gathering, itself a sacred act, for in gathering together with others you are of necessity breaking away from every other claim on your life, whether work or play. In gathering with others, you are renewing your baptism by acknowledging that you have been consecrated to God, that you’re grafted into Christ and his people.
God Speaks by the Word He has Spoken
There is the reading of the Apostles and Prophets, accompanied by instruction from those passages. Remember this is how God’s people encountered the Scripture - not in personal isolation but in sacred community, and ready for instruction rather than just trying to figure out what it meant on their own. We need to remember that the Bible was primarily written not to individuals but to whole communities and congregations. That's how it’s ideally heard and understood.
Prayer, Communion, & Offerings
There is communal prayer with a congregational ‘Amen!’, followed by the sacred meal of Thanksgiving. The Greek word for ‘Thanksgiving’ is eucharistos, and that’s why this meal is sometimes referred to as the Eucharist. There is a community offering in which those who had prospered shared their material goods in such a way that the needs of others were met through this act of radical generosity.
Public worship formed people, families, and societies because in that Sunday gathering God spoke by the Scriptures to his people, and they found their lives nourished on his truth, renewed by his promise, and transformed by the beauty of his grace.
Public Faith and Private Spirituality
Christian faith is a very public faith. Christian worship is as well. One is never a Christian ‘privately’, nor is worship something that is merely private, even if it is certainly personal.
When he was converted, CS Lewis thought that private worship was an adequate expression of his new faith. He discovered how wrong he was as he found his life transformed, not by astonishing private visions or study, but by very modest, plain, simple, Sunday worship in his parish church.
Lewis wrote, “My own experience is that when I first became a Christian, about fourteen years ago, I thought that I could do it on my own, by retiring to my rooms and reading theology, and I wouldn’t go to the churches and Gospel Halls; and then later I found that it was the only way of flying your flag; and, of course, I found that this meant being a target… If there is anything in the teaching of the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obliged to take the Sacrament, and you can’t do it without going to Church. I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music. But as I went on I saw the great merit of it. I came up against different people of quite different outlooks and different education, and then gradually my conceit just began peeling off. I realized that the hymns (which were just sixth-rate music) were, nevertheless, being sung with devotion and benefit by an old saint in elastic-side boots in the opposite pew, and then you realize that you aren’t fit to clean those boots. It gets you out of your solitary conceit.”
Lewis didn’t think much of the songs in public worship, and many people still feel the same way. Some don’t like traditional hymns and still others can’t abide new styles of songs. I’m all for chanting Psalms myself, but personal preference isn’t our guide to choices in church music.
Singing Together
Worship is far more than song of course, though it certainly includes it. Justin Martyr doesn’t mention singing, but we do know from Paul’s letters to the Ephesians and Colossians that singing ‘Psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs’ was part of the gathered worship because it would lead to God’s word richly dwelling in his people’s hearts.
Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. - Colossians 3:16
Be filled with the Spirit, speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord; always giving thanks for all things in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God, even the Father… - Ephesians 5:18-20
It’s often true that we learn our theology first from the songs we sing. I know that was true for me growing up: I learned the hymns, like ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’, and service music, like Psalm 51(“Create in me a clean heart O God…”) long before I could even remember a sermon. That’s why the doctrinal content of what we sing is so crucial!
Keeping the Feasts Together
Ancient Israel had worship that was deeply personal, familial, and national, the language of the Psalms reflecting each. There were Psalms of deep personal distress, songs of war and celebration in the great congregation, and Psalms for the family. All three - personal, family, and congregational - need to be cherished in our hearts as well, and given their rightful place. Personal worship is vital, but it isn’t the same kind of worship as public, gathered worship; family worship is a beautiful grace too, but sacraments are given to the Church, not the family: dad and mom don’t have the authority to excommunicate the kids!
Israel followed a pattern of God’s redeeming acts through the year in their sacred assembly, and so do we. Israel celebrated three great Feasts (hey, don’t forget it’s a FEAST!): Passover, Pentecost, and Tabernacles. These great festivals kept before Israel’s mind the amazing acts of God that saved them and secured them.
This also happens with us each week when we come to the Lord’s Table, and through the year when we come to Advent, Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. In each of these great seasons - these Feasts! - we see again the great acts of God to save and secure us. You might celebrate Easter and Christmas at home, though you’re probably at church as well; but I’m sure you don’t do Advent, Ascension, and Pentecost on your own! This pattern of celebration shapes us in the life of Christ and the narrative of our redemption.
Reclaiming Our Worship
Our spiritual ancestors wrote ‘The Westminster Directory for Public Worship of God’, a remarkable guide for what they hoped would be included in beautiful, God-pleasing, church-edifying worship services. We find in it instructions on the right attitude to have as we approach worship, the content of our prayers, the way sermons should be delivered - and heard! - and the way baptism and communion should be administered. While this document isn’t binding on our churches it is certainly a document with great wisdom and lessons to teach us.
Great attention was paid to these things for the reason that the way we worship leads us into our view of God and his relationship with us. The old Latin proverb is Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi - ‘the Law of our Praying is the Law of our Believing’. In short, shoddy worship leads to a shoddy faith; immature and lazy worship leads to an immature and lazy faith. Robust, Biblical, and serious worship, on the other hand, leads to a really deep and abiding faith. We can and must reclaim every aspect of our gathered worship, deepening it, broadening it, and giving serious attention to it, knowing that the way we worship is going to form our lives. What a gift!