Recovering the lost ground of worship (1)

The first Christians understood the focus of worship.

But if all prophesy and an unbeliever or an outside enters, he is convicted by all, he is called to account by all, the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God really is among you.
-1 Corinthians 14:24, 25

A growing rift
What began as “worship wars” in the ‘70s and ‘80s is provoking a growing rift within the ranks of evangelical churches. The debate between the contemporary and the traditional in worship has widened into a philosophical parting of the waves concerning such crucial matters as what is the Gospel and whether or not Christians can know truth. Church leaders are repositioning themselves and their churches around some very polarizing concepts and are coming close, in some instances, to the kind of mutual anathematizing that broke the unity of the Church in the 11th century and has been a staple of theologizing from the Reformation to the present.

What a tragedy to think that our worship of God has become a thin entering-wedge for the fragmentation of evangelicalism, at just the moment in history when the Church could be positioned to reclaim the high ground for truth.

Looking back in order to look ahead
I’m not naïve to think that our various and sundry splits and divisions can be healed if only we could agree to return to the form of worship practiced by the first Christians. I don’t even claim to be able to explicate that form completely. There just isn’t enough evidence in the New Testament or the writings of the first and second century Church to tell us exactly how Christians approached the worship of God. We have some helpful synopses from late in the second century and a few hints here and there in other writings of the Church Fathers.

But in the main we are left to our own careful examining of the Biblical evidence to help us overcome our differences and settle on some common worship practices. If we could, we might be able to heal some of our divisions, create some space for talking about our different visions of the Church, and get back on track with our overarching mission of seeking the Kingdom of God and His righteousness.

1 Corinthians 14 is as full as the New Testament gives us on the question of how to approach the worship of God in a local church. Over the next few installments of this column, I’d like us to take a closer look at this chapter, to see if we might be able to discover how to bring more of the kind of worship Paul describes into the experience of our own churches.

A meeting with God
We begin by noting that, for the first Christians, worship was a convocation of the saints for the purpose of meeting with God (vv. 24, 25). Much as we see in Psalm 50, worship was understood to be a place where the Church met with God to offer Him, from the depths of their hearts, the thanks and praise which are His due, to enter into His very presence and glory, and to receive from Him the instruction they needed to continue serving Him in the world.

Worship among the first churches was all about God – meeting with Him, honoring Him, entering into His glory, coming under His conviction, hearing His Word, participating in Him through the sacraments, and being bound more firmly together in unity and maturity as a congregation of the people of God. Any thought that worship should be constructed to meet the needs of God’s people or to exhibit a welcoming face to visitors was completely unknown. If visitors or unbelievers should wander in, the great hope of the Apostle Paul was that the presence of God in worship would be so palpable that the lost and all sinners would be convicted to the depths of their being and compelled to admit that God was, indeed, present here.

As we prepare for worship and when we come together, what are we looking for? If not for God – to glimpse, adore, exalt, and honor Him – then what? Those who have the responsibility for planning worship must consider each element of the service. What is it designed to do in bringing us into the presence of God? Does this element, the way it is planned, accomplish a turning of our hearts upward to the Lord, or merely inward to our own interests and needs? And are all the elements present in the service that God might use to bring us properly before Him?

The first Christians came to worship in order to know the presence of the Lord. Whatever else worship was to them, it was supremely this. So it must be with us.

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