Passionate Worship
The Personal Practice of Passionate Worship
Through the personal practice of Passionate Worship, we learn to love God in return. Followers of Christ develop patterns of listening to God, allowing God to shape our hearts and minds through prayer, personal devotion, and community worship. We love God.
The Congregational Practice of Passionate Worship
Worship describes those times we gather deliberately seeking to encounter God in Christ. God uses worship to transform lives, heal wounded souls, renew hope, shape decisions, provoke change, inspire compassion, and bind people to one another. The word passionate expresses an intense desire, an ardent spirit, strong feelings, and the sense of heightened importance. Congregations who practice Passionate Worship offer their utmost and highest; they expect worship to be the most important hour of the week.
What word would you use to describe RLC's worship? Here's how our congregation assessed itself in our recent survey. Out of 72 responses received...
ON PASSIONATE WORSHIP
Psalm 84: 1-2, 10 "How lovely is your dwelling place, O Lord of hosts! My soul longs, indeed it faints for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh sing for joy to the living God... For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere"
Worship is the most likely point of first contact the unchurched have with a congregation, and in some churches, many visitors do not find genuine warmth, a premium on excellence, or a message presented in a form that engages them. When a congregation loses touch with the purpose of worship, people come and go without receiving God.
To worship speaks of devotion to God, the practices that support honor and love of God. Passionate describes an intense desire, an ardent spirit, strong feelings, and a sense of heightened importance. Passionate speaks of an emotional connection that goes beyond intellectual consent. It connotes eagerness, anticipation, expectancy, deep commitment, and belief.
Passionate Worship means an extraordinary eagerness to offer the best in worship, honoring God with excellence and with an unusual clarity about the purpose of connecting people to God. Whether fifteen hundred people attend, or fifteen, Passionate Worship is alive, authentic, fresh, and engaging.
In Passionate Worship, people are honest before God and one another, and open to God's presence, truth, and will for their lives. People so eagerly desire such worship that they will reorder their lives to attend. Searching for wholeness, healing, meaning, connection, restoration, perspective, or hope, people discover that when they encounter Christ, their lives are changed and empty places in their spirits are filled up. They attend to learn about Jesus, faith, and life, and they encounter Christ. A warm and compelling sense of belonging appeals to them and makes them feel a part of the Body of Christ. They genuinely look forward to services and invite others to be present with them. For churches that practice Passionate Worship, every effort at preparation provides evidence that this is the most important hour of the week.
What does Passionate Worship mean to you? What brings you to church each Sunday?
Some Thoughts from Bishop Mauney on Holy Communion...
"Obedience to Christ opens us to a promise of unspeakable comfort, for the great comforting promise of Christ is this: "Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. (John 6:54-56).
Obedience to Christ also opens us to a promise of unspeakable courage. The cup is not only the cup of the blood of Christ as the gift for eternal life. It is also the cup of Christ's courage to go to the cross, to offer up his life. What is more, he promises that it will be for our courage as well, the courage to offer our lives! "The cup that I drink you will drink," he says to James and John and to all of his disciples. ...Christ's promise that we will have the courage to drink his cup, that is, share in his offering, his mission, his suffering."
Now that's another meaning to the "passion" of worship, isn't it. Love and Courage seem to be deeply connected. Loving so much that you have the courage to bear suffering for whom you love.
Let's talk about all that on - Sunday March 4th - informally amongst ourselves in the Narthex before and after worship. Then during worship, we get to do practical application! For the Adult Forum, we'll have Vicki Gellerman presenting on Sharing, Saving, and Spending. How does our Sharing relate to Passionate Worship?
Learn More! Every day during Lent, we will post a new thought about fruitful living on our Twitter and Facebook sites. Weekly Website News e-mails will
reinforce each weekly theme:
Week 1 - Radical Hospitality
Week 2 - Passionate Worship
Week 3 - Intentional Faith Development
Week 4 - Risk-taking Mission and Service
Week 5 - Extravagant Generosity
These thoughts come from Bishop Robert Schnase's devotional guide entitled Forty Days of Fruitful Living
To get on our e-mail distribution list or to get to our Twitter and Facebook pages, go to:
http://www.resurrectionpeople.org/news/index.php
Or just click on the buttons later in this e-mail.
Join us in prayerful discussion about how to make our lives more fruitful!
"You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit -- fruit that will last." John 15:16
