News from Faith United Presbyterian Church

Is Our Worship Christian?

While this may seem an obvious question, I hope you will indulge me. Consider our worship on the Lord's Day and the following description.

"Worship is something we do, for the most part, in church on Sunday morning. We go to church. We offer our hymns and prayers to God. We hear scripture read and listen to a sermon. We offer our money, time and talents to God. We do these things, following Christ's instruction and with the Spirit's help, but worship is what we do before God."

Is this an accurate understanding of our worship?

If you answered, "Yes", then our worship is not Christian. In the description above, worship is centered in the one offering worship, not Jesus Christ. "...worship is what we do before God." In Christian worship, which may well embody many of the same activities, the focus is always on the person and work of Jesus Christ, particularly in his relationship with God, the Father.

Most of us raised in the Presbyterian church have had our understanding of worship deeply shaped by Protestant liberalism. Here an emphasis was placed on our personal relationship with God, a contract-reward god rather than the Covenantal God of the scriptures. Morality, rather than faith, became the hallmark of the Christian life. Jesus became a moral teacher, rather than God incarnate. As for the believer, "right behavior" was rewarded by this contract god, while "bad behavior" was punished.

In Protestant liberalism, worship became something we did in the hope of currying the favor of the contract-reward god. The quality of our worship was defined by the subjective experience of our relationship with this god and the cultural pressure to be "good."

The decline of worship attendance in mainline Protestantism is, perhaps, the best witness to the corruption of our theology of worship by Protestant liberalism. For generations, we have tried to feed off our subjective experience, rather than the bread of heaven, and have left wanting.

As your pastor, I have tried to change our understanding of worship by changing our worship. We have broadened our hymnody to more accurately reflect the depth and complexity of our Triune God. We follow a liturgical order of worship, which not only unites us historically with the worship of God's people, Israel, but which proclaims, each Lord's Day, the promise of salvation, from call to sending. We follow the lectionary and the liturgical year rather than let the pastor's whims determine our focus. The hymns, scriptures, sermons and prayers on any give Lord's Day, all center on a particular proclamation of God's Word.

Where I have not succeeded is in encouraging our celebration of the Lord's Supper on each Lord's Day. From the conversations I have had, it seems our reluctance is rooted in the Protestant liberalism of our congregation's heritage. While some logistical concerns have been raised, most people opposed to celebrating communion each Lord's Day offer some version of: "Communion would lose its meaning, if we celebrated it every week." Is this really what makes communion meaningful, our personal experience?

In Christian worship, the relationship, the communion, of Jesus the Christ with God the Father, in the Holy Spirit - not our individual experience or personal relationship with God - is the center of worship. In Christian worship, offered by the grace of the Father, through our vicarious humanity in Christ, through the power of the Holy Spirit, we participate in the communion of the Father and the Son. Worship, then, at least Christian worship, is not something we do. Worship, or better communion, is who God is.

In Christian worship, we participate in the worship, we share in the communion, between the Father and the Son by grace through faith. When communion is excluded from our worship - when we feed not on the bread of heaven, nor drink from the cup of salvation - we are left to feed ourselves and go hungry.

People of faith, in our life together, may God bless us with an understanding of, and desire for, God-centered worship and Christ-like service. May God invite us to share in the life giving communion of Father and Son.

See you in church!