Dear Servants,

 

Over the next few weeks, I invite you to reflect with me on how we understand and enter into worship. I begin this week with the question above. I pray that we will all allow Scripture and the Holy Spirit to challenge our understanding of worship as is appropriate.

 

Why do you come on Sundays? In our culture, increasingly many people don’t, even if they consider themselves Christians. For those who do regularly come, their motivations can vary greatly. For some, it is time with friends. For others, it is the habit of their lives, long instilled by parents or grandparents. For others, it is an act of obedience. If I’m honest all three of these reasons have motivated me at different times in my life. Clearly, God calls us to worship and the act of sacrificing time and attention to God is an act of obedience. The simple answer to the question of why gather with other Christians on Sunday is to worship God.

 

The next question then is what do we mean by worship? You may not know, but the phrase ‘worship service’ actually never occurs in Scripture. Perhaps that’s one reason so many people are fuzzy on just what worship means. This may also be why what we call ‘worship’ varies so greatly from congregation to congregation and denomination to denomination. While we don’t see ‘worship service’ in Scripture what we do see over and over again is the concept of worship as service. In the passage above, St. Paul famously says the offering of ourselves (our life – time, talent, finances, attention, etc.) to God is our spiritual act of worship. This means that we gather for worship not primarily for what we get out of Church but for what God gets out of it. Are we coming to Church offering ourselves in service to God?

 

Now of course, whenever we give of our time, talent, and attention to God, we receive rich blessings back, no question. But the temptation of worship will always be to focus on the reward, asking“what am I getting out of this?” before asking, “what am I offering to God?”

 

In order to aid in the preparation of ourselves to enter into true worship (service to God), I am going to begin introducing a five minute rule before our service. At 7:55 and 9:25 the Celebrant will welcome the congregation and invite each of us to quiet our conversations and prepare ourselves to offer worship to God. The clergy, chalice bearers, and acolytes will lead in this preparation, so we would ask you to refrain from talking with them during this five minutes. My hope is that our intentional actions will aid in our entering into worship. After all, isn’t that what we come for?

 

In Christ,

Alex +