What is worship? Just type the word “worship” into Google and a number of definitions appear. Many Baptist congregations understand worship to be the place the church gathers and the gospel is proclaimed for the salvation of the lost. This perception has led to the common understanding in days past that worship was the sermon and everything else was simply “warming-up” the congregation. It is interesting that for the last 20 years, “worship” has been understood as the music portion of a church gathering that precedes the sermon.
Regardless of style or context, the Bible portrays worship as what happens when God reveals himself to his people and we respond by giving ourselves to God. This is evident across the Testaments, from the Shema to the teachings of Jesus: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:4-5).
Marc Brown
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The command for God’s people in Deuteronomy can be understood as more than just a call to worship, it can also be understood as instruction on how we should worship — re-sponding to God’s revelation. Jesus reinforces this concept when asked by one of the teachers of the law: “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” In the Gos-pel of Mark’s ac-count of this interaction, Jesus responds that the way we respond to God is of utmost importance. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
Baptists have obviously been influenced by the salvation-focused worship of frontier evangelism. Our history of being a Great Commission people has led our worship to concentrate on engaging our people’s hearts in worship — by challenging them to make concrete decisions.
Depending on the congregation, we have also intentionally connected with their souls through strong emotions or their minds through new, transformational understanding. Just like all worshiping traditions, though, we have the tendency to focus on one or two parts of the Shema and Greatest Commandment rather than on the whole. We unintentionally lead our people to understand only some of the ways God reveals himself to us, limiting their re-sponse and keeping our worship from being as significant as we want.
The dialogical pattern of revelation and response shows that all communication with God is divinely initiated. This understanding can cause us to change the way we worship. Understanding that revelation and response can happen at any point in a worship service leaves the worshipers no alternative but to enter praising God, then looking, listening and waiting for his revelation before responding to him.
If we understand that God’s revelation and our response occurs in corporate worship as well as in our personal lives, we will also gain better expectations of what our roles in worship are. If we know what we are supposed to do (and not do) in worship, then our praise, our waiting on the Lord for his revelation, and our response to that revelation, become the experience of engaging our hearts, souls, minds and strength. Embracing alternatives risks letting our churches’ worship descend into a series of hollow and sometimes consumer-based experiences.
The good news is that many congregations are seeking worship renewal based on more than trendy church-growth techniques and a great band. One example is the Ancient-Future movement. This movement encourages congregations to recapture worship practices from the ancient church — worship practices that engage the whole person with heart, soul, mind and strength.
The holy dialogue of revelation and response can be expressed through every element of corporate worship, so the never-ending questions of style become irrelevant. When we see worship as a dialogue between God and his people, believers more easily understand God’s revelation and have a better means to respond, and the story of God’s mighty acts of redemption are communicated.
Marc Brown ([email protected]) is worship pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Woodbridge, Va.