Christian worship is remembering, re-enacting and responding to the God who acts in the past, in the future and in the present. The past and future acts of God converge into the present moment bringing meaning and purpose to life.
Worship is the church's first and central work. The relationship of the church and worship is cyclical. The church is created and recreated out of worship and then creates its worship. It is the foundation of all else the church does. Worship begins and ends the week. The past week's activity and experiences are gathered up to bring before the Lord. The anticipated new week is lifted up in intercession.
The Three Tenses of Christian Liturgy
Each tense of salvation history (Heilsgeschichte) contributes a crucial dimension to worship. Remembering the past acts of God gives worship objective stability, historical perspective and rootedness. The covenant recital in Deuteronomy 26 recounted the past act and grace of God. When God's acts in history are omitted, worship loses perspective, content and motivation. The prophet Jeremiah lamented that the priest and other religious leaders no longer said, "Where is the Lord who brought us from the land of Egypt?" (Jer. 2) Without the past worship loses its orientation.
When the past is not remembered, worship loses its sense of God's prior grace and moves toward an ahistorical subjectivity or propositional rationalism. On the other hand, if the past is given too much emphasis, worship tends to solidify into sterile objectivity and meaningless rituals coming from a cultural context that seems unrelated to the present.
The future promised acts of God contribute confidence, joy and fullness to the Christian life and liturgy. Without the future dimension, the gospel is limited to the extent of the kingdom now realized. Courage, perseverance and joy characterize worship that includes eschatological hope. The early church's exclamations of "maranatha" expressed a live eschatological expectancy, relationship to the world beyond and the return of Christ. The eschatological dimension brings hope to worship and sends the believers into the world with renewed energy and vision.
The Holy Spirit makes salvation and worship meaningful now. In addition to the past and future contexts, the current historical context provides language, metaphors, and symbols to communicate and celebrate salvation. Without the present experienced acts of God, worship becomes powerless and empty, degenerating into intellectual statements and meaningless activity. Then past acts of God seem like fairy tales from a never-never land that can't and won’t happen today.
A full rich worship life needs all three tenses of the Christian faith. Without the present, worship tends to become objective sterile rationality. Without the future, worship is limited to the salvation already experienced. And without the past, worship loses its perspective, objective content and historical foundation of prior grace. The verbal and symbolic language of liturgy needs to draw from all three tenses of salvation history.
Stained Glass Window Analogy
Corporate worship in the Anabaptist and New Testament tradition is highly participatory and should stimulate and release the gifts of the entire local Body of Christ. This calls for a carefully planned flexible liturgy with a leadership style that allows the liturgy to be completed by the participants as the worship happens. Freedom, creativity and spontaneity can occur only where the right kind of order and leadership exists.
The above described liturgy, planning, and leadership may be compared to the creation of a stained glass window. The worship planners and leaders, like the window artist, envision the completed (liturgy) window with it focal point, movement, lines, flow, color, theme and repetitions. The worship-planning group prayerfully creates and puts into place enough glass panes to give the gathered church a sense of the liturgy's central theme. (The entire liturgy ought to say essentially one thing in different ways.) The church at worship and the worship leaders then complete the window by creating and filling in the missing panes and details led by the Spirit, the mind and intuition.
The liturgy takes on nuances of meaning as it happens. Only at the end of such a worship service is it clear what "the Lord is saying to us" and "what the response to that message should be."
If the stained glass window is totally completed in advance (over- planned), there is nothing for the church to do but admire and appreciate it. The result is a program rather than a worship service. If not enough panes of the window are in place (under-planned), the people do not know the content, theme, and appropriate places to contribute.
Worship includes active listening and silence as well as words and action. The stained glass window style liturgy will usually take more than an hour because listening and waiting takes time. This kind of liturgy planning and leadership requires a church that learns to creatively submit to the Holy Spirit, the pre-planned theme and prepared leadership. Listening and sensitivity is required by the creating congregation so that spontaneous contributions fit into the emerging and increasingly clear theme and flow of the liturgy. (That obviously precludes blurting out a favorite song or scripture whether or not it fits the time and theme.)
Leading this Style of Worship
This approach to worship calls for gentle sensitive leadership that "nudges" the liturgy along symbolically with few words. It precludes pushing, manipulating or driving the congregation with instructions or interpretations that disturb the flow of the worship. Effective worship leaders are crucial to the liturgy. But they are as effective as they are inconspicuous. After a well led worship service the worshippers will hardly remember who led them to "be lost in wonder, love and praise." A worship team used to working together can assist and compliment each other in listening, sensing and making quick decisions as the liturgy happens.
Planning and Preparing
Worship leaders have two tasks: carefully and prayerfully plan the liturgy and prepare themselves. Planning is no substitute for personal and spiritual preparation. Nor is personal preparation a substitute for careful planning. Only after careful planning and prayerful personal preparation, are leaders freed to enter into the liturgy and lead people into the presence of God. Adequately prepared worship leaders will have experienced and lived through the liturgy in advance, anticipating and envisioning the dynamic potential of each element of the liturgy, the moving of the Spirit, and the people's contribution and response.
After all their careful planning, the leaders need to remain open for the Spirit's surprises as the worship happens. After creatively investing themselves in the planning and preparation, the leaders must surrender their liturgy creation to the Holy Spirit and the worshipping congregation before they are ready to lead the church in completing the liturgy. Without the surrendering, the letting-go, the carefully crafted liturgy becomes an idol to be worshipped rather than a servant to facilitate worship. The last prayer before leading liturgy is always the prayer of surrender. A well-planned and led liturgy is one of the best gifts anyone can give to the church.
Communication Directions in Worship
Worship involves six directions of communication. The primary direction is towards God and then listening to God speak to the church. The worshipping church members speak and listen to each other in song, word, ritual and symbol. And finally, the individual worshippers speak and listen to themselves. Worship planners and leaders need to be cognizant of these different directions in the grouping, tempo, flow and transitions of the liturgy. Without careful attention to directions, worshippers can feel jerked this way and that as the liturgy abruptly changes directions.
Focus and Emphasis
Worship focuses on both God's transcendence and immanent presence in the fellowship of the church. Worship material should focus on God and eternity, beyond the congregation, the Bible and the leaders. But some material should also speak to fellowship, service, discipleship and decision-making in the Body. However, the primary focus needs to be on God.
A loving and expressive gathered community of the Spirit will communicate the love of Jesus by its very existence. When you enter an alive church you know it! The love, joy and peace of the Spirit are present. The gospel is proclaimed by the brothers and sisters who worship and love one another as well as by the proclamation of scripture and sermon. Alive liturgy proclaims the gospel and evangelizes. Therefore, every service ought to provide opportunity for persons to make an initial or growth step response to God in a way meaningful in that context.
The serendipitous outcome of worship is the building up and strengthening of persons and the Body of Christ. Paul articulates the principle that the form and content of the liturgy should build up the Body. (I Cor. 14:26) But the focus of worship remains on Christ; the outcome is secondary byproduct. When building up the Body becomes the focus, it leads to an "effectiveness orientation," a program, excessive leadership control and manipulation which ironically aborts the very building up of the Body that was attempted. Only the Spirit can build up the church! Like well-planned liturgy, the church and fellowship can easily become idols that are worshipped.
Communicating a Whole Gospel
What is meaningful worship will be influenced by the personality types, tradition, the local and international cultures. Worship also involves the whole person; mind, body and spirit. If the gospel could be reduced to theological propositions all that were needed in worship would be disembodied minds. Holistic worship calls for ritual, the visual, the dramatic, the symbolic, as well as the verbal. The gospel contains mystery. It cannot be captured in scientific formula. Thus spiritual reality can only be communicated indirectly through commonly understood symbols, rituals and analogies. Movement, sight, touch, smell, as well as the ear are needed to communicate a whole divine-human gospel. Consequently, one of the most important tasks of Church leadership is to help create and provide good stewardship of a congregation's verbal and nonverbal worship language.
Being Christian involves belief, experience and behavior. While including all three, the gospel cannot be reduced to only theological concepts, a felt experience, or ethical decisions, a theologically discerning liturgy will contain a balance of the three dimensions of the Christian life appropriate for that situation. Liturgy is a potent theological teacher for good or ill.
How theology, ethics and experience are combined and emphasized in worship depends on a particular church's tradition, personality types, and the local and larger cultural contexts. With the incarnation and creation-wide atonement of restoration, all creation is available to use in worship. All of life, the whole person and the whole gospel ought to come together in worship and praise to God. (Psalm 150:6)
Responding to the Gospel
There should always be opportunity for overt individual and corporate response when the gospel is communicated. Ceremonies and rituals provide ways for individuals and the church to respond saying "Yes" to the Spirit's voice whether to further faithfulness or to a first time commitment. The forms for this response need to fit the culture and church.
Several Principles
Ceremony, rituals and symbols are necessary for community, communication and worship. Verbal language, symbols and ritual lose and take on meaning as culture changes. Thus, the church must create new language, rituals, ceremony and symbols to carry on the meanings the old wineskins no longer seem to hold. But interestingly enough, when spiritual renewal happens old symbols, ceremonies and rituals often take on new life and meaning.
The North American Mennonite Church community, like the contemporary culture, is increasingly visual and less print oriented. The gathered people come from defending themselves from hundreds of clever advertisements beamed at them all week. Their trust level is not high, yet they expect to be engaged and captured. Consequently worship needs the dramatic element to engage the people and lead them into focused worship.
Repetition is a much-neglected principle in much of Caucasian non-Pentecostal free church worship. Careful repetition through words or symbols helps the liturgy flow, weaves the theme throughout and ties the various parts of the liturgy together. Careful and subtle repetition brings emphasis, give cues, and replaces intrusive instructions. The significance and power of artistic repetition in liturgy or a sermon can be appreciated only after having experienced it.
Conclusion
Worship in its broadest sense is the surrender of all of life to the Lordship of Jesus the Christ. In worship our affections and loyalties are refocused and reoriented from the idolatrous powers of daily life to Jesus the Lord. For that Lordship to remain vital, its foundation and existence must be nurtured and celebrated through specific meetings, verbal and non-verbal ritual and symbols.
Without corporate worship, Christianity degenerates into individualistic mysticism or self-righteous ethics. Without private worship, corporate worship degenerates into sterile institutional activity. Each needs the other, builds on and compliments the other.
rev 6-04
Marion G. Bontrager
Hesston College