3 Steps to Becoming a Worshipping Church
It seems to go without saying that churches should be places of worship. And yet, those things that we say “go without saying” usually still need to be said. What is a worshipping church?
C.S. Lewis once said:
“It’s not out of a compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are. The delight is incomplete until it is expressed. In the same way, we delight to praise God because our praise of him not merely expresses, but it completes our enjoyment.”
No doubt, every church seeks to worship God and yet there are so many areas where churches stumble. There’s a reason why we have had “worship wars.” Churches have literally split over styles of worship.
I would like to offer three steps that might help churches as they seek to be worshipping churches.
Put the Emphasis on God
How many times have we heard people say things like “I did not get anything out of worship” or “I just didn’t enjoy worship today”? What does that say about how we understand worship?
Quite often, people see worship as being about them. They might choose a congregation based on how the worship fits with their tastes. The problem is that there is nothing anything like this in the Bible. The Scriptures tell us that worship is about God and how an individual “enjoys” it has nothing to do with it.
If we saw worship as being about offering something to God, then a worshipping church might not be so focused on pleasing people with the style.
Broaden Our Understanding of Worship
What is worship? Some churches see worship as the praise time that leads up to the sermon. Thus worship becomes synonymous with music. Others see worship as the liturgy. Worship is what you find in the prayer book.
Worship is actually all of it from the music to the prayers to the Bible readings to the offering and beyond. A worshipping church sees all of its corporate activity as being worship.
What about how other congregations worship? Do you accept how a congregation or denomination with a very different style worships as being “true worship”? Why or why not? There is nothing wrong with preferring one’s own tradition, but that does not mean we have to dismiss how others worship.
Integrating Ethics into Our Worship
A worshipping church should look beyond its official rituals and traditions. As important as they are, biblical worship cannot be divorced from our ethics.
In Isaiah 1, God states that he hates a number of activities that we equate with worship. The problem is that God commanded those forms of worship. The problem is that the same people neglecting the needs of the poor. Worship separated from ethics falls flat.
The kind of worship God wants is that which overflows into how we treat others. One passage that makes this clear is this:
“Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen.” (1 John 4:20)
Love for God and love for people go hand in hand. Since worship is about loving God, it must include a life of love toward other people.
What is a worshipping church? Biblically, it must be focused on God, it must be understood broadly in terms of content, and must be consistent with living an ethical life.
