In my previous post, I finished by asking the question – what is the purpose of a weekly worship gathering? What is the goal?

The first purpose of a weekly worship gathering is to call people into deeper worship. It is about following Jesus. We must encourage deeper submission, deeper sacrifice, and deeper obedience. By revealing God, we encourage a response based not on the emotion of the moment, but on the truth of who He is and what He has done.

William Temple (Archbishop of Canterbury, 1942-1944) wrote:

To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, and to devote the will to the purpose of God.

Worship is about God's nature being fully revealed to us, and our response should be opening ourselves more fully to God, and letting Him have His way with us.

The second purpose of a weekly worship gathering is to meet together as a community. It is about sharing life. Regularly attending a weekly gathering builds community, binds people together, and promotes unity.

Hebrews specifically links worshiping together and the building of community, saying:

Think of ways to encourage one another to outbursts of love and good deeds. And let us not neglect our meeting together, as some people do, but encourage and warn each other, especially now that the day of his coming back again is drawing near. (Hebrews 10:24-25, NLT)

The third purpose is to provide a pathway for those searching for truth to find it. It is about investing in others. While a weekly worship gathering should not be relied upon as the only means of outreach, it is natural for people who are curious about Christ to attend a weekly gathering, especially if they have a relationship with someone in the church.

Paul specifically mentions considering those outside the church in Corinthians:

If, therefore, the whole church comes together and all speak in tongues, and outsiders or unbelievers enter, will they not say that you are out of your mind? But if all prophesy, an unbeliever or outsider who enters is reproved by all and called to account by all. After the secrets of the unbeliever's heart are disclosed, that person will bow down before God and worship him, declaring, "God is really among you." (1 Corinthians 14:23-25, NRSV)

So while the first two purposes of a worship gathering are clearly for the benefit of the believers, it is also clearly for the benefit of an outsider as well.

I know some people have a problem with the idea of a "seeker-sensitive" service, but Paul clearly lays this out as something we should be mindful of. At the same time, if everything you do is dictated by the mantra of "seeker-sensitive," you're missing out on two incredibly important aspects of a weekly gathering.

These three purposes are not only the purposes of a weekly gathering. They are also the purposes of the church as a whole: following Jesus, sharing life, and investing in others.

How do we combine these purposes into a weekly worship gathering?

To call people into deeper worship, we must infuse our worship activities with more revelation about God, and less of a desire to generate an experience. If we provide the revelation, the Spirit will provide the experience. We should include songs and scripture readings that reveal God's presence in our midst. We can't just throw a few songs together and see what happens. We need to think about what we're presenting and what we're trying to get people to think about. But we have to keep the presentation fresh – if the pastor used the same sermon week after week, people would stop listening (and likely stop attending). Likewise, we can't simply rely on the songs that the congregation knows well. When a new song says something in a new way, it makes you think about God in ways you hadn't considered before, and can even change the way you think about scripture verses you've had memorized since you were a kid. We cannot afford to ignore God's modern-day prophets – the talented songwriters that are living among us, revealing awesome things about God – any more than we can afford to ignore the songwriter-prophets that came before us, leading the way.

To help build community, we must leave room for fellowship. When Sunday school classes get out five or ten minutes before the gathering is supposed to begin, and the gathering dismisses at a time when people feel rushed to take off for lunch, we've lost the opportunity for fellowship. We must also encourage participation – people should feel encouraged to share what the Spirit has laid on their heart. Our gatherings are typically so rushed that there's no room for people to connect. Our agenda is too full. We need to treat our gatherings more like a family gathering, rather than as a program where we need to get to the next step, so we can finish on time and get to lunch.

To help keep the pathway open for "outsiders," we need to lose some excess baggage, so that all outsiders see in us is Christ. The reality is that the first two purposes can be fulfilled with any musical style and any cultural lexicon. But too often we shroud our message and our community in language and culture that is out of touch with those who surround us. The message should be based in who God is. The community should be based in love. And the context should be based on who will likely be walking through the door as an outsider. We want the message and the love to be transparent, and the only way to accomplish that is to use contemporary language. If we want to reach German-speaking people, we need to speak German. If we want to reach 21^st-century families in our community, we need to speak a language they can understand.

I think the church as a whole has done a pretty poor job of fulfilling these three purposes. We have let ourselves stagnate too much, and it's time for a major shift in how we think about our gatherings. The temptation, though, is to fulfill these purposes in other ways so that we can keep the weekly gatherings more or less the same as they've been. But this approach won't work, because people will fall through the cracks. We can't let someone escape participation in community simply because they won't (or perhaps can't) sign up for a small group. Our weekly gatherings must satisfy all of these purposes, if we truly want people to be transformed and say, "God is really among you."

Are we ready to really believe that nothing is sacred, let go of any traditions that hold us back, and envision a weekly gathering that really fulfills all of these purposes? If we are, then God is ready to do huge things with us. If we aren't, then we will continue to coast along, wondering when God will really show up. I'm ready to get moving.

Labels: church