Missional Discipleship Practices, 6: Worship

As with prayer, we tend to make worship difficult. And, as with prayer, it isn’t. Or shouldn’t be.

We think worship we tend to think sanctuary and liturgy and pastors or priests, as if worship can only be done rightly in special places, in special ways, led by special people. There’s no doubt that services of worship, organized according to liturgies that include confessions and prayers and hymns and sacraments that we know and have meaning, held in sacred places set apart for such a purpose and led by people who, through their training and insight, make the services meaningful in ways they otherwise might not be, are a blessing.

Yet it’s also true that one person, alone, anywhere, anytime can worship God. Because it isn’t the time or the place or the leadership that makes worship. It’s the presence of Jesus Christ. And as Scripture itself reminds us in stories of people worshiping in tents and caves and prisons and mountaintops, Jesus is everywhere.

Wherever, whenever, however we proactively acknowledge we are in Christ’s presence to worship, certain basic realities of worship don’t change:

• In worship, we acknowledge the presence of God in the world and in our lives. This, in fact, is one of the most important professions we can make.

• In worship we are nurtured and renewed by the Word, the Sacraments, by prayer and the opportunity to give thanks. Indeed, most worship is an act of thanksgiving to the God who gives and sustains our lives.

• In worship we are reminded, even when we worship alone, that we are members of a much larger community—followers of Jesus who are doing the best they can to follow faithfully. And for all the gifts of worshiping alone, there is a greater gift of the synergy that arises when worshiping with others.

• In worship we are renewed to be sent out into the world as ambassadors of Christ. As with so much else when we follow Jesus, worship, for all its gifts to us as individuals, is always in service to something bigger than ourselves.

Some Scripture: Exodus 27:21
                            Acts 16:25