Worship
Worship is a corporate event that brings people together:
- to honor God's presence
- to join voices in song
- to pray for one another
- to hear words of encouragement, instruction, chastisement and absolution
- to draw near to God by remembering what Jesus said and did
- to seek glimpses of the eternal in the everyday stuff of Christian fellowship
Worship can take many forms. A healthy congregation, whatever form of worship it values, will take worship seriously and do it well.
As a spiritual discipline, worship invites the individual to enter into community. The heart of this discipline is participation:
- Being part of the worship event
- Helping others to worship effectively
- Receiving help from others
- Seeing in each other's faces glimpses of God, and hearing in each other's voices the sound of God's voice.
- Entering into an attitude of obedience and self-sacrifice, in not needing to get one's way, but yielding to the needs of the body.
As important as worship is, a healthy congregation keeps worship in perspective. It is one activity among many, one spiritual discipline among many, one claim on staff time, one use of facilities, and one component of the congregation's budget. When worship grows out of proportion, it tends to strangle other ministries. In fact, many congregations offer nothing but worship, and therefore have no resources for calling on visitors and members, undertaking mission work, teaching, and other activities that speak more to people's actual needs.
