I lovingly disagree...

In my last few years of ministry, I have noticed a trend that many churches are adopting in North America.  Many United Methodist Churches and pastors have chosen to take one or several Sundays of the year and not gather for worship.  Instead, they gather and do a service project or some sort of community event during that time.  Although I also seek a strong connection between worship and service.  I lovingly disagree with this pastoral choice.  Let me explain.

Before I begin, the purpose of this post is not to disparage any other pastor or congregation’s prayerful reflection and choice.  I respect and admire greatly many of the pastors that have led congregations in these type of events.  So, I want to be clear that I trust and have faith that God is at work in their ministry in powerful ways.  They don’t need some blogger adding to the list of people trying to tell them what they should do and how they should do it.  So, this post is not intended to do that…  But, I do want people to know the theological reasons why I might choose a different course to address the same issues.

As a pastor, I am very concerned about helping my congregation engage in the work of God in the world.  I believe that “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, On Earth as it is in Heaven”, “Go forth into the World”, and “What you have done to the least of these” are commandments to actively engage the world around us in actions of Christian love.  But, when people confuse Christian action for worship, I feel that the full significance of worship and the role it plays in God’s kingdom is not fully understood.

There is a tendency in church life today for people to think that worship is everything done for God or in a spiritual way.  As an example, I have had many people in congregations that I have served tell me that they can worship God in the deer stand.  What they are expressing, is to a degree accurate.  We can have deep and meaningful experiences of God in all parts of our daily lives.  Brother Lawrence in “Practicing the Presence of God” explains how even the daily chores of his seventeenth century monastery can be done to God’s glory and let him experience the presence of the Lord.  But, if every experience of God is worship, then nothing really is.  Worship is something more.  

Worship is always corporate.  One person can do it, but it always involves engagement with others.  Even when it is a solo activity, the one is joined with a communion of those who have gone before who are mystically present in the now and allow a corporate participation.  The gathering and corporate action of the congregation joined on each Sunday morning is also celebrating Easter each week and remembering in a potentially transformative way what God has done in the life, death, and resurrection of our Lord Jesus the Christ.

It may be possible to worship without music, but since the earliest expression of worship in the Psalms, music has always been a part of worship.  There is something about singing that engages our whole being and helps one focus on the potentially transformative act of worship.  This new trend seems to diminish the significance of the transformative experience that is possible in worship.  It also begs the question if there are such things as sacred spaces.  I believe that there is consecrated space in which the gathered community pauses to remember and embody the Easter miracle afresh each week.  Worship can be done anywhere, but if the primary purpose of a gathering is a task other than worship, the primary goal of worship -centering our lives in God - will necessarily be diminished, perhaps not in intention, but by the actions and thoughts of actual participants.

So, I guess that my biggest reason for not adopting the trendy maneuver to claim a service project as worship and cancel Sunday services to convene somewhere else is that it seems to imply that the church either gathers to worship or gathers to serve.  I believe that this is a false choice.  I might instead suggest that service without corporate worship is vanity.  This false choice fails to impress upon the worshiping community that the Triune God deserves our worship and reverence.  Seeking God through immediate experiences alone tends to diminish the participant's understanding of the transcendent nature of God.  Likewise, I believe that corporate worship that does not lead its participants into active participation and engagement in the world around them is equally pointless and fails to help the worship community understand the immanence of God.  These are false choices.  God is both transcendent and immanent.  We need to both pause and worship and go into the world to serve.  

I lovingly disagree with the either/or approach.  My hope in my ministry, leading people in word, sacrament, order, and service, is to bring worship and service both together.  I strive to create worship that leads to service.  So, even now, I’m again working with people to create worship opportunities, even immediately following worship to go and serve.  I believe strongly in the importance of blessing and sending mission teams into the world.  It is my hope, that vibrant Spirit filled expressions of worship and vibrant experiences in mission, work together.  What we do in the churches I have served in Sunday morning worship matters.  What we do in the churches I have led in local and global Christian action matters.  They were infinitely more meaningful because they both led to and enhanced the other.  In the contexts that I have served, when I am often fighting an uphill battle to help people reclaim the powerful significance of worship.  I am concerned by the message sent of closing the church on Sunday and implying that service is more important than worship, ending two thousand plus years of faithfully pausing on Sunday mornings to celebrate the power of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus the Christ in the assembled community.  Although this is likely not necessarily the intention, this is the message that such actions unwitingly convey.  

I lovingly disagree with a few of my colleagues and resist the false choice.  See you in worship on Sunday morning and I’ll join you in works of piety throughout the week!