Is there reality in our worship

By John R. W. Stott

November/December 1979

The Christian Church is fundamentally a worshiping community. According to I Peter 2:5,9 it is a holy priesthood, a royal priesthood whose function is to offer to God the spiritual sacrifices of our worship.

Now I venture to go even further than that. I believe that worship is the church’s priority task. Of course, it is popular to say that the church’s priority task is evangelism. I venture to disagree. I believe that the church’s priority task is worship.

Of course, this is an unnecessary dichotomy anyway, because we don’t have to choose between worship and witness. Each, properly understood, involves the other. It is impossible to worship and love God without loving my neighbor. And, it is impossible to love my neighbor without loving God. Therefore, worship and evangelism inevitably involve one another.

Worship is derived from “worth ship.” So true worship is an acknowledgment of the supreme, absolute worth of God. How can I acknowledge the unique and absolute worth of God and not be concerned that the rest of the world will recognize his worth equally? Therefore, true worship is bound to drive me and the Church out to witness. There is something essentially hypocritical about worship if it does not lead to witness.

Why do we want to evangelize? Do we want simply to win people, get them to profess faith, and be baptized – period? Why do we want them to come to Christ? Surely in order that people, having come to him themselves, will bow the knee to Jesus, give to him the glory that is due his Name, and acknowledge him as Lord – in other words, worship. Therefore, the ultimate objective of evangelism is worship.

Having worshiped, we’re driven out to evangelism in order again that there may be more worship. So, there is a continuous circle of worship leading to witness, witness leading to worship, and so on.

It is an unnecessary dichotomy – worship and witness, worship and evangelism. Each, properly understood, inevitably invokes the other.

Nevertheless, I think we must put worship first. Partly because our duty to God precedes and takes precedence over our duty to our neighbor, and partly because evangelism is only a temporary task. It will end when Christ comes again in glory and power, but we shall be worshiping God forever and ever and ever. It is the eternal function of the Church to be preoccupied with the worship of our Creator and Redeemer. That task will never come to an end.

As evangelicals we should not be ashamed to assert this. I say this because evangelicals are supposed to be interested only in evangelism, and I think it would be greatly for the health of the Church, as well as for the glory of God, if we said that we are equally or even more interested in worship.

The subject of worship has acquired a new importance in our day because of the contemporary quest – particularly in the Western World – for transcendence [something greater or higher than human wisdom and achievements]. What a remarkable thing this is! Young people, disillusioned increasingly (thank God) with the technocracy, are everywhere seeking something Beyond. They believe there is another dimension – a higher dimension – to life than scientists or technologists have ever dreamed or conceived. And today these young people are seeking this higher dimension.

Unfortunately, many seek it in mind-expanding drugs, in yoga, in the higher consciousness, in the flight to the East, in Transcendental Meditation, and in sexual adventures. Although they’re seeking in the wrong places, they are seeking transcendence. This is what they should discover in worship within the Church.

We need to remember that our Christian worship must be more than a social habit, more than a cultural convention. It must be real. It must be authentic. This means, I think, that there are three indispensable characteristics of a local church’s worship-characteristics which make worship both acceptable to God and satisfying to the worshipers.

1. Worship must be informed and inspired by Scripture, the Word of God. Human beings never initiate the worship of God. For all human worship is a response to the divine initiative. Jesus says in his conversation with the Samaritan woman, “such the Father seeks to worship him” (John 4:23). He takes the initiative. He reveals himself in order to evoke our worship.

It is impossible for us to copy the Athenians, who had that foolish altar to an unknown god (Acts 17:23). You cannot worship a god you do not know! For if you do not know him, then you cannot know what kind of worship might be pleasing to him, acceptable and appropriate.

Jesus also teaches this clearly in the Sermon on the Mount. He dismisses heathen or pagan worship (Matthew 6:1-18). He says that the heathen have these repetitions.

That is pathalogia in Greek, meaning any kind of prayer whether spontaneous or liturgical, in which the mind is not fully engaged.

Jesus wants us not to worship like this.

Why not? Because the God we believe in, the living God who is revealed in Jesus Christ, is not interested in that kind of worship.

Instead, he wants us to come to him and say, “Our Father in Heaven, may your name be honored and your Kingdom come and your will be done.” In this spirit we come to him like little children, thoughtfully, intelligently, confidingly, trustingly. We know the kind of God we come to, that he’s our Father and that he desires us to bring him our worship. And so, the kind of God we believe in determines the kind of worship we will offer him. That is why the Psalms are full of references to his works of creation and redemption.

These provide God’s people with tangible ground for their praise. I was upset a bit at the International Congress on World Evangelization at Lausanne when we kept crooning “alleluia, alleluia.” A sort of mindless trance. I wanted to say stop! stop! stop! What are you saying “alleluia” about? It’s no good just saying, “We praise you,” “we praise You,” “we praise You.” That’s never so in the Bible.

Many psalms begin with the word “alleluia” and end with the word “alleluia.” But in between this “alleluia” sandwich there is tremendous theological content. We are told what we are alleluiaing about. We are told to praise the name of the Lord because of his mighty works, for his creation, and right on through to his redemption.

As a result, our minds are filled with an awareness of the greatness of the Lord. That is the reason for saying “alleluia.” We need to recover some content-full theological hymns and songs so that we can know what we are singing our praises about.

I long for more evangelical reverence. Why not teach our people to come to church early, not to hurry in during the first hymn or after it, but to come in time to be quiet as a prelude to worship? I wish we could teach people that instead of the bout of conversation, to be quiet at least a minute or two before the worship service begins. It’s quite a good idea for the clergy to come in and sit down and be quiet a minute or two before 11 a.m. Also, it’s a good thing to have periods of silence during public worship.

Our worship, if it’s inspired by God’s Word, will not only be reverent but warm. Worship is cold only when the preaching is cold. There is no need to stir a congregation’s emotions artificially when Christ opens the Scripture through the reading and preaching of the Word. That is what makes worship warm, joyful.

2. Worship must be offered by the whole congregation. The second mark of true worship is that it is congregational.

During the Middle Ages, worship was a theatrical performance. The stage, especially the eucharistic stage [having to do with Eucharist or the sacrament of Communion], was the church chancel. The actors in the drama were the priests and the language of the play was Latin. Congregations were mere spectators in the audience, watching the drama performed by priests around what they called the altar.

One great insight that God gave to the Protestant reformers was a determination to replace this theatrical performance by congregational worship. This reform brought the action down from the chancel to the naves (people). The Protestant reformers insisted on the use of a language understood by the people.

The Church of England produced a book of common prayers, or, in the Church of Scotland, the common order. They did this because they were determined to involve and engage the people in congregational worship.

Some churches today have gone back to the Middle Ages. The pastor does everything while the people sit and doze and listen, interspersing their dreams with hymns.

The highest some churches reach in so-called congregational worship is that during the prayers a hundred, two hundred, three hundred people engage in their own individual prayers. Really, this is not much different than the medieval mass in which the congregation was just encouraged to go on with their private devotions while the priests performed up in the sanctuary.

Do we come to church in order just to enjoy our private devotions, although standing or sitting next to somebody else who is doing the same thing? Surely we should come together for public worship!

Therefore, anything that will better involve the congregation in common worship seems to me highly desirable. Take the seating of the church, which symbolizes our understanding of worship. The Roman Catholic custom was to erect a screen to segregate the chancel from the naves and the clergy from the people. Protestants have opposed this. Yet we tolerated a kind of confrontation between the clergy and the people which the traditional arrangement of pews creates. Over here you have all the people … and over there the clergy. This separation establishes a confrontation between the clergy and the people. It perpetuates and encourages that clerical domination of the laity which has been one of the most disastrous things in the history of the Church.

When Christians meet in houses we gather around in a circle. Somehow we need to secure this intimacy again in our public worship. We need a sense of the congregation being gathered around the action.

In our own church in London we have recently made all the furniture movable. The chancel furniture is movable, the pulpit is movable, the Communion table is movable, the baptismal font is movable. For a Communion service, the table is brought right forward and the people feel they are gathered around the table for the Lord’s Supper. If it’s a baptism, we bring the font forward, closer to the people. If it’s a preaching, we put the pulpit in the center and the people are gathered round. We want to overcome this appalling feeling of confrontation, of separation, between laypeople and clergy.

Related to seating is the question of lay participation; it’s good to involve laypeople also in the reading of the Scripture lessons.

God has gifted many Christians with good voices or an understanding of Scripture so that they can read well. We can also involve laypeople in giving testimonies from time to time or being interviewed about some significant aspect of their lives as Christians. These can greatly enrich our worship.

Why should the pastor always lead in prayer? It’s a very good thing for the laypeople to lead the prayers individually or as a group.

Bach once composed a fresh cantata for every Sunday. And at a Roman Catholic cathedral in Holland there is a group of young people who produce and compose a fresh folk mass every Sunday. Do you have a little worship group in the congregation to help the pastor with the composition of the worship?

There are people in your congregation with creative and innovative artistic and liturgical understandings, laypeople who need to be involved with us clergy in preparing worship that is acceptable to God.

3. Worship must be related to the contemporary world. Public worship can have a very damaging effect on our Christian lives if worship is regarded as an escape from the real world. A minister in the United Church of Canada, writing about the Jesus People, has said that like the early Christians they live simply, they read Scripture, they break bread together. But he goes on, “Like drugs, a Jesus religion can be an escape from the world in which He is incarnate.”

We gather together as the Lord’s people on the Lord’s Day for worship; then we scatter into the world for our witness. This is another rhythm of the Christian life – gathering and scattering, gathering in church in order to scatter as Christians out into the world. It is vital that we keep the gathering and scattering together in our minds; that we don’t divorce them from one another. In church on the one hand, and at home and at work on the other, we are in the same world.

God’s world. We mustn’t live a double life, oscillating between two worlds, secular and religious. Instead, we must carry our business into our worship and our worship into our business.

Many worshipers, when they come to church, deliberately and consciously step out of the real world into a religious world which has nothing to do with ordinary life. They even step back three or four centuries into an Elizabethan world which no longer exists. And when they look around at the ecclesiastical architecture or the clerical dress or the liturgical language, they must sometimes wonder if they’re dreaming. Is this the real world?

I want to urge that we must worship in modern English! I believe honestly it is inappropriate to worship the living God in a dead language. Oh, we’re so used to “thee’s” and “thou’s” and other archaic words and phrases. But using such archaic words tends to separate our worship from reality.

That is why using today’s language is indispensable, if our worship is to have about it the quality of reality.

It’s very important, as we worship, to keep in our minds the modern work-a-day world to which we belong. Do our worship services encourage the congregation to shut out of their minds the world of their home and of their job and of their community life? If so, then we are promoting by our public worship an unBiblical, spiritual schizophrenia. And we are contributing to that divorce of the sacred from the secular – possibly the most disastrous thing in the whole history of the Christian Church. We need to teach our people that the God whom we worship is the living God who created the world of work and marriage and homes and leisure and community.

His Son, after all, was incarnate and lived and died in the world. So we must not shut out the world in order to retreat into God. Instead, we must worship the God who made and rules the world. We must submit to his sovereignty that bit of the world in which we are involved day by day.

In its widest sense worship is living for God. It is honoring God in the totality of our lives. The hour or an hour and a half in which we mouth our hymns, songs, prayers, and praises simply focuses and verbalizes what is (or ought to be) the direction of our whole life. The sacrifice pleasing to God, according to the Scripture, is not just the praise of our lips, but the offering of our bodies and our money and our service in the world of everyday affairs (Romans 12:1,2). That is true worship! And Scripture states with great plainness that mere words, when divorced from social righteousness, are nauseating to God, disgusting to Him (Amos 5:21-24).

So we need to help people, in public worship, not to forget the world, but to remember it. Not to escape from life into God, but to bring all our life, as it were, with us and subject it to God as an act of worship. At least some of our prayers in church should be really concrete and topical, relating directly to the contemporary concerns of the people. Not just mentioning the sick and the bereaved by name and the missionaries {although that is very good), but also to take up newspaper concerns that are local, national, and international: racial conflict in the community, war, tragedy, disaster, high-jacking.

Public worship is God’s people responding to God’s Word in God’s world. And so my final exhortation is: do let’s toke trouble over the worship. A lot of preachers, I’m afraid, come to church with a prepared sermon and an unprepared service. It seems to me we ought to take equal trouble with the worship as we do the preaching.

John R. W. Stott (1921-2011) was Rector Emeritus, All Souls Church in London.  This article is appeared in the November/December 1979 issue of Good News and is condensed from an address Stott delivered to a combined meeting of leaders of Good News and the Covenant Fellowship of Presbyterians.