Re-ordering Worship (Introduction)
The word ‘worship’ is confusing.
And the confusion comes because it’s such a flexible word, and this flexibility gives us permission to use the word in so many different ways.
In church culture the word ‘worship’ tends to be used to describe what we do in gatherings, often more narrowly as the singing part. ‘How was the worship?’ is often the first question people ask after a gathering, when really what they mean is: ‘did you like the singing’? Most courses and training days have historically focused on this.
For some ‘worship’ encompasses ‘everything we do’: everything we do is worship, or at least, everything we do should be an act of worship — an act of ‘giving worth’ to God. The phrase ‘worship is a way of life’ in this respect is quite popular, but what does that actually mean? Does it mean that we need to maximise the time spent in church gatherings, or intersperse our daily life with more specific acts of devotion? Is work our worship? And if so, does it mean that we don’t need to go to church because if our work is our worship then as long as we are doing our work in a way that ‘gives worth to God’ then that’s enough?
Popular culture doesn’t help establish clarity: people worship the ground their lovers walk on (infatuation), worship their football teams (tribalism), worship their favourite bands (fanaticism) or worship money, sex, or power (idolism). Or when a high profile band somehow manages to get a crowd singing a song about God without them realising it is a song about God, then that’s un-churched people worshipping without them knowing they are worshipping right?
Worship ministries attach other words to the word ‘worship’ to reinforce their own particular emphasis — such as the words Mission, Encounter, Kingdom, Life, Central — in which case worship is somehow connected to Mission (I agree), Encounter (I agree), Kingdom (I agree), Life (I agree) and is Central (I agree). Yet are these things purely connected to worship (and if so how?) or are these things in essence worship itself?
Even when we turn to our bibles, different translators at different times translate different Hebrew or Greek words as the English word ‘worship’.
Indeed, we are confused.
Yet our confusion doesn’t seem to stop us being opinionated.
You only need to read some of the many articles that go viral on social media to know that passions and opinions run deep. There are a lot of hands being thrown into the air in dissatisfaction as we talk about consumerism and performance and excellence (and yes, I have gone ‘there’). But there is far less that counters the often-critical cynicism with robust biblical theology.
We may think it’s broke, but even if we have some inkling as to why we think it’s broke and have strong opinions on how to fix it, if we are brutally honest, I’m not sure we really know what the ‘it’ is that we are trying to fix.
So in trying to develop a theology of ‘worship’ we are trying to construct a theology around a word that is understood differently by different people, churches and streams, understood differently by the culture we live in, and even used differently by biblical translators. As D.A Carson says in Worship by the Book,
A cursory scan of the literature on ‘worship’ soon discloses that people mean very different things when they talk about ‘worship’. To construct a theology of ‘worship’ when there is very little agreement on what ‘worship’ is, or refers to, is rather daunting (quote marks mine).
The danger is that our theology of ‘worship’ can become constructed not around an open-minded reading of scripture, but around our preconceived ideas of what we think ‘worship’ is, or even what we would ideally prefer ‘worship’ to be. For example, if worship is mainly ‘singing’ for us, then it’s very easy to look at everything to do with singing in the bible and develop a theology of worship around that. I know. I’ve done it.
So for me, it’s been helpful to take a step back. To empty myself of what I think ‘worship’ is, and start again with a very basic question with which I approach the biblical texts:
If God is who he says he is, and has done what he says he has done, and has created us to be what he said he has created us to be, how should we respond?
And in this series this is the question that will be hovering behind what I explore as I make my own attempt to ‘re-order worship’.
In this way, over the course of the series I will make my own contribution to the debate on ‘worship’, tentatively suggesting how we should understand it biblically, maybe even try and define it differently and ultimately help translate that theology of ‘worship’ into our practice of ‘worship’.
In Part 1 I will be looking at the order of life in Eden.
This is where we need to start, as it is in Eden that the correct order of everything is established, and immediately lost, but not before it speaks profoundly to us about God, our identity, the kingdom and idolatry.
