A Reflection on Worship
by LewisOn Sunday, October 12, 2008, a significant part of the Palo Alto Church of Christ participated in worship service.
We often call — as do other churches — a “normal” Sunday morning gathering of the members a “worship service,” but it isn’t, really. We might be closer if we called it “a time of worship,” or “a gathering for worship,” but there is seldom any service to it.
In fact, there is so little actual service that the word service has come to mean (and this is the third meaning in my little dictionary) “a ceremony of religious worship according to a prescribed form; the prescribed form for such a ceremony : a funeral service.”
Now that describes most of our Sunday mornings. No, I don’t meant the funeral service, I mean the “worship according to a prescribed form” part. Ten songs, five from The Red Book, five from The Blue Book, three linked prayers (two for communion, one for offering), two prescribed prayers (opening and closing), one sermon (not too long), and a partridge in a pear tree.
We are not unique in doing almost exactly the same thing on one Sunday that we did the previous Sunday and that we will do the next Sunday. Many churches fall into a pattern, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. At least not until the form becomes more important than the content, or the outcome.
But this past Sunday, as I wrote earlier, we participated in worship service. How? We served people, and in doing so we worshiped God.
Would that all our worship were that genuine, that it would put us in such proximity with God.
October 17th, 2008 at 11:47 am
I’ve never understood why we call the Sunday morning communal event a “service,” but I do wish we would put more service into what we do as a community of faith.