Prayer sensitizes us to the true meaning of worship. The person who spends time within the divine circle of companionship never enters the hour of worship without being sensitive to what can occur there.
—John Killinger
Several years ago I was preaching in a small Tennessee church. From the minute I entered the sanctuary, I felt a spirit there I hadn’t felt in many sanctuaries. The prayers, the music, and even the silences were extraordinary. I feel sure that I preached over my head—that my own spirit was measurably quickened and deepened by the unusual sense of worship prevailing in the minister and the congregation.
Later, I commented about this to two laymen.
“I hope you know,” I said, “what a rare and exhilarating kind of worship you enjoy in this church.”
They smiled knowingly at one another. “Have you seen The Cloisters?” one asked. I wasn’t sure what they were referring to—surely not the assemblage of monastery remains brought to New York by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.
“The shed up in the woods behind the preacher’s house,” one of them added when he saw my perplexity.
I had seen the building, but I didn’t know it by the name they used.
“That’s what the preacher calls it,” they said. “It’s where he goes to pray. And sometimes he takes some of us there, too. He goes up there every Saturday evening to pray for our services on Sunday. His wife says sometimes he stays two or three hours.”
The mystery of the great worship services suddenly evaporated.
It was not a large congregation. They had no dynamic, colorful song leader. None of the cues were evident that usually indicate an exciting, impressive service of worship. But the most important ingredient of all was present: the minister and his people were prepared spiritually to come before God.
Catered Worship
Unfortunately, too much worship is constructed and performed with little such spiritual preparation.
How easily I can begin to process worship like a caterer who’s served a thousand meals and now can do it blindfolded, who knows precisely how many gallons of anchovies and olives he needs for the salad trays and how many mousses and strawberry parfaits for the desserts. I can begin to approach worship with the nonchalance and casualness born of years in the ministry, no longer stopping to wonder if what I’m doing is pleasing to God, or if God is going to work mightily in the souls of the people as they worship.
Isn’t that true for any of us? We begin to concern ourselves principally with whether the service will be well attended (“Had a great service today—chairs in the aisles!” ) and if it will proceed without snags or glitches (“It went beautifully this morning, without a bobble!” ).
As we well know but sometimes forget, our greater care ought to be about how God regards our worship. It matters not how many attend or how glitch-free our performance is if, when we are done, the Almighty says, as he did in the days of Amos, “Come to Bethel (or church), and transgress; to Gilgal (or church), and multiply transgression … for so you love to do, O people of Israel!” (Amos 4:4-5).
Many church attenders don’t necessarily miss the spiritual dimension. They tend to leave that sort of thing to “the experts.” But they do know if they’re getting anything out of the time they spend in the sanctuary.
Suppose they finally make the connection between their boredom and the absence of God. That’s a sobering thought, isn’t it? It would mean they know I’ve failed in my role as a spiritual leader, that I’m fulfilling only the technical side of my responsibilities, that I’m not measuring up on the truly important matters.
Our Job First
Worship preparation is basically my responsibility as pastor. Oh, congregations are responsible too. They make an enormous difference with their prayers and enthusiasm and healthy participation. But they aren’t the leaders and can hardly be expected to provide the thrust toward more spiritual services. According to biblical warrant, that is my venue—and yours.
If we don’t prepare spiritually for worship, it’s highly unlikely that the Spirit will be felt in the service, or that the individual parts of the liturgy will rise and converge into an exciting whole.
Let’s admit we are busy people—pastoral ceos—and we’re prone to try to “work up” the sense of worship from our side, without pausing to think what we are doing when we gather to invoke the presence of the Great Mystery. A tribe of African fishermen, I’ve been told, padded the oars of their canoes when they entered certain lakes. Impressed by the sacredness of their environs, they took care to muffle their strokes. What happens when we feel that way about approaching the Almighty in worship? It transforms our understanding of how worship occurs. We see technique as much less important than an awareness of God’s presence.
Sensitized to Worship
What helps sensitize us to true worship?
Certainly prayer. The person who spends time within the circle of divine companionship becomes acutely aware of the way all of life is transmuted by that experience and never enters the hour of worship without being sensitive to what can occur there. Like writer John Updike, who says he never can pass a bookstore without thinking. There’s a book in there that can change my life, the prayerful worshiper knows that he or she stands at the threshold of a potentially new and radically different existence.
Music is another avenue—especially the great choral and instrumental music of our faith. For a long time it has been the habit in our household, early on Sunday morning when I am grooming to leave for church, for my wife to sit at the piano and evoke the marvelously compelling melodies of our religious past—the choruses that charmed us, the beautiful hymns that helped to set our theology, the glorious anthems that transported us. Whatever my mood when she begins, the music overpowers me, and I’m caught up in a spirit of excitement and enthusiasm for worship.
I thoroughly approve of the practice I have found in some churches to have a hymn- or chorus-sing for twenty or thirty minutes prior to the appointed time for the service. It warms people’s souls for worship as few things can.
Apt words sometimes help remind us of the true enchantment of worshiping God. We may prepare ourselves by spending a few minutes with a book by Carlo Caretto or another great devotionalist. We can help the congregation by reading aloud a few prefatory statements about worship, or by printing them on the worship bulletin.
Here is a “poem” I found framed at the entrance to the village church in Hawkshead, England, where William Wordsworth worshiped as a schoolboy:
No man entering a house
ignores him who dwells there
This is the house of God
and he is here
Pray then to him who loves you
and bids you welcome
Give thanks
for those who in years past
built this place to his glory
Rejoice
in his gifts of beauty
in art and music
architecture and handicrafts
And worship him
the one God Father of us all
through our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ.
Amen.
I’ve used this in my own worship bulletin to inspire my people to know what they do when they worship.
It comes down to our sense of expectancy as we approach worship, and how we can create similar expectancy in our congregations. Perhaps a simple ritual, such as removing our shoes for a moment before entering the sanctuary on Sunday morning, would maintain a proper sense in ourselves. But what else can we do for our people?
A Heritage of Worship
I’ve found study of the history and theology of worship provides an enormous thrust to most people’s sense of what is occurring—or supposed to occur—when they worship. It deepens their understanding and sharpens their feeling of participation, and hence creates a greater mood of excitement and mystery.
When I was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Lynchburg, Virginia, I talked with the worship committee about conducting a course of study for them. They were pleased with the idea but suggested that if it was good for them, it also would be good for others. So we opened the course to the congregation and were surprised when nearly one hundred persons signed up for a ten-week Sunday-evening series on the history and meaning of worship.
We began with a study of Jewish worship as it existed in the time of Jesus, and showed how, with the addition of the Lord’s Supper, it became the basis for early Christian worship. Then we saw how the legalization of worship and the building of Christian sanctuaries led to more involved and formalized liturgies, eventually issuing in the complicated form of the Mass in the later Middle Ages. Naturally, excitement rose about the revision of worship under the sixteenth-century Reformers, and subsequent developments as the various liturgical traditions encountered the American frontier. (Two textbooks complemented our study: W. D. Maxwell’s An Outline of Christian Worship and Brad Thompson’s Liturgies of the Western Church.)
An enthusiastic study group can analyze the way its congregation worships and propose alterations or additions that might enhance the spirit of true worship. Some congregations even begin producing worship and devotional aids created by their more artistic and poetic members.
Out of this ferment, prayer groups may develop to pray specifically for the success of worship. Imagine what this alone can do to heighten the sense of expectancy as the congregation enters the sanctuary on Sunday morning! Anyone who has taken part in an all-night prayer vigil for a series of special services well remembers the high state of devotion and excitement with which he or she then attended the meetings. The same is true for people seriously engaged in prayer for the regular Sunday morning services. They come into the services standing on tiptoe for the miracles of God.
Whole Parts
A truly memorable worship service is one in which the particular prayers, hymns, anthems, responses, readings, sermon, and Communion all serve as points of entry for the overall experience. That is, the whole experience of worship is greater than the sum of the parts—so much greater, in fact, that there can be no comparison.
The parts contribute to the order of the service, but they never should restrict the spirit of the service. Because they are only ingredients, they never should disallow room for spontaneity or the coming of the Spirit.
Worship errs, on the one hand, when it lacks the proper ingredients, depending entirely on the movement of the Spirit. It also errs, however, when it’s too rigid, foreclosing the hope that the Spirit will transform the situation into something unplanned and unexpected.
We see the former problem illustrated in many loose-knit services, whose lack of liturgical integrity or forethought repels persons of disciplined understanding and intellect, while the latter problem is all too familiar among churches with a tradition of highly liturgical orders.
I conceive of the discrete parts of the liturgy as building blocks whose purpose is to point us not to themselves, but to God, the One for whom all worship is conceived. When I remember this, I’m far less prone to idolize the liturgical parts themselves.
As ministers, we work diligently at preparing the parts of the service for which we have primary responsibility. We want the choice of hymns and anthems to be sensitive and informed, the prayers to be carefully framed and articulated, the sermon to be well conceived and artfully produced, and the Communion to be thoughtfully and appealingly offered.
But, even more, we want each part to be infused with prayer and surrendered to God as an oblation fitting for his service.
Thirty years ago I heard Elam Davies, the former pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church in Chicago, say that he always spread on his desk or sofa the pages of a new sermon and prayed, “Here they are, O God, the best that I can give you.” He made a deep impression on me. Everything we do—the preparation of worship as well as its execution—should be an offering to God.
If this is true for both pastor and people in worship, the separate items of the liturgy become a holy dance in which we whirl round and round with the Spirit. Something truly miraculous happens—a theophany.
The Dream of Substance
A few months ago a television executive confided to me the substance of a dream he had had about our worship.
It was the time of the offering, he said. But when I called for it, instead of a sober moment in which ushers passed among the pews extending the offering bags, there was an electric happening in which the people themselves poured into the aisles, crowding into our capacious chancel.
“They were everywhere,” exclaimed the man, “all around the pulpit, up by the altar, filling the chancel, crowding around the steps, and choking the aisles! And they were kneeling! They were the offering. They themselves were the holy oblation. You were passing among them, touching them in love and blessing. And the sense of majesty filling our building was awesome, simply awesome.”
I called this “the substance of a dream.”
It is also the dream of substance—worship as worship ought to be, when, filled with a sense of the Holy One, we’re all brought to our knees in humility and devotion.
Copyright © 1990 by Christianity Today
