Course: Spiritual Life of the Leader

Lecture 21: Philosophy and Forms of Worship

Movements in worship

1. Kneeling in acts of loving worship. Kneeling in submission before God to acknowledge that you are dependent on him. 2. Exalting God by declaring his worthiness 3. Receiving God’s life symbolized by the sacrament of communion. 4. Empowers us and encourages us to go out and serve. We participate in the fellowship and life of the Trinity. We need to immerse ourselves in relationship to God and let that inform and empower what we do so that our worship service is more than creating an experience or transmitting information. Be explicit about your purpose in worship and include prayer.

I. Distinction between Leading Others in Worship and Performing

As leaders we need to understand that in leading worship we have to make strong distinctions between whether it is performance based or is it leading others in worship. Also, if there is a person who doesn’t have any confidence, then it is a major distraction. So, am I there to lead others in worship or am I there to perform for others? These are values for you as a leader has to take the time to get your mission straight. What is it that the Word says is our mission? Then you start working out your values and that we are not here to perform for others. We are not performance oriented but instead we are worship oriented. While in one of Tim Keller’s congregations in New York City, there was no overheads, no cameras and only two simply instruments up front. The only electronics were the lights and mikes, but there was a strong sense of worship during that time. They had already taken the time to work through those types of issues. Let us continue on in this leadership and consider how we are called to follow some ancient paths of worship.

II. Ancient Paths of Worship

A. Examine Our Own Lives

Think about the great commandment that Jesus gave us; to love the Lord our God with all of our hearts, soul, mind and strength. This is from Mark 12:30. This is the qualification that Jesus reinforced; we should worship the Lord our God and serve him only. This requires us to examine our own lives. Am I leading a life of personal worship and adoration as well? You kind of get disqualified internally even in your own thinking, if you, as a leader, are merely a performance based person and you are not living out what you are preaching. So, a big part of up front spiritual leadership in setting the compass of my life; I am going to first follow Christ in this ministry position. You would think that this is elementary and wouldn’t have to be spelled out, but it does have to be spelled out. I would never want to make worship formulae; in other words to put a formula on how God wants you to worship. There are different streams in God’s church. I know there are a number of streams that says they are the only true church; they are the only ones with the pure water of God. Well, we love them as well. There are a number of streams in God’s kingdom and history of the church. I want to have deep respect for every major Christian stream. I want to stay within that boundary. But, are there foundational movements that the Lord wants us to apply both in our own lives, in our leadership lives, in our family lives and in our church life.

B. Forms of Worship

I want to suggest some movements here. The first movement is about kneeling in acts of loving worship in our hearts with the totality of our physical bodies. The heart is the major issue here. Are we kneeling in submission before Father, Son and Holy Spirit? It is not my church, it is your church. Actually, it isn’t even my ministry; I need to get rid of those personal pronouns. Today Lord, I am here for your ministry, for your kingdom. So, in kneeling primarily in spirit with all that I am before the blessed trinity, I am acknowledging that I am a completely dependent creature and I am looking to God as my teacher and Lord. Jesus, not only has the right to instruct us in all things, but to ask for our total loyalty in all things. So, I am kneeling in my heart and my life. The second movement concerns exalting God and lifting his name high in worship. By declaring his worthiness in saying the Psalms and singing the hymns and in offering him praise; even as a leader, whether you are the worship leader or the pastor. You should be clear; when gathering the people, it is for the sake of worship. Like Eugene Peterson says that we are here to worship the Living God. Give thanks to the Lord for he is good, for his steadfast love endures forever. This is from Psalm 136:1; we are letting worship lead us and guide us. In worship we are affirming God’s character. We are acknowledging who he is and by affirming his character, we are establishing our personal lives, our family life and our congregation on the revelation of who God is. That is what is preeminent and that is what the world needs most. We are responding to his self-discloser that came in through the incarnation by returning and showing our love to him.

Third, are we coming forth in whatever way your local congregation does this, to receive his gifts? At the heart of the sacraments which Jesus started on the night before his death; we are coming for the body and the blood. This is receiving his life into our lives. We are placing everything before him when we do this. Everything that we are, we are laying down our lives before him; we are literally laying our lives before the feet of Jesus. These ancient paths of God’s church offer a reliable path today because when we kneel down, we bow down and lift high and come forward to receive; then we are able to go out to serve the mission of God that he has for us. We are being empowered and encouraged to go out and serve. So, in summiting to God and lifting his name high and placing our lives as a living sacrifice before him, the Holy Spirit enables us to participate in what James Torrents calls the Son’s communion with the Father. The Father is pouring out his life into the Son and the Son is returning that life. So, the Son’s communion with the Father, Torrents wrote in his vicarious life of worship and intercession. This is taking us into the heavens and we are participating in the worship and adoration and giving and receiving of love. This is going on in the very heart of the Trinity. We are called to seek nothing less in worship and may Lord help us here.

III. The Public Worship of God is Overloaded

This is an issue that we have seen in our interviews and onsite visits in our work with a number of denominations and with the work with our own students. Across God’s church today, we are also finding that the public worship of God is overloaded. We are finding that in pastoral leadership, the leaders are trying to do too much in their worship services. We are blessed with some out-standing sermons as we go from church to church. I sat in one of those sermons, a first class message on following Jesus and being his disciples. The pastor of this large church really explicated well the call to discipleship. This pastor finished the sermon by calling people to the altar to commit their lives to discipleship and there was a large response to that. I was very thankful for it. Then, I walked out of that service and the more I thought about it, the more disturbed I became. Why would I feel this way when such a biblical call of discipleship took place? In going to the literature of the church and looking at what the church was offering through its various ministries and programs, I didn’t see a single thing in regards to where a new Christian could come in and learn what it means to be a disciple. It was probably there but I didn’t see a process for it. The pastor took the lazy way out; he was trying to hold up discipleship without offering any real avenue for discipleship. Not only that but he didn’t know his own traditions. The tradition asks how discipleship is accomplished. Some discipleship is done in these large services. They hear and receive the word and also the sacrament of Holy Communion. They were doing all of that there, but discipleship in the history of our Christian tradition has been historically accomplished through Jesus being with the twelve disciples. He ministers to the crowds and then pours his life into the twelve disciples. You can read this in the book by A.B. Bruce in the late 1800s called, The Training of the Twelve.

The Lord loves that pastor and congregation and he is going to bless them. I think this church is representative of what we have found in any number of settings. We saw people trying to do healings and there were also deliverance ministries within the primary worship service. We saw people trying to do justice ministry and other ministries that really cannot be accomplished outside of small group interaction, yet they are packing it into the worship service. They are trying to accomplish too much in the worship services. It is like Apollos in Acts 18; he was an eloquent person and well versed in the scriptures. He had been instructed in the way of the Lord and he spoke with burning enthusiasm. He taught the things of God accurately, but there was a problem that we see in verse 25. He knew only the baptism of John. The church had to take him and provide more instructions into his life. The church isn’t accomplished to merely right thinking. Apollos had this but he didn’t have all the information here. He needed more in his life to accomplish the purposes of the church. I look at Eugene Peterson and what is reflected in his book, The Pastor, on page 239. He says that my theological education had pivoted on Martin Luther and John Calvin, brilliant and comprehensive thinkers and writers. They taught me to think largely passionately about God in the Scriptures. For them forming the Christian life was primary but not entirely a matter of recovering right thinking, understanding and doctrine. This was rightly so in that day and time. Yet, after a prolonged time of struggling, what Peterson called the Bad Lands. He had gotten to know Sister Gwenevieve, the head of a Carmelite Monastery of Nuns. As Peterson looked back into his own training, he reflected this; I had received a theological education adequate for preparing me a professor in the classroom, dealing with knowledge and faith seeking understanding. But now as a pastor, a great deal of my life is dealing with souls as they went about their lives, but the life of the soul and attentiveness of souls to God that as prayer, I had taken this for granted because it was simply assumed and peripheral to my training. But the people that Sister Gwenevieve had put him in touch with taught him how to rightly pray with the same disciplined care as Luther and Calvin took with the Scriptures and believing rightly. This was something like faith seeking holiness.

A. Our Mission is to Work through the Power of the Holy Spirit to hold up the light of Worshipping the one True God

This is what Apollos needed in his life. He needed the fullness of God in his life. So, just as Apollos needed Priscila and Aquila and Paul to have that fullness of understanding in his life. Peterson needed Luther and Calvin as well in his life. I think we need to refocus our worship energies, not just presenting the truth or creating an experience but taking all aspects of our lives and bowing before the Father and consuming fire of love. I think that is part of the call; it is part of a generation of leaders and part of the repentance of the whole of several generations of leaders that need to rethink what we are doing in terms of leading the people of God in what is our role and as part of reclaiming the priority of worship in our lives. I am thankful that there are many people who are like Apollos, truly seeking to do the right thing. What we are trying to do is to dive deeper into the Word and to let the Word speak to you and direct you and lead you in all of this. As the flock of God, the church, we have a huge task before us. We want to remember what that task is, namely, our mission is to work through the power of the Holy Spirit to hold up the light of worshiping the one true God to whole worldwide system now that will have nothing to do with that kind of worship. It is darkened by false worship. In the 1st chapter of Romans, Paul gives very keen insight which Augustine and Luther picked up on. In establishing the major problem of the world, you can’t understand the good news unless you understand the bad news.

B. Righteousness and Wrath (Romans 1:17ff)

So, he is writing about the righteousness of God in verse 17. The righteousness of God is what God declares good and upright and holy. We live in a culture that now declares all sorts of perversion as being good. Then in verse 18, he says that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness. When was the last time anyone has heard a sermon on the wrath of God. How do you understand the atonement without this and your need for redemption? The wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness. Wrath is God being opposed to disobedience of humanity and will confront that disobedience with his holy love.

C. The Greatest Issue is No worship and the Cure is Proper Worship

The key here is understanding what Paul is saying about what God opposes. The word, ungodliness, literally means no worship. Dr. Kenneth Kenlaw, a great Old Testament scholar, now is heaven talked about this. Paul wrote that the greatest issue we face as sinful and broken human beings is our lack of proper worship of the God who has been revealed to us through Jesus the Messiah. Hear the word, the greatest issue is no worship and the cure through Christ our Lord is proper worship. Your mission is to lead the people of God into proper worship. This in of itself becomes a literal kingdom vehicle through which God shares his light with a broken and fallen world. Do we need congregations compromising by turning to society values? What do we have to offer society or are congregations holding up the light of a worshipping community where the people of God in that community have their heart, minds and leadership set? We are attracting people to worship God, not to do anything else. Those who don’t worship are ungodly; they are without worship. These are the ones that Christ died for.

D. Without God, People Naturally Go to Unrighteousness

Without the on project object to worship, without a life giving relationship with our living Lord, the resurrected Lord, humanity naturally collapses into unrighteousness. This Greek term, Adikia, is the word for unrighteousness. This is the worldwide culture today and has it ever been any different? No, there is nothing new here. We have attitudes and actions that violate all that is good and all that is right as revealed by God. Since they have no root of goodness in God, these behaviors begin to bring about devastating consequences in our lives. That which is opposed to God, by its very nature, is dark and destructive to life. It separates us from the love of the Father and it injects nothing but destruction and death into our lives.

E. Self-Seeking (Romans 2:8)

Paul then gives further definition to our proclivity toward lack of worship in Romans 2:8; he sums up the basic problem as self-seeking. It is the self, bending back upon itself; Paul points forward to the great judgement of humanity that is going to come when Jesus returns in verse 5. When this day occurs, Paul states that we will be repaid according to people’s deeds. Those who are redeemed in Christ, they go to heaven; however, some of their works get burned up. There is going to be some smoky people going up into heaven. Those who have sought to live according to God’s highest design for humanity, doing good in seeking for the glory and honor that belongs to God. These will receive the gift of eternal life, he says in verse 7, but those who are self-seeking, whom have not sought after God and haven’t obeyed the truth but instead lived in wickedness in verse 8; they will receive nothing but the indignation of God for their self-centeredness and their lack of worship. It is a right and a good thing; holy love will not allow falsehood or anything that is contrary to God’s goodness into the New Heavens and the New Earth. We simply cannot be a Universalist and read Scripture. So, Augustine and Martin Luther, both of them highlight Paul’s term of self-seeking. The divine plan is for us to return the love we have received from the Trinity back to the Trinity in worship and adoration and then share that love in unselfish acts of goodness to those around us. But in the collapses of self-curvature, the love intended for God and others are pulled back and wrongly focused on self. Leaders, this is why we cannot focus worship services around what is in it for us in terms of earthly benefits. All we are doing then is promoting self-curvature, making the Christian life all about me and all about what I am going to gain either materially or whatever other way you want to say it. That is distorted love; all that does is works for self-advantage. No, we are called to work toward self-donation, kenosis.

Kenosis is Paul’s term. Does that mean that God doesn’t give blessings during this life-time? No, I have been blessed beyond imagination. My wife and I have had all of our needs met according to his riches in glory and then abundance on top of that. But, we are not called to put those things first. As is true of all aspects of the Christian life, the Word of God leads us into the fullness intended for the worshiping body of Christ. We want to step into the joy of worship.

IV. Questions and Answers

A. Is Corporate Worship a Reflection of Individual Worship and Individual Worship a reflection of Corporate?

Worship is entering into a relationship among the trinity and it is true first in our hearts and then it works out at a corporate level if that is your leadership role. Is this a fair way of thinking of it and is it fair to think of it in reverse as well? I’m trying to think of a red flag; if I am a leader in the church, would it be a red flag for me to look at corporate worship and if it looks like it is focused on the human benefit, do I need to ask about my own personal worship and am I really worshiping as an individual? In other words, is the corporate a reflection of the individual or is the individual a reflection of the corporate?

Worship begins for all of us as a response to how God has loved us. Even as there is a giving and receiving of love in the trinity, I’m called to receive the love that the Father has for me that is demonstrated through the Son and applied to the Holy Spirit; his presence is with me, loving, guiding, uphold, and inspiring. My own personal worship is an outflow of that. What I think you are saying, the red flag comes when I as the leader see worship as a mere functional part of my job. In other words, I am there to perform this service, not in the worship type of sense instead to perform a function and that it needs to be good. I need to inspire the people and meet their needs. Could it be, so that they will affirm me and like me and keep me around? This can be an exaggeration but it can also be right. So, is this a function or does worship flow out of a very strong and ongoing relationship that I have with God? I as the leader of the flock am inviting others to be a part of this amazing reality of honoring God.

B. How do you Implement Change in a Way that People will Respond Positively?

In listening to this morning’s teaching about worship; is first all very inspirational and I think anybody with a heart for God will find themselves responding and wanting to worship better. But when I turn around and think of how to implement this in a church setting, for most people, we are finding ourselves already in a leadership position of a church. The so-called worship has been set up by the denomination long ago or by church tradition or whatever. So, it is already fairly fixed. There is the issue of trying to fix it and try to implement a less meeting the needs type worship and more toward the act. I think it is very obvious what is going to happen, people will leave. They are not getting what they came for, which was a good show for example or a Christian variety show. I find there is a dichotomy of how you actually implement this in a way that people can accept it.

You are talking about a process which is one of the great questions before the church today. If we know things are not quite where they need to me or far away from where they need to me, what would be a God honoring and people blessing process be in order to move it. One of the things that we actually say for church planting which you have been a part of. In many cases, it is easier to start with a whole newly formed church as long as you have it down in your own heart and mind. This is how I believe God wants us to go. But, nevertheless, I want leaders who aren’t planning to be encouraged by this. It can be done and it can be done without blowing the thing apart. Will people leave? Probably, I can’t control that. This is part of having a migratory congregational culture anyway. Sometimes, it is because of you and sometimes it has nothing to do with you. A short answer would be team work; can I get a leadership team rolling? If you are the leader, then yes you can. Can I get a team rolling to iron this type of stuff out? There are wonderful organizations that can help you. One such organization is Spiritual Leaders INK out of Kentucky, a proven organization to help you get a leadership team to help you work out what God’s will is and his vision for us here. How can we start revising our mission and our vision? How can we have concerts of prayer where you get the whole congregation to come in and pray for different things and receive input from everybody that wants to speak into it? There are ways to do this without blowing the whole thing apart. Another organization is from Ashbury Theological Seminary. There is a whole branch that is teaching people how to do this. Cultural change can take place and it can take place without a war.

C. Prayer to Invite and acknowledge God’s Presence

I have been in worship services where there is actually very little prayer during the worship, an opening prayer or closing prayer but perhaps not even that much. But even if we have a prayer that would invite the Holy Spirit into the worship service and ask the Lord to be here in this place and in this time whether it includes liturgy or whatever the form is. A lot services have deleted a lot of prayers.

That is exactly what we are also finding in our interviews. You can be in a worship service and worship is never mentioned. A simply approach here is be explicit in saying that we are gathered here to worship God.

The purpose of this is to get our leaders focused. What is your job, what is really your ministry here? It may not quite be what you think it is according to contemporary cultural terms. But let me also say, you can transition it all. It can be done; the Lord can help you. You take what you have and through his love and grace, you transition it.