About 2 years ago I wrote a post in response to my friend Randy and InternetMonk entitled A novel idea for churches - read the Bible. I expressed a certain amount of surprise that there were churches where the Bible is little read.
Now Craig confirms that this is an issue for the Australian church too.
Could the issue be that ‘worship’ is seen in some quarters as something separate from the exposition of the word? There’s a ‘worship time’ - singing, praying and so on - and then the sermon with its associated Bible reading. The Word is ‘tacked on’ to the ‘worship’, just as in the past Communion was a tacked on addition to nonconformist services (in Britain at least) The Bible becomes a book to be studied, but its reading is not strictly part of worship?
{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }
John Meunier 07.14.09 at 4:20 pm
I’ve read somewhere (forget where now) that this dichotomy is often experienced by people in the pews. The “worship” part is different from the part where a guy or gal gets up and drones on for a while about something they don’t understand.
Our preaching contributes to this view. Preaching is not always practiced as worship. It is often in some of the largest US congregations presented as a kind of self-help exercise. I struggle to figure out what it means for preaching to be worship, but I’m pretty sure it is not dispatching moral lessons and tips to improve our quality of life.
Chris P 07.14.09 at 4:43 pm
On a number of occassions I have been welcomed by stewards with the words “we are really looking forward to your message today.” or during the vestry prayer they will pray for my message, but there seems little mention if any of the worship!
Perhaps we need to think about worship in a holistic manner. That the whole of the service is an act of worship for God and from God.
Tony Buglass 07.14.09 at 6:20 pm
The whole thing should be worship - in our hymns, praises, prayers when we open our hearts to God, and in our reading and exposition, when we try to let him speak to us. I hate it when someone says “Let’s have a time of worship, now…” - what have we been doing for the last half-hour or hour?
One of my bug-bears…
Kim 07.14.09 at 6:21 pm
I struggle to figure out what it means for preaching to be worship, but I’m pretty sure it is not dispatching moral lessons and tips to improve our quality of life.
I’m sure you’re absolutely sure, John. And you’re absolutely right.
If you want an idea - and example - of “what it means for preaching to be worship,” I’ve just left a comment - mainly an extended excerpt from a sermon by Herbert McCabe - over at Halden Doerege’s blog Inhabitatio Dei on his post “God’s Self-Understanding”. Maybe Richard will do a link for us … (I still don’t know how to do the buggers!).
John 07.14.09 at 7:32 pm
Thank you for the pointer, Kim.
Here is a link to that post. I found the illustration helpful.
Hope I got the HTML correct or I just made a mess of the comment.
Beth 07.14.09 at 7:53 pm
Don’t do it, Richard - I’ve just sent Kim an email explaining how to link, so let him try it out for himself!
PamBG 07.14.09 at 10:09 pm
Count me as another who isn’t particularly keen that the word ‘worship’ seems to have turned into some kind of version of ‘raving to Christian music.’
I can’t really comment on situations in the US or in Australia, but I do think Christians need to become a lot more familiar with the content of the bible. I suspect that a lot of people also have to sit down and be given information on processes of biblical interpretation and then wrestle with what they believe is the process that they would choose.
One of the things I find ‘interesting’ - and not necessarily in a good way - is that a lot of the congregations in the area to which I’m moving in the US which are doing really exciting social justice work and seem to take discipleship seriously also affirm the verbal inspiration and complete inerrancy of Scripture. The mainstream needs committed disciples who are biblically literate and who are confident in a hermeneutic (a fancy word for ‘the process of interpretation’) that stands the test of time, reason and experience.
Richard 07.14.09 at 10:46 pm
I’ve always thought that the opportunity to work together on social justice is much more important than protecting the purity of “our” interpretation. Whoever “we” might be. Christians too often divide from one another on that basis. I agree with you about the urgent need for Biblical literacy in the mainstream.
Fat Prophet 07.15.09 at 6:08 am
Unless I am very much mistaken I thought that the whole of a service was an act of worship. For me every element is an important and integral part of a cohesive act of worship and reading of the Bible is as much a part of that process as the offering. I am always pleased when I go to a church and people turn to the readings in either their own or pew Bibles. I think, and again this is one of my generalisations, that many of our members never look at or open a Bible other than on Sunday when they are at worship. Perhaps we could learn something from those of other faiths in this respect. I note as I travel from work past a local Mosque the young people going to Mosque all carrying their own copy of the Koran, generally wrapped up in cloth and treated with great respect but at the same time read and studied- makes me think!
PamBG 07.15.09 at 8:26 am
Unless I am very much mistaken I thought that the whole of a service was an act of worship.
I agree with this, absolutely. Also agree on reading and studying the bible outside of Sunday church. The problem, of course, is that no one can force people to do this. We have to find ways of encouraging people and making the discipline seem both necessary and interesting.
One thing we found in one of my churches is that we have called a group that meets during weekday evenings a ‘fellowship group’. This is an elderly congregation for whom the word ‘fellowship’ sounds positive (I think, perhaps, it would be a strange word for 20-somethings). We have a lot more people coming to the ‘fellowship’ group than we had coming to the ‘bible study’ group but we are, in fact, studying the bible. We do leave a good 30 to 45 minutes for socializing as well and it seems like an effective combination.
Dave Warnock 07.21.09 at 11:55 am
I made a slight mistake in preparing the worship for Sunday afternoon’s worship.
I was using SongPro and put in a scripture reading from Mark 6. The only problem is that I seemed to miss out the end verse.
So in the service I said we are going to read together 5 verses from Mark 6 starting at verse 30. But they just kept going, felt like we were about to read the rest of the New Testament.
I was thinkling of this post when this was happening but still decided to stop after a few extra verses and restart the service at the song following the reading.
On the other hand people seemed quite happy reading along, maybe next time I’ll just let it go and we can carry on reading right through.