Performing the Gospel

in liturgy and lifestyle

Charles Sherlock

• Publisher: Broughton Publishing Pty Ltd
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780987045874
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

Performance is a time-honoured way of thinking about what a Christian congregation does when it gathers. Christian services typically set out to have us take part in the great Divine drama that revolves around Jesus Christ. But what really matters about how we perform the gospel in church, and beyond? This is what this book sets out to explore.

In an era when the choices of worship style are often presented as polar opposites to prove a point, Charles Sherlock offers a refreshing alternative to blind conservatism or deconstructionism... I’m looking forward to parishes, theological colleges and worship committees to take up the challenge that is laid out... It deserves wide attention.
-- From the foreword by Archbishop Philip Freier

Chapter One

Liturgy and lifestyle: performing Christian worship

Overview

Part A	reflects on what ‘worship’ means, and addresses some confusing ideas about it—the ‘theory’ behind Part B.
Part B	explores the basic thesis of this book—that worship combines liturgy and lifestyle as interactive performing of the gospel.
Part C	poses questions about how worship works out in practice, especially in your local church.
Part D	is a little more specialist, outlining the Liturgical Movement. This scholarly movement did much of the ‘back room’ work that undergirds the changes in Christian liturgy over the past half-century. Many regular worshippers are unaware of its influence on their worship—but it is a story worth knowing, and lays foundations for later chapters.

Part ASo what is ‘worship’?

To many, ‘worship’ is whatever people do when in ‘religious’ mode. It happens for an hour (or three) on Sunday mornings in a church building, where someone upfront, acting like an orchestra conductor, might be referred to as a ‘worship leader’. Some speak of a ‘worship time’ during a service, meaning a period of intense focus upon God, usually involving singing or prayers tinged with emotion, and having a ‘worshipful’ tone.

Worship without a dimension of communal and personal experience can be barren—but making our experiences central is spiritually dangerous. We then tend to focus on our feelings; and leaders focus on feeling good about their speaking, singing or acting skills, rather than concentrating on performing the gospel. The outcome is spiritual consumerism—‘church-hopping’ for the best spiritual entertainment.

In reaction, other Christians emphasise that worship should be ‘objective’, a time when we engage together in time-honoured words and actions that recognise and express the ‘worth-ship’ of God. Taken to an extreme, however, this can end up in sub-Christian notions of going through ritual motions to gain divine favour.

Ideas like these are not untrue, but they are only part of the story. When they dominate our thinking they can be dangerous, distracting us from true worship—performing the gospel in and out of church.

Worship according to the scriptures

The Jewish and Christian scriptures describe ‘worship’ in a wide variety of ways, much wider and deeper than just ‘religious’ or ‘cultic’ activities (which are typically criticised sharply in the Bible, especially by the prophets and Jesus). Both First and New Testaments present worship as involving all we do in response to God’s love. As Paul summarises it in writing to the Roman church:

Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable worship. (Romans 12:1)

The performance of worship includes our bodies, and embraces our whole lifestyle as Christians—how we live out our faith in Christ year on year, both personally and as churches. Yes, worship is to take place on Sundays, but even more so in daily life: consider Isaiah 58 or Romans 12, for example. Andrew McGowan, concluding a scholarly overview of ‘worship’ in the New Testament, writes:

‘Worship’ henceforth means those practices that constitute Christian communal and ritual life, as reflected in the NT itself and thereafter ... ‘Worship’ in the sense employed here is about bodies and spaces and objects, as well as words.1

So when we meet together as ‘church’, we perform the core of Christian faith: we celebrate what God is, does and means for us, we feed on Christ through scripture and sacrament, and share the “fellowship of the Holy Spirit”. But in doing so, we reflect on and are re-energised for our ongoing lifestyle of Christian worship. In short, in church we perform the good news of God’s saving truth and so are formed into maturity in Christ (Ephesians 4:11), and become more skilled to perform the gospel in daily living.

In the scriptures, the words which the English term ‘worship’ usually translates are abodah (Hebrew), latreia and diakonia (Greek). Each carries the idea of authorised service or ministry on behalf of others: in ordinary life they describe the skilled, thoughtful work that a person undertakes for others. So an ambassador ‘serves’ his or her nation by obediently representing it to others; a waiter ‘serves’ food and drink to guests on behalf of the host. This traditional meaning can be seen in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer wedding service, where the man says to the woman, as part of his marriage promise, “with my body I thee worship”. The groom is not promising to ‘worship’ her as if she were God, but to ‘serve’ her in practical ways. In Israel of old, a priest ‘served’ God through offering tangible prayers and praises (i.e. sacrifices) on behalf of the whole people: Romans 9.4; 12.1; Philippians 3.3; Hebrews 9.1–6; I Peter 2.9–11 are typical ways in which New Testament writers took up these ideas.

In years gone by, signs outside a church building would often read ‘Divine Service’ followed by a time. This points up a nice double meaning. The phrase ‘the worship of God’ can be understood in two ways—the worship we offer God, and the ways in which God serves us. (In technical terms, these are the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ genitive ways of reading the phrase—the German Gottesdienst embraces both ideas.) Both senses are important: according to the scriptures, worship is grounded in God’s ‘divine service’ to us, inspiring our response of ‘service’ to God (with all that entails for the whole of life).

And this is no half-hearted matter. In the scriptures, an act of worship is usually described as hishtahawah (Hebrew) or proskuneo (Greek). These carry a strongly physical sense—to lie flat on one’s face before someone, to ‘prostrate’ oneself (see Exodus 3.6, Revelation 5:14 or Luke 4:8 for example). On God’s part, ‘divine service’ entailed Christ’s taking on our human form and laying down his life, even to death (see Philippians 2:5–11). On our part, such ‘service’ calls for a whole-hearted, Spirit-inspired response of reverent awe in God’s presence, glad obedience to God’s will, and treasured delight in God’s word.

True, false and imperfect worship

True worship embraces the whole of our response to God’s love— our attitudes, words, thoughts, behaviour, motives. In reality, our responses is never wholly true, since we are creatures and not the Creator, and live in a world distorted by sin and evil, and limited by death. As Christians, we offer worship in faith that God, who knows us inside out, sees us in Christ, and gladly accepts the true worship he offers on our behalf.

This does not excuse us from facing the inadequacies of our worship. In doing so, however, it is important to distinguish between false worship—serving ourselves rather than God, which is idolatry (see Exodus 20:3)—and imperfect worship, not serving God truly (consider 1 Corinthians 11:27–32).

We all worship imperfectly, but confusing this with false worship, especially when speaking of other Christians, leads to ‘holier than thou’ pride, and fosters division. And both categories apply to the whole of life, not just how we perform the gospel (or not) in church— consider 2 Corinthians 8 and Ephesians 5.5 for example.

To live falsely is to run the risk of denying the gospel; to live imperfectly is part of our human condition as finite mortals. Even so, we each live “by faith in the Son of God who loved me, and gave himself for me” (as Paul wrote in Galatians 2:20).

Part BWorship = liturgy + lifestyle

The proper term for describing what happens when we assemble as Christian people for worship is ‘liturgy’. Some see this term as representing stuffy, controlled, boring and inflexible rites. But having this specific word ‘liturgy’ allows ‘worship’ to keep its wider biblical sense. The Greek word which ‘liturgy’ transliterates is leitourgia, the ‘work [ergon] of the people [laos]’—or as we might render it, ‘public service’.² Liturgy is of fundamental importance in worship, but does not exist for its own sake. Rather, its rhythms, rituals and familiar words lay ‘godly ruts’ in heart, mind, body and soul for our daily worship, following Christ as his disciples.

In short, ‘worship’ = ‘liturgy’ + ‘lifestyle’. The gospel we perform in church shapes, celebrates and corrects the gospel we perform ‘24/7’. Frederic Buechner puts this in an interesting way:

Phrases like Worship Service or Service of Worship are basically tautologies. To worship God means to serve him. Basically there are two ways to do this.

One way is to do things for him that God needs to have done—run errands for him, carry messages for him, fight on his side, feed his lambs, and so on.

The other way is to do things for him that you need to do—sing songs for him, create beautiful things for him, give things up for him, tell him what’s on your mind and in your heart, in general rejoice and make a fool of yourself for him the ways lovers have always made fools of themselves for the one they love.³

So far ‘worship’ has been discussed from a ‘Gods-eye’ perspective, a theo-logical approach—performing the gospel of God. It is hard to think of a better Christian place to begin! But left to itself, this approach may not leave our human experience untouched—after all, worship involves our lifestyles. More ‘descriptive’ definitions of worship are thus both legitimate and necessary, expressing it in terms of what we humans so or experience.

Consider this suggestion, based on the lexical work of Nouw and Lida: “Worship is attitudes and actions expressing obedience and allegiance to what is worshipped.”⁴ When people say things like “Chris worships the ground Lesley walks on,” it is this wider understanding which is in view. Its particular strength is the assumption that all human beings engage in ‘worship’ of some kind—the question is whether or not the ground and object of our allegiance, and ‘ultimate service’, is the living God. Good things like sport, the arts, business, the nation, our family etc. easily become the central focus in our living, and thus become idols.

Some scholars seek to blend a more explicitly theological perspective with human experience in defining worship. So Evelyn Underhill describes it as “the response of the creature to the Eternal”,⁵ while the Second Vatican Council in 1965 famously taught that worship involves “the sanctification of men in Christ, and the glorification of God”.⁶ James White seeks to move beyond just words alone: Christian worship, he writes, is “speaking and touching in God’s name”—a concept close to that of worship as performing the gospel.⁷

One useful aspect of a descriptive approach is that the tensions and balances encountered in reflecting on worship become more evident:

•True worship holds together both our internal attitudes and external behaviour. As Jesus told the Samaritan woman (John 4:23–24), we are called to worship God in spirit (i.e. in our Spirit-given...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Liturgy and lifestyle: performing Christian worship
• Chapter 2: Setting the scene: spaces for gospel performance
• Chapter 3: Being ‘upfront’: performing and presiding
• Chapter 4: The words of gospel performance
• Chapter 5: Performing the gospel ‘according to the scriptures’
• Chapter 6: The sound of music in performing the gospel
• Chapter 7: Seeing is believing? Liturgy on screen
• Chapter 8: When we perform the gospel: times and seasons
• Chapter 9: Common prayer? Planning to perform the gospel
• Further reading