Worship: A Many-Splendored Thing

Ever since I first became a Presbyterian, back in 1959, worship has been important to me in my life of faith. Well, actually, worship has always been important. I have often said that the Baptists taught me about the Bible, the Episcopalians gave me an appreciation of liturgy, and the Presbyterians provided a sense of church structure and polity. Always these elements have been for me set within the context of worship. Almost from the time we joined the Presbyterian church in Madison, I served on the Worship Committee there. At Duke Divinity School, the first course I signed up for was a history and survey of Christian worship. And one more credential to add to this list: when the Presbyterians published the Book of Common Worship, I was already familiar with its contents, having worked for several years with its proposed resources before they were finally approved and published in the form we now have.

I attended every workshop possible on worship over my years as a member at Madison. Our committee sampled various forms of worship and versions of liturgy. We experimented and then once a general pattern was agreed upon, following the recommended form, it was followed thereafter with some modifications from time to time. Once I began serving churches myself, I was a stickler for what ought to be in a Service for the Lord’s Day. When congregations showed me how they had “always done it,” I worked hard to introduce them to the “proper” order and content of worship. My successes were rare, but usually there were some gradual changes to what was deemed good Reformed worship. There were battles, of course, over adopting the newest hymnal but even those mountains were finally scaled. The grounding was that Book of Common Worship.

Then I began an interim ministry in two small churches in Stokes County. There were printed bulletins for each church with different orders of worship, and neither congregation followed the “accepted” forms. The two churches used different hymnbooks, neither of which I had ever seen before, and neither based on the Reformed tradition. I was nearly distraught. This isn’t right! I thought, looking through previous bulletins. I resolved to set those folks straight about what should and shouldn’t be in a worship service, and about where in the service those elements should go, and also, what were the proper liturgical colors to use. The last piece was the easiest to resolve: neither church used paraments, so I crossed that issue off my list.

The third or fourth time I led worship in the churches, something began to dawn on me. Because nothing was as it should be, nothing correctly attended to in the course of worship, I discovered a sense of liberation! I was free – free at last from the constraints of being part of the worship police. By the time my ministry ended at those small churches, I had learned that it is not necessarily the order or the correctness of worship that takes priority. It is instead being in the holy presence of the people of God that matters. There in those small churches “far from the madding crowd,” I began to sense the surroundings as blessed by the Holy Spirit, that we were standing on holy ground, sharing our songs from the heart, feeding one another from the Table, listening for God’s word and for what that word meant for us in our time and in our place. I had been liberated from conformity, from particularity of things, from the dictates of the right piece in the right place with the right words in the right time. I let go and as the saying goes, let God be revealed, however that might be, throughout the service.

Now, it is true that on occasion I have been a back-slider and tried once again to set the standard order of worship as the Proper Way to Worship. But then I am drawn back to that other realization, that worship services were designed by the People of God in order to give God praise and to offer our petitions, intercessions, and thanksgivings. How we do that, and in what order, and with what words, is simply our own undertaking. It can be flexible to meet the needs of worshipers, and to address the texts of the day, and to encourage creativity. After all, we are made in the image of our Creator.

I remembered the main teaching about worship as posited by the Danish theologian and philospher, Kierkegaard: the congregation, choir, preacher, and all others in the service are the performers for God, Who is the Audience. It’s not so much about us as it is about the One we worship, the Three-in-One, Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer. We sing our hearts out for that One who listens there in the sanctuary. We pray, we plead, we give thanksgivings with tears in our eyes, we grieve the sorrows that come upon us, but always . . . always . . . God is there, with the healing wings of the Risen Christ spread wide as the whole world.