Every member of the church is meant to participate in the church’s gathered worship, because the Bible insists that we do.
Continuing my series on my Eucharismatic manifesto, I’d like to talk about the importance of what we might call ‘worship,’ but I’ve referred to as ‘prayer.’
I’ve deliberately shifted the language because I want to continue to insist the worship of the church is word and sacrament, which includes the words we sing and pray, but is more than the part of our meetings where we sing songs.
When I’m speaking here of ‘prayer’ I mean both sung and spoken prayer, expressed to God as part of our worship of him because he is worthy of all honour.
In lots of churches songs are sung, and some prayers are offered, but I believe that the Bible gives us a book of order for what this should look like—1 Corinthians 12-14—and it’s messier than you might expect.
Because every member of the church is a priest in the Temple (1 Peter 2), every member gets to offer valid worship to the LORD. Because the Spirit has been poured out on all flesh (Acts 2), all those who are filled with the Spirit can speak with the Church’s prophetic voice, and so we hear from God in the sacraments, in the Bible and the preaching of the Bible, but also in the people’s prayers.
Paul in 1 Corinthians is trying to correct a chaotic situation. When the Corinthians church gathers they fail to prefer each other. We see this in the way they eat the Supper (1 Corinthians 11), but they also speak over each other in ecstatic utterance, not waiting until the previous is finished. They speak in tongues without interpretations, and they love tongues speaking so much that they don’t have the richness that God calls them to in the way they worship.
As a result, Paul calls them to be orderly, charging elders with keeping the worship orderly. In many churches today you would never know that this was needed, and we need the opposite correction. I honestly think that if elders never have to bring order to your Sunday meetings because the contributions the members are bringing get a bit out of hand, then you’re not doing it right. I’m all in favour of carefully thought-through liturgy that repeats the story of scripture. And the Holy Spirit has been poured out on all flesh, dramatically and dynamically filling the lives of believers, so the cosmos is open to surprise: your meetings should be too.
The churches I’ve helped to lead allow for what we would call contributions, by which we mean spontaneous prayers, prophetic words, reading of the Bible, tongues (with the expectation that someone will then interpret—and that those leading the meeting will stop and wait for it if that doesn’t happen), or starting songs which the rest of us then join in singing. I understand this to be what Paul is expecting churches to look like.
These come from the floor, with complete freedom for anyone to say anything. Some churches that feel similarly want contributions to be given to a microphone so that they can be vetted first—I understand the impulse but, in my experience, it throttles the ability of most people to actually take part in the meeting. It requires more leadership to allow it to be open to the floor, sometimes you get long awkward silences (that’s OK, it’s part of it), other times you have to correct a contribution that was wrong in some fashion without crushing the person who bravely offered it, and other times you have to step in to stop the weirdness.
It’s important in the New Testament church that every member has a genuine ability to lead the rest of the church in our priestly function, under the direction of the Spirit.
It’s not an easy way to worship, it requires training, it requires careful leadership each Sunday. It requires bravery on behalf of leaders, sometimes you have to stand at the front and wait in silence. It requires different skills from worship leaders and musicians: not picking all your songs before you start, expecting to fit their songs to what the Spirit says or maybe just start playing along to a song started from the floor. It requires leaders to lose their ego each week, as what you’re hoping for is the people will say what God is saying, not that you will: when it’s going best you simply comment pastorally on what we’ve heard in various contributions, helping others to see the thread.
It’s difficult for leaders, it’s not any more difficult for the average church member, and there’s an opportunity to allow your heart of worship directed to the Lord to flow over into speech of one sort or another as the Spirit prompts.
But, this is how it’s meant to be, as we worship together in Spirit and in Truth.
Photo by Gabriel Brito on Unsplash
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