Blogotional: Yeah - What Is It?

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

Yeah - What Is It?

Godspace wonders about worship and makes an interesting point:

I hosted a blog series over the summer on worshipping God in the real world. To be honest I was a little disappointed with the response Most of the posts were about traditional spiritual practices like praying and singing hymns in the midst of everyday life. Now don’t get me wrong, I think that these are very important, but what I was really hoping for were more contributions that unpacked the ways that we can worship God through ordinary everyday acts of life like taking a shower, walking in the park and even reading the newspaper.

That's an excellent point - I have long thought about worship as obedience. If the idea is to acknowledge the kingship of God, He must be king at all times.

But then Christine take an interesting turn:

We must learn to take our worship outside the church box and do so we must continue to take church outside the boxes of tradition we have wanted to confine it in. To do so we must constantly encourage our worship leaders to become worship curators just like Mark suggests.

Unfortunately this is never easy because it means we also need to take theology outside the boxes in which we have placed it. As Mark comments:
A worship event should never be about theological purity. It should always be about ordinary people engaging their messy selves with the transformative person of the God who became flesh and lived in this messiness.
And that for me is where worship and the real world connect. As we take worship outside its boxes we become more sensitive to the presence of God in every ordinary mundane act of life and eventually all of life becomes worship to God. Would love to hear your thoughts on this. How do you think we move our understanding of worship outside the church box and into the world?

Now here I think I must disagree a bit. Worship must happen in all times and places - but the specific worship service should be, I think, the place where I witness and experience the holy. Now, for sure and for certain, holiness is not about theology, but it is also not mundane and everyday. The worship service must be sacred, uplifting, enlightening - it must open the door just a bit more on seeing God.

Bringing the mundane into the worship service will more likely bring it down to mundane levels, rather than urge us to bring the rest of our lives up to God's level.

Technorati Tags:worship, worship service, every day
Generated By Technorati Tag Generator