As a Church Community, one of the obvious things we do is participate in worship. Going on the assumption that all people were created to praise and adore something, I take this to be a good thing. The irony is, what is supposed to be a good thing causes people to bicker and argue, demonize some, ridicule others, and actually believe that a particular method of worship is given directly from God. Methods of approaching God quickly become the object of our worship and we are guilty of idolatry.
The difficulty in developing an exhaustive list is that the Bible is radically silent on the required elements of group worship. We can look for descriptions, but beyond a few prescribed elements (preaching, singing, sacraments), there is freedom. It would be much easier if we could turn to chapter and verse and read, “Thus saith the Lord, ‘thou shalt gather in a public building on Sunday between the hours of…sing for a period of…incline thine ears to the oration of the Scriptures for…and give thanks to Him who giveth all things as thou hasten forth before thy Sunday lunch.’”
At Missio Dei, we are committed to gathering for the purpose of proclaiming the good news that Jesus Christ lived perfectly as our substitute, died in our place as a guilty sinner, and overcame sin and death in the Resurrection giving to believers His Divine Spirit as a downpayment until He comes again to perfectly restore creation. Our aim is to make everything we do as the Church gathered (from the welcoming of newcomers, to the blessing of our community as they go) to proclaim this magnificent truth and so we include various elements hoping to make it clear.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll break down the included elements giving a theological basis and goals. I’ll attempt to cover them systematically, biblically, and historically in the hopes that we approach our gathering times together with greater intentionality and a more clear proclamation of the Gospel.
