So while at Urbana, I had the opportunity to participate in a panel discussion on “The Missional Church and Worship.” I didn’t know much about it going into the discussion, and I quickly discovered that most of the participants were using the term “missional” simply to mean “people who boldly proclaim with words the name of Jesus.” I wasn’t surprised, but I tried to give my perspective on how being missional involves following Jesus in word and in deed.
In my introductory statements on how I see mission and worship as being one and the same, I brought up what the Bible says about justice and worship. In Isaiah 1 God says he hates our worship gatherings – finds them meaningless and detestable – if we are participating in injustices and not seeking justice for the oppressed. And in Isaiah 58 we are told that the sort of worship practices God desires are those that “loose the chains of injustice, and untie the cords of the yoke, set the oppressed free, and break every yoke. To share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood.” Worship has to be about serving God by serving others. Worship is mission which is seeking justice for the oppressed. The Bible is very clear about that and I think we have strayed far too far in the modern church from this biblical conception of worship. While most Christians might admit (hopefully) that worship isn’t just the singing of songs, I think very few realize that feeding the hungry is an act of worship and devotion to God. It is something the church must reclaim.
So I made my assertion that a missional church will be seeking justice as an act of worship and I got an interesting response from the audience in return. One man said that these days he sees certain students caring so much about serving others that they neglect the acts of piety like doing devotions and praying so we need to be careful about encouraging things like seeking justice. I actually didn’t get a chance to respond to the statement as one of the other panel members jumped in and claimed that practices of piety should always be at the center of our worshiping practices. My first thought though was, “did this guy miss the part in the Bible where God says he DESPISES our acts of piety if we are not seeking justice at the same time???” But my next response was to feel heartbroken at how in the American church we have so equated worship with cultural habits that we fail to see how biblical worship is even worship at all.
I know I probably don’t score very well on the typical evangelical worship meter. I don’t do the singing endless praise choruses thing. I don’t put “Praise the Lord!” in my Facebook status update at least once a day. I don’t do fill-in-the-blank “bible studies.” I don’t read spiritual devotiony sort of books expecting a paragraph or two of religious sounding words to fill me up each morning. I don’t meet for marathon prayer sessions where I have to pray for someone’s neighbor’s cat or something. I know all those things work for some people to help them celebrate God, and they used to work for me too, but I’ve realized that I cannot limit worship (and God) by insisting that those cultural habits are the only or best ways to worship God. Sure, I dig deep into scripture, I pray, and I celebrate God, it’s just that my acts of piety don’t fit the 20th Century American Evangelical Contemporary Christian Subculture box. And because of that I’ve been accused at times of not being a Christian. Or at least reminded of what my faith and worship habits should be looking like.
So when I hear a pastor warn against following scripture in order to encourage these cultural habits, I get uneasy. Worship cannot be confined to a box – be that the box of evangelical devotions or praise music or reformed liturgy or Catholic Mass. And following the biblical mandate to worship God through seeking justice isn’t in opposition to, but is instead part of personal piety and devotion to God. We are loving God, celebrating God’s greatness, and reflecting God’s glory by participating in the acts of service we are instructed to do. It isn’t that I seek justice some days and worship on others – it is all worship. How I meditate on God’s word and how I seek justice for the oppressed will of course look different than how others do it – but we are all still worshiping.
Worship is much bigger than ourselves, and I think to truly be a missional church we need to get over ourselves and our allegiances to cultural habits and start integrating what God said he wants from our worship into what we do.