DOES GOD CARE ABOUT THE FORM IN WHICH WE WORSHIP?

I presently attend an Orthodox Presbyterian Church. They are proudly Reformed. In other words they take their doctrine seriously and have attempted to piece together a coherent and consistent theology based upon Scripture. They are liturgical. In other words they have thought about each aspect of the Lord’s Day (Sunday) worship service, and have structured it in such a way as to reflect their systematic theology. The sermons are typically a detailed exegeses of Scripture, so much so that we have been doing a study of Luke for about five years now and are only a little over half way through. We sing only hymns (typically written over two hundred years ago) and the psalms put to music. We sing only this type of music primarily for two reasons. One is the deep theological concepts that the words of these songs bring forth and because the church believes that the music of these songs are properly reverent for use in worship.

We are keenly aware that Sunday morning worship is first and foremost about God. He is the audience and we are the participants. It is not about us, it is about Him. We believe that there is a proper form to the worship God requires of us, and we should therefore conform our desires and our emotions to this proper form. If we don’t like this form then the problem is us, not the form. We are constantly told that we should not conform our worship to the surrounding culture. Therefore we eschew all forms of worship that attempt to contextualize the service to the culture.

I used to believe most of this and still do in part; however I now also believe that our form of worship, can become so rigid, unintelligible and unnatural to the participant’s everyday lives that it causes a stumbling block to our desire to worship. If this happens we become mere unthinking unemotional robots going through the motions of the service by rote, but never truly worshipping God. Unfortunately, Lord’s Day worship is NOT all about Him, as this neglects a key factor in worship that being the congregation doing the worship. As noted before, we are the participants of worship, and if the Church neglects this critical aspect, it will quickly find that the worship is dead in spite of our desires to truly worship, and instead of reaching the throne room of heaven, it reaches only to the ceiling. Perhaps we should not worry about the need to tweak the proper form, but we are called to worship in Spirit as well as in Truth, and we are fallen individuals who will constantly need the faith contextualized for us, or it will become so foreign that it will be unintelligible. Does God care about how we worship Him? Absolutely, but He cares more about our heart. I believe that a “contemporary” service with a praise band and praise songs, who truly believe and is singing with all their heart to Jesus is more pleasing to God, than a rigidly structured Episcopalian service (or pick your favorite proper form) where the congregation is just going through the motions. But can we have both, the proper form with the proper heart? I think we can, but we must walk a fine line, and unfortunately that line moves with the people that make up the congregation.

One of the hallmarks of the Reformation was that it made the Faith accessible to the masses. No longer would one need to know Latin to understand what was going on in the service. No longer would one need to be able to read Latin to read Scripture. No longer would the songs be chanted by the clergy in tunes foreign to the congregation’s everyday lives in a language in which no one could understand. In this the Reformers were returning to a prior notion of the early church of “baptizing” the culture. It was their desire to take the Faith from the purview of the elite clergy and return it to the everyday man. They had to do this because the Roman Catholic Church had insisted on the rigidity of their form, and had put this “proper” form of the worship in front of the needs of their congregation. In our effort to reform our worship let’s not make the same mistake.