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Commentary
GEN-X RISING: Worship: a vital means of grace Andrew C. Thompson, Aug 13, 2009
Andrew C. Thompson
By Andrew C. Thompson UMR Columnist
Why do we worship?
I’ve been asking myself that question a lot this summer. And I think our confusion over it represents a problem that ripples through our understanding of Christian discipleship.
I worked at a summer program for high school youth last month that invites teenagers to view their calling in life through the lens of Christian worship. For most of them, it was a revolutionary experience.
But of course, summer is also the time when regular attendance in most churches falls significantly. That suggests many churchgoers think a simple change of season is reason enough to relax their attitudes about weekly worship attendance.
It also seems like a lot of our thinking about worship focuses on what it can do for us practically.
Our United Methodist anxiety over the numbers of youth and young adults in our churches leads us to think that mechanically altering worship styles will solve many of our problems.
So we use terms like “traditional,” “blended,” “contemporary” or “emergent” to describe our services. And we employ terms like “relevant” and “exciting” and “cutting edge” to describe what we hope worship will be.
Those approaches suggest that we really think worship is about meeting our own perceived needs: The “right” worship will draw young people and reverse numerical decline. Worship that is “relevant” will speak to the contemporary culture around us. And an “exciting” or “powerful” worship service will make us feel good and convince us that coming to church at an inconvenient hour of the week was worth it after all.
Notice anything missing?
The Westminster Shorter Catechism, written in the 1640s during the English Civil War, asks the question, “What is the chief end of man?” The answer: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.”
That statement—while not official Methodist doctrine—says something profound about how we should think about worship. We come together to hear the word of God preached, to receive the sacraments, and to pray and sing our faith because those activities bring glory to the God we know in Jesus Christ. That means worship is the best way to pursue the very end for which we’re created!
The second part of the Westminster Catechism’s teaching is also significant. It says that a part of our chief end is to enjoy God forever. It sounds simple enough, but the Catechism doesn’t mean “enjoy” in a simplistic sense. To enjoy God is to become like God, to be progressively healed of the sin that plagues our lives and to be renewed in God’s own image.
Here’s where our own Wesleyan tradition can help us understand how we should worship—and why it is so vitally important.
Enjoying God, in the Wesleyan sense, means being sanctified or being made truly whole by the working of grace. That can only happen through our committed and sustained participation in the means of grace that God has provided for us.
Wesley wrote quite a bit about the means of grace. And not surprisingly, he associates most of the central means of grace with worship: prayer, searching the Scriptures and the Lord’s Supper. These practices must be done in community because the power of the grace we receive through them is manifested primarily in congregational worship.
When Wesley says, “There is no holiness but social holiness,” he’s referring to the reality that the Holy Spirit works to transform individuals as they relate corporately in Christian love to God and one another.
So worship should be put at the center of the Christian life because it is the way we glorify God and learn to enjoy him through being transformed by him.
The consequences of this understanding are enormous.
We can stop squabbling over worship “styles” because we will realize that worship should be done for God’s glory and not our own felt needs. We can joyfully pull our kids out of the summer extracurricular activities that deprive them of the opportunity to worship God on Sundays.
And we can stop fooling ourselves into thinking that Jesus Christ can be worshipped as easily from an individual perch on a fishing boat, a living room sofa or a beach chair as he can from a sanctuary full of worshipers where his word is preached and his body and blood lay on the altar.
And who knows? Maybe worship attendance will actually jump in the summertime.
Andrew C. Thompson
Those approaches suggest that we really think worship is about meeting our own perceived needs: The “right” worship will draw young people and reverse numerical decline. Worship that is “relevant” will speak to the contemporary culture around us. And an “exciting” or “powerful” worship service will make us feel good and convince us that coming to church at an inconvenient hour of the week was worth it after all. 
