Friday • 12/10/2021

We are taking a detour from the Daily Office readings for a few days. Instead, we are thinking through various facets of worship and how our Lord provides meaningful communion with him through our formal corporate worship as well as in individual worship in our daily devotions. The thoughts offered here are excerpts from articles I wrote for Worship Leader magazine a few years ago.  We’ll resume our reflections on the Daily Office Monday, December 13.

Ten Words 

The most remarkable worship leader I ever knew didn’t lead singing. He didn’t play an instrument. Robert Webber (1933–2007) was an evangelical theologian who happened to fall in love with ancient liturgy. He held the past in one outstretched arm and the future in the other and proclaimed: “What Christ has joined together, let not the church put asunder.”  

Worship practitioners are also worship theologians. We always implement a theology of worship when we lead. Our job description may put us more or less “in control” of that theology. But most of us have some say in its shaping. Here are “ten words” from Webber – six from his liturgical, and four from his evangelical sensibility – that may serve you in your vision of what worship can be.   

 Doxology. We gather for one thing: to honor God. Worship, of course, includes education and evangelism. It may even be entertaining. But worship is first and last doxological. Thus, it is theocentric, not narcissistic. Worship celebrates Christ as the central cosmic figure of the universe. Worship features God’s story, not our nation’s, not our favorite team’s, not our denominational tribe’s. 

Mystery. If God could be figured out or if he could be understood in his entirety, he wouldn’t be God. Sometimes he’s more real in his silence than in our answers. Some things get killed when they are over-explained. They just have to be allowed to be – to be experienced, not parsed. 

Incarnation. But God hasn’t left us in mystified befuddlement. He came in the very flesh of what we are. Jesus came as one of us, in order to redeem a creation God had made to be “good.” He reclaimed the world for God, so we tend it. He re-appropriated time, so we reshape it: B.C. and A.D. 

Sacraments. Christ meets us as material beings in material stuff. We’re not just dust. We’re not just spirit. We’re unified beings: dust that God has breathed into. We have ears to hear. Hands to raise. We have knees to kneel. Lips to drink, tongues to taste, noses to smell.

History. This is the “Be true to your school” principle (via the Beach Boys). No matter how our church got its name (e.g., such-and-such saint, such-and-such street, such-and-such one word), every church came from somewhere. And we can help it be the best St. Matthew’s or Delaney Street or Cornerstone or whatever. 

Catholicity. This is the complementary principle that comes from St. Vincent of Lérins: “What has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.” Before there was a Reformation with its Confessions, Revivals with their sawdust trails, the Jesus Movement with its “New Song,” or Emergence with its eclecticism, there was a Great Church that gave us the Creeds and a remarkably common pattern of worship. 

Orthodoxy. Life is at stake in our holding forth true theological truths. It matters that there is one God in three persons (one hope for humanity because of the eternal community of love). It matters that Jesus is truly God and truly man (he has the authority to forgive and the nearness to heal). It matters that his work saves from the guilt of sin, from the despair of death, from the lovelessness of loneliness. 

Scripture. Evangelicals embrace Scripture as a non-negotiable formal principle. Wisely, we refuse the serpent’s hiss: “Hath God really said?” At the same time, the classical liturgy is Scripture-saturated and Scripture-shaped in ways that evangelical worship often is not (even if too many in liturgical churches are reluctant to confess the Bible’s absolute authority). How powerful it is when evangelical and liturgical sensibilities merge. 

Conversion. Each person matters. The actual faith of individual worshipers matters. It doesn’t matter how “cool” the ad-libbed prayer. It doesn’t matter how profound the historical litany. Neither means anything apart from regenerate hearts and personal faith. Worship tells God’s story so new characters can take their place in the storyline. 

Mission. The Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead and indwells us impels us into the world in mission. The worshiping church is neither a museum of quaint antiquities nor a mall of religious exotica. It’s an Ark, says St. Augustine, a place that offers refuge to sojourners “in this wicked world as in a deluge.” Into its walls of safety the one Righteous Man draws those who otherwise would drown, and then makes them co-heralds of his victory over sin and death, his Father’s love for sinners still outside, and the Spirit’s power to rescue them as well. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+

Image:  Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando, Florida (adaptation of Theo Gordon photo)