The purpose of the Sunday morning worship service, I would contend, has a three-part foundation around the concept of communication.[1] One of the major aspects of the greatness of God and the direct result of the sacrifice of Jesus is the fact that we are reconciled to him. We have already spoken about the torn curtain in the temple after Christ died symbolizing the reconciliation of a Holy God to his people. We will discuss how we can culminate an amplified worship experience with this concept in mind, but the underlying result of reconciliation is the glorious and gracious ability we have in communication. The purpose of the Sunday morning service is then to facilitate communication on three levels: God communicates to us (Matthew 17:5, Hebrews 1:1-2); We communicate to God (Jeremiah 33:3); We communicate to others about God (Ephesians 5:19). These three make up a mentally structured foundation to a biblical gathering of believers.
Notice that the subject of the service is not man and it never should be. The subject of the purpose of a Sunday morning service should only and always ever be God. In the three foundational communications, many things and elements are probably popping into your mind of how to accomplish them, but I want to focus on six distinctive biblical functions that are done corporately to build on the communication foundation: Testimony (Psalm 71:15); Prayer (Philippians 4:6); Meditation (Psalm 119:27); Scripture itself (2 Timothy 3:16); Prophecy—Preaching (1 Corinthians 14:26) and Confession (1John 1:9; James 5:16). These are very general functions and are meant to be so. Some of the functions tie very closely together and can be combined, yet are distinct enough to be individual. The purpose of these distinctions is to identify the biblical means by which communication happens logically in the corporate and unified body of believers during a service. This function list is by no means exhaustive, yet is the best general representation of biblical corporate response. There are so many different ways that can be done to accomplish these functions, and that is where our discussion leads to now. We finally get to the portion of the recipe that most worship leaders and worship pastors spend most of their time trying to think up: Forms. The functions that accomplish the foundation of a worship service can be done in so many different ways. If you take the function of prayer for example, you could simply pray over the mic, have your congregation read a pre-written corporate prayer, leave a moment of silence for people to pray privately, sing songs, which are basically prayers put to music, you could have an open mic time where people call out their requests aloud to the Lord, have an elder pray, the pastor prays in his sermon, even before the service starts you can have a prayer team praying over the service, you can have a whole service devoted to prayer and set up stations and such. Do you get the idea? The forms are endless, but the function stays the same. Because of that, the function holds more weight than the form and it MUST always be superior to it.
[1] While on staff at Harvest Bible Chapel (Elgin, IL) I sat under the teaching of James MacDonald, Andi Rozier, Rory Noland, and Matthew Westerholm. They trained me in the Harvest Worship Philosophy which makes up most, but not all of what I am portraying in this study in written form, though the philosophy has not been formally published. It is to say that citation and credit be given in part to the above men for helping me be able to formulate these thoughts in written and chart form from their years of trial and error and extensive study of the subject passing it down word of mouth and in house printed resources. Currently (May 2011) James MacDonald is working through a sermon series titled “Vertical Church” that makes reference to Harvest’s motivation and strategy in service planning.
No comments:
Post a Comment