Worship[1] Old and New: Recovering the Presence and Power of the Story of Jesus

Part 1: Confronting the Crisis https://youtube.com/watch?v=AVxzCXVCvCA&si=5KQxwQrJFx8iZgRe

[] = words omitted from preached sermon

Bible Readings: Psalm 148; 2 Ki 17: 28-34; John 4:1- 26; Rev 3:14-22

Introduction

Let me begin with a few of my favourite Bible texts, “Adam…was a type/pattern of the one who was to come (Jesus).” (Rom 5:14)

“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Rom 11:36)

“all things were created through him (Jesus) and for him” (Col 1:16)

“For in him (Christ) the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have been filled in him” (Col 2:9-10)

Jesus says, “Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my reward with me…13 I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.”” (Rev 22:12-13)

When we[2] connect these biblical truths, it becomes indisputable that every crisis in the Church is necessarily a Christological crisis, this applies to what we are constrained [in the Spirit (Acts 20:22)] to declare is a worship crisis in the contemporary Church. It is not simply that Jesus Wants His Church Back (Ray Johnston)[3], but that our jealous Holy Father (Ex 34:14; Num 25:13; John 17:11; James 4:5),  is grieved at the falling away from the worship he passionately seeks,  “worship in Spirit and Truth” (John 4:24)[4].

It is surely audacious for a visibly aging retired Anglican minister who is a part of an obscurely located small church, to assert there is a crisis of contemporary worship. But God’s mind  [is not concentrated on either the worship scene of today as such  nor on the Church, no matter how important to his plan[5], but it ]has forever been intoxicated with the majesty and wisdom of his own design to “set forth in Christ 10 as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth.” (Eph 1:9-10). This is a plan whose dimensions are cosmic, whose substance is Jesus himself (Col 2:17), and whose dynamic is Christ’s own eternal worshipping life shared with all holy creatures (Rev 5:13-14)[6]. Since the claim that worship today is in crisis is a counterintuitive proposition[7], being the exact opposite of the reputation of the most famous churches today[8], I need to fill out this claim.

Today’s Worship Crisis

I believe this crisis is three fold:

1. A crisis of content. Because the current worship movement is proudly non-theological it necessarily ignores the great drama of God’s overarching salvation-history story and reduces salvation to an individual level[9]. Setting aside the biblical narrative of creation, fall, Incarnation, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension, outpouring of the Spirit, recreation, new heavens and new earth, glorification of all things [this ignorance effectively dismembers the kingdom of God[10].]

2. The modern worship scene is in the grip of a culture induced crisis of structure. Modern psychologically-based narcissistic personal experience puts self-generated worship at the centre of worship. [A centre which belongs exclusively to Jesus.] Instead of the revelation of Christ through Word, Bible reading, prayers, creeds and hymns, and the Table of the Lord’s Supper, [which elicit remembrance and anticipation of kingdom realities,] God becomes the object of my affections, and the all- important story becomes the narrative of my heart.

c. A crisis of style. Whereas the structure of worship should serve the content of worship, as an extended exposition/application of the saving story of God in Christ, our contemporary worship factories confront us with a lengthy bracket of songs leading into a sermon [, not generally considered as an act of worship, but] topical in nature.

Given that how people live is the best indicator of what they worship[11], the individualistic and un discipled state of the Western Church means that we need to listen with care and urgency to “hear what the Spirit says to the churches” (Rev 2:7 etc.). Scripture indicates that God’s people have been in our phase of spiritual dryness like our own many times in the past.

Spying out The Land

Drastic situations amongst the people of God require new visions and revelations of the divine glory. This was the external situation behind the glorious visions of the three great apocalyptic prophets of the Bible, Ezekiel and Daniel as captives in the midst of physical Babylon, and of John the seer imprisoned on Patmos surrounded by spiritual Babylonian powers (Rev 18; 1 Pet 5:13). In seeing corruption, self-seeking, a lack of care for the poor and needy plus missional coldness prevalent in today’s  Church[12], it is plain we are sharing spiritual exile with the bearers of apocalyptic visions. We are in exile far from the Promised Land[13]; [whether they can articulate it or not,] most of the people of God are indeed languishing in “a far country” (Luke 15:13)[14]. This is why there is so much hunger for revival. (Prayers here 4-5 pm every week for our meeting together,bg)  we need reminding that the God we worship, however deficiently is still running the universe (Rom 8:28-30; Eph 1:9-13).

We live in an age in which trust in all the major institutions of Western civilisation has been lost; government and democracy are under suspicion (especially in the U.S.), our major banks (selling policies to dead customers), and the church (sexual abuse) are no longer the trusted pillars they once were. Rather than joining in the chronic scepticism [of the rampant conspiracy theories of today, whose truth or falsity is not that significant, ] the people of God are called to see opportunities within the social turmoil of our times for the advancement of the good news of the kingdom of God[15]. This news is the reliability of the testimony of Jesus to which the scriptures infallibly and unerringly bear witness.

The times are calling out for a much larger story than the prevailing self-centred narcissism. A story in which humanity can find its meaning in the life history of Christ[. God forbid that this series advocate something as small as attending “a service” designed to placate out personal needs, worship and liturgy is about entering[16] into] as a cosmic and eternal story of divine triumph.

The shaking of all the institutions that has been happening throughout our lifetimes provokes the question, “Why church?”. Most answers are inadequate because they do not centre on the Lord Jesus Christ. In scripture, [taking the background from the Old Testament translated into Greek,] ekklesia/church designates Israel/the people of the Lord summoned by God to assemble for some act of obedience, this is the essence of worship.[17]

[If in my earlier teaching series this year I tried to approach the same presenting problem, that is, the lack of sacrificial discipleship, from a personal/individual level, the present series approaches things from a more corporate/communal/congregational level.] Despite our international reputation for being a worship powerhouse the failure of the national Church to make holy men and women of God reveals our worship has no depth. Jesus is still saying, “You worship what you do not know; we worship what we know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. 24 God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth.”” (John 4:22-24)[18] The quest for true worship is a very old question for me.

Signs of Decline

As a young Christian I was very zealous for the Lord, but not always with understanding (Rom 10:2). The first church I attended was a traditional Pentecostal one; there was a half hour prayer meeting before the service, usually attended by about 10 percent of the congregation, the services often went for two+ hours, people were keen to sit up the front near the preacher, everyone brought Bibles, there were many baptisms and inspiring testimonies and so on. All this was great, and it was the place the Lord wanted me to be at that early unformed stage of my Christian journey. However, after I had been there for a couple of years I remember coming out of the service with a friend of mine[, who’d become a Christian through my witness,] and we looked at each other and spontaneously said, “We come here Sunday by Sunday and say, ‘Praise the Lord, Hallelujah’ and we are not changed.” We had stopped growing as Christians. This was a shocking realisation at the time, but being untaught believers, we didn’t know what to do about it! No-one was teaching us that worship isn’t about the intensity or sincerity of our efforts to praise God but about growing in the life of Jesus as the one true Worshipper. This will be discussed in much greater detail later, but first I need to give a broader biblical background to our present dilemma.

Exile as a Means of Grace

The Lord first proclaimed through the prophet Isaiah (40:1-5), then by John the Baptiser (Luke 3:4-6), that Jerusalem’s time in the wilderness as a punishment for her idolatry was now ended and that “the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together, for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”” (Isa 40:5). Since the glory of the Lord did not overwhelm those who returned physically from Babylon, any more than it surged over the scribes and Pharisees when they heard John preach, we must look for a fulfilment in our time. We must accept that the Church’s being deprived of divine glory is not essentially caused by cultural pressures of secular post-Christian postmodern wokeness, but a sign of God’s unfailing Fatherly discipline; the sovereign hand of a holy God is hungry to be worshipped in Spirit and truth and so is  working to purge his people from their sins.[19] If the Lord is cleansing and purging us so that we turn from our numerous idols, he needs to put something in their place.

Eucharismatic Worship: A Personal Testimony

I am proposing a coming together through the “worship of Jesus”[20]* of two seemingly incompatible cultures.[21]  Anyone who attends a thoroughly liturgical church, like our 9.30 service, is familiar with set prayers, corporate confession of sin, recitation of God’s saving acts in creed, benediction/blessing and dismissal found in a Prayer Book[22]. Such a tradition seems a long way from lengthy times of corporate singing, sermons longer than 20 minutes, extempore/unprepared prayer and an array of spontaneous spiritual gifts. The Lord however is doing something new in our city[23].

Late last year I felt moved by the Spirit to connect with the lead pastor of C3 Hepburn Heights, one of the most charismatic groups in the state. I then discovered that I had been one of Jason’s lecturers 20 years previously. He went on to mention that that his wife’s father had been the pastor at a well-known charismatic Anglican congregation in the city (Derek Chamberlain, Karrinyup Anglican). She, Emma, has a strong interest in liturgy and writes such forms of service (week 6?). A little later I was able to watch a prayer meeting held at Hepburn Heights for the World Prayer Assembly[24] that involved many churches utilising their own forms of service, like chanting the psalms, joining in creeds, the Lord’s Prayer etc.[25] I found it to be a deeply moving experience palpably pleasurable to the heart of our common Father.

In an email Jason sent me this quote from a book I’d never heard of[26], “Imagine a service that includes healing testimonies and prayers of confession, psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, baptism in water and baptism in the Spirit, creeds that move the soul and rhythms that move the body/ imagine young men seeing visions, old men dreaming dreams, sons and daughters prophesying and all of them coming to the same Table and then going on their way rejoicing….This is what it means to be eucharismatic.”  “Eucharismatic”, is a term that combines “eucharist and “charismatic”, a new term with an ancient meaning.  For sure, the worship of the Early Church was “eucharismatic”. After ordering and reading the book, I passed it on to Mark who also found it quite persuasive. Some little while after that while Donna was looking for something at the Op Shop run by the Anglican Church in Maylands, I found myself inside the Church building looking at a host of ecumenical/liturgical documents on the back counter prepared by Emma Schroeder.

A Turning Tide

There is something happening in the Spirit across the nations. Earlier this year, Dean Briggs,  [then] one of the leaders from the International House Of Prayer in Kansas City, a 24/7 praise, prayer and worship centre, was preaching in Perth, his topic, to my great surprise,  was The (Coming) Great Communion Revival[27].  He began with noting the unbiblical and nonhistorical marginalisation of the Lord’s Supper in contemporary Evangelical Protestantism

Whilst I believe this restoration of the regular practice of the Lord’s Supper will take place, much of the present agitation to see this lacks serious theological and spiritual foundations. What needs to be rediscovered is nothing less than a revelation that since the whole cosmos/ “all things” are a gift of the Father to the Son in the power of the eternal Spirit, human existence was always designed to be an act of worship and thankfulness to God. Given that the ancient word “eucharist” means “thanksgiving”, all of life is called to be “eucharistic”[28]. However, shifts in culture, including in the church, rarely come easily or speedily.

I am old enough to have witnessed the death of Classical Pentecostalism, when the regular use of charismatic gifts in Sunday worship were pushed out[29] [not on theological or biblical grounds but based on] by pure pragmatics[30]. That is, on the ground of “what works”. Today’s pastors dare not clutter up the “programme” with something that isn’t singing, preaching or notices. Few recognise that ordinary human subjectivity, flesh and blood emotions, have replaced the witness of the life of the glorified Son of God as the axis of worship. The primacy of the subjective needs of the worshipper in their need to understand and experience God dominates everything.[31] This ignores the spiritual reality advocated by a theology of the Incarnation, that nothing takes place subjectively in the experienced life of the Church which has not already taken place objectively in the [vicarious] life of Christ.  We have forgotten that our personal knowledge of God derives from that of the man Christ Jesus. “And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption,” (1 Cor 1:30). To simplify, genuine human knowledge of God can never be other than a share Christ’s knowledge of God.

[Any major change of worship today must see an eclectic/unified movement that will emerge out of a 1. Greater focus on sacraments, especially Lord’s Supper. 2. Increased interest in life of the Early Church. 3. A desire to see the entire Church as one Body. 4. Growing unity of charismatic evangelical and reformed worship streams. 5. Interest in integrating spontaneity into worship. 6. Greater involvement in sign and symbol in worship. 7. Commitment to the teaching, work and ministry of the Holy Spirit.] A genuine worship revival will not happen easily, because there can be no resurrection life without the fellowship of suffering (Phil 3:10).

Dying to Prejudice

Most members of so-called free or non-liturgical churches are prejudiced against liturgical forms of whatever sort. (The prejudice runs the other direction too.) Decades ago[, after being called into the Anglican Communion,] I came across a comment from New Testament scholar Leon Morris[32] that even the most non-liturgical churches had their own “oral liturgies”[33][34]. Our problem is that we have many prejudices about set forms of worship shaped by our lack of experience, or assumptions about other faith traditions, which we consider inferior to our own. This has left us prey to the great danger of the hour, the influence of secular humanism replacing the dynamic humanity of the Son of God.

[Secularism as a negation of human beings as worshippers, is not equivalent to obsession with “the relevance of worship”, but the loss of true relevant theological and historical Christ-worship in the West, especially the separation of grace from nature, has led to a scientific conviction of the independence of the world from God that has led to what we now call “secularism”.] I am old enough to remember, Christendom in Australia, where everyone simply assumed a so called “sacred canopy” over all things. This has been stripped away from our culture leaving people to pursue happiness as humanity’s highest goal. [One bad fruit of this is the failure of the prayer of the Church for the life of the world (Schmemann) arising from a failure to understand the whole cosmos has been redeemed in Christ.] A renewal of liturgy to its God-appointed place [will only come from insights that look beyond the fine turns of phrase, use of poetry, drama music and story[35], but because of its focus on….Christ in all things who is “altogether lovely”. This] will demand humility and charity between various Christian traditions. Meanwhile sensitive Christians across the Western world are finding a loss of the sacred to be spiritually unbearable. In a Zoom conversation with a businessman and devout Jesus follower from Hong Kong but now resident in America, I discovered he’d recently shifted from an Evangelical congregation to an Anglican Church because a young service leader said in a casual way, “lets give God a clap”. In many places theatre and spectacle have replaced holy presence[36]. We must approach liturgy however with our eyes open.

Liturgy of Christ

The energy of the poetry of liturgy [crafted and shaped over millennia of public use] has the single divine purpose of transforming us into Christlikeness.  There is a universal[37] shape to liturgy [framed around the rhythm of gathering[38] /Word/ sacrament/ dismissal,] because it strategically has no specific target audience. A former well-known Evangelical leader, editor of Christianity Today,  and convert to liturgical practice testifies, “It is precisely the point of the liturgy to take people out of their worlds and usher them into a strange, new world—to show them that, despite appearances, the last thing in the world they need is more of the world out of which they have come. The world the liturgy reveals…is more real than the one we inhabit day by day…We find our gaze directed away from ourselves and toward God and his kingdom.” (Mark Galli)

]Worship is the enacting outward of the reality of the gospel in our hearts through signs and symbols of a vital relationship with God.] Liturgy worship doesn’t work magically but should enact  “a participation in Christ’s own prayer addressed to the Father in the Holy Spirit”[39] The liturgy of the Church should reveal to us that the Gospel is greater than all things[40]  because it represents and reflects the life story of Jesus that gives shape and meaning to worship, and so to the lives of worshippers.  The God who acted in the history of Jesus to transform Christ’s own humanity will continue this work in us if we please him with our worship [based on the primacy/prevenience of grace in sacraments etc. the story of Jesus[41] should impose   gospel like elements of worship in a gospel like order on all of our living.]

Conclusion

['If we can imagine God drawing up the plans for the universe before He created it, and if we could examine these plans, we would not see Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, but Jesus Christ in the Gospel' (G. Goldsworthy).]

Music driven, performance-centred and programme-controlled models of modern worship cannot adequately proclaim God’s cosmic redemption. Instead of following the biblical template, that is, devotion to “the apostles’ teaching (Word) and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread (Eucharist) and the prayers” (Acts 2:42), worship leaders have become programme designers as worship has become a presentation (see Webber Ancient Modern 161-162) [programme, theme and creative have become dominant themes in designing culturally driven worship.]

The contemporary Western Church is confronted by a host of master narratives in culture (secularism, feminism, environmentalism…) that contradict the gospel. The key question, “who gets to narrate the world?” (Webber Ancient Modern 180), is not being answered by most of the Church in a Christ-centred and coherent manner.

“Jesus is my spirituality” is more than a slogan, it means that worship exists to form my spiritual life according to the pattern of the death and resurrection of the Son of God (2 Cor 5:14-15. (Webber Ancient Future 93) Jesus is the one human who truly did God’s service (worship) of reclaiming the world for the Father. Having a revelation of this compels us to give God the glory (doxology) and to live according to his pattern of existence. The Jesus revelation dispels all self-generated worship. Christ himself if the eternal liturgy of God [reversing the failure of the first Adam, the fallenness of the creation, his resurrection is a new act of recreation after which the world new world order will be patterned.]

Christ lifts/exalts us up with him so our worship is beyond all our felt needs (Isa 6:3, Ezek 1; Rev etc.). He matures us by taking us beyond ourselves into the God he laid down his life for. Healing in a narcissistic psychological age depends on a revelation that God is not only like us but also infinitely beyond us. Therefore our liturgy must be infused with the presence of Christ from beginning to end (Rev 21:6; 22:13) in order that through grace and the Spirit we might partake of the divine nature (as Peter puts it 2 Pet 1:4). [“For the Son of God became man so that we might become God.” (Athanasius)] Liturgy impresses upon us the personality we worship.

Practical Application

We intend to add liturgical elements to our meetings week by week today it is the Lord’s Prayer[42]. The common neglect and ignorance today of what we call The Lord’s Prayer should be a matter of grieve to us all just as it deeply grieves the Spirit who inspired it.  Amongst other things, this is because the petition, “hallowed be they name” has its background in the promises of God in Ezekiel to act for the sake of his own reputation in the world and to make known his holiness. Every time we pray this prayer, we are pleading for the Lord to cleanse us from false and defiled worship.[43] So that we might indeed be “the light of the world” (Matt 5:14).