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September 21 - October 19, 2017
this creates an interesting challenge because sincerity and authenticity tend to generate a penchant for novelty.
We distill “Jesus” out of the inherited, ancient forms of historic worship (which we’ll discard as “traditional”) in order to present Jesus in forms that are both fresh and familiar: come meet Jesus in the sanctified experience of a coffee shop; come hear the gospel in a place that should feel familiar since we’ve modeled it after the mall.
When I encounter “Jesus” in such a liturgy, rather than encountering the living Lord of history, I am implicitly being taught that Jesus is one more commodity available to make me happy.
expressivism breeds its own kind of bottom-up valorization of human striving that slides closer to works righteousness.
historic Christian worship is rooted in the conviction that God is the primary actor or agent in the worship encounter.
Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us.
to the extent that we recover a biblical sense of the primacy of God’s action in worship, we will also recover an appreciation for why the form of worship matters.
When we realize that worship is also about formation, we will begin to appreciate why form matters.
By the “form” of worship I mean two things: (1) the overall narrative arc of a service of Christian worship and (2) the concrete, received practices that constitute elements of that enacted narrative.
worship is not primarily a venue for innovative creativity but a place for discerning reception and faithful repetition.
Christian worship is the heart of discipleship just to the extent that it is a repertoire of practices shaped by the biblical story.
Not everything that calls itself “worship” today will have this counterformative power, since so many of our worship services are little more than Jesufied versions of secular liturgies. They claim the name of worship but deny the power thereof.
early Christians were more intentional about and conscious of the practices they adopted for worship.
This is why we can say that the shape of historic, intentional, formative Christian worship is “catholic”—not because it is “Roman” but because the repertoire of historic Christian worship represents the accumulated wisdom of the body of Christ led by the Spirit into truth, as Jesus promised (John 16:13).
When you unhook worship from mere expression, it also completely retools your understanding of repetition.
In a formational paradigm, repetition isn’t insincere, because you’re not showing, you’re submitting.
If the sovereign Lord has created us as creatures of habit, why should we think repetition is inimical to our spiritual growth?
In some ways, we belong in order to believe.
Worship is the heart of discipleship if and only if worship is a repertoire of Spirit-endued practices that grab hold of your gut, recalibrate your kardia, and capture your imagination.
every pastor is a curate and every elder a curator, responsible for the care of souls and responsible to curate hearts
God doesn’t deliver us from the deformative habit-forming power of tactile rival liturgies by merely giving us a book.
If we want to be a people oriented by a biblical worldview and guided by biblical wisdom, one of the best spiritual investments we can make is to mine the riches of historic Christian worship,
Far from being antithetical to liturgy, it was Cranmer’s evangelical conviction about the centrality of the Bible to the Christian life that propelled his creation of the rites of the prayer book.
But in addition to the prescribed rhythm of Scripture readings, Cranmer’s prayers were also drenched in biblical language and were another way that English Christians would absorb a biblical sensibility on a subconscious register.
the rites and rituals of the Book of Common Prayer dug wells into the very imagination of those who prayed according to its cadences.
Christian liturgies can’t just target the intellect: they also work on the body, conscripting our desires through the senses.
Christian worship that will be counterformative needs to be embodied, tangible, and visceral.
it teaches us how to love, and it does so by inviting us into the biblical story and implanting that story in our bones.
There is something about this reality that I can only know in the practice itself. I learn something in the doing that can’t ever be put into words and yet is its own irreducible sort of understanding.
Every liturgy, we’ve said, is oriented toward a telos—an
Christian worship comes loaded with its own vision of flourishing, one that is not just “spiritual” or ethereal or displaced to a disembodied heaven. The biblical vision of creation’s shalom is “heavenly,” but it envisions a heavenly order that becomes a reality on earth (Rev. 21:1–2).
Thus the biblical vision of our telos is, as we’ve said above, a kind of sanctified humanism—a vision of how to be human.
In Christ, the image of the invisible God (Col. 1:15), we become the image bearers we were created to be (Gen. 1:27–30).
The end of worship is bound up with the end of being human. In other words, the point of worship is bound up with the point of creation.
one of the goals of Christian worship is to “character-ize” us,
First, as we’ve already seen, Wright invites us to see Scripture as the narration of the unfolding drama of the God who acts.
But Christian worship also “character-izes” us in a second sense: in the rhythms of worship, the Spirit inscribes in us the character that makes us a certain kind of person.
In his important book After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre famously says, “I cannot answer the question, ‘What ought I to do?’ unless I first answer the question, ‘Of which story am I a part?’”
What counts as a virtue is relative to a goal or an end that is envisioned, a telos.
This is why virtue is bound up with a sense of excellence: a virtue is a disposition that inclines us to achieve the good for which we are made.
You can see how deep disagreements about the telos of humanity could generate radically different accounts of what is virtuous and what is vicious. But we often don’t articulate these different ends.
Indeed, the telos for Christians is Christ: Jesus Christ is the very embodiment of what we’re made for, of the end to which we are called.
And how does that happen? By being regularly immersed in the drama of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself, which is precisely the point of Christian worship—to invite us into that story over and over again,
Prayer, both ecclesial and personal prayer, thus ranks higher than all action, not in the first place as a source of psychological energy (“refueling,” as they say today), but as the act of worship and glorification that befits love, the act in which one makes the most fundamental attempt to answer with selflessness and thereby shows that one has understood the divine proclamation.
Whoever does not come to know the face of God in contemplation will not recognize it in action,
Formative Christian worship paints a picture of the beauty of the Lord—and a vision of the shalom he desires for creation—in a way that captures our imagination.
That means Christian worship needs to meet us as aesthetic creatures who are moved more than we are convinced.
Christian worship should tell a story that makes us want to set sail for the immense sea that is the Triune God, birthing in us a longing for “a better country—a heavenly one” that is kingdom come (Heb. 11:16).
the tangible practices of Christian worship paint the picture, as it were—in the metaphors of the biblical story, the poetics of the Psalms, the meter of hymns and choruses, the tangible elements of bread and wine, the visions painted in stained glass—all
“Fiction does not ask us to believe things,” he points out, “but to imagine them.
