Emerging Worship 1
Today, I started reading Dan Kimball‘s Emerging Worship. Kimball is one of the major players in the emerging church conversation and so, having spotted this book in the library, I thought I’d give it a quick read to see what Kimball thinks worship ought to be like.
After a meandering foreword by David Crowder (why did he even bother writing it?), Kimball starts by talking about what an “emerging worship service gathering” is. He makes the point that when many evangelical Christians hear “worship” they think “music.” When people say, “The worship at my church is great!” they usually mean “The worship band rocks!”
(I’ve sometimes said that the difference between evangelical churches and specifically Reformed churches is that the former say, “What did you think of the music?” and the latter say “What did you think of the sermon?” which is not necessarily better.)
Kimball rightly maintains that worship is broader than just music (p. 2).  Furthermore, he’s right to insist that worship is not all about doing something that makes us feel good (pp. 2-3). But then he stumbles when he says about a worship service: “It is not about God’s service to us. It is purely our offering of service and worship to God — offering our lives, offering our prayers, offering our praise, offering our confessions, offering our finances, offering our service to others in the church body” (p. 3).
While I grant that worship is what we do and that it’s okay to apply the term “worship” to the whole of what we do in the service (even though the biblical words translated “to worship” generally mean something like “to bow down”), I’d want to maintain that worship isn’t the whole of the service. Or, to put it another way, we aren’t the only ones who are doing the serving when we assemble as a church. In fact, our service is not the primary service. God serves us first and we serve Him (and each other) in response.
It’s not wrong to come to church wanting to receive something. All of us come to church needy. Specifically, as James Jordan has pointed out, we need the three gifts that God gives in the liturgy: glory, knowledge (or wisdom), and life. While it sounds better to say “We don’t worship to get; we worship to give,” it isn’t accurate. We have nothing to give until we first get. We come needy, God supplies our needs, and then we give in response.
All of which is to say that, while I appreciate Kimball’s call for a more holistic understanding of worship — one which goes beyond just the music — I don’t think Kimball goes far enough. We need an understanding of the service which goes beyond worship, beyond what we do, to what God does for us.
On another note, Kimball’s call for churches to move “away from a preaching-and-singing-a-few-songs worship service model to a multi-sensory approach to worshiping God” (p. 5) suggests to me that much of what he appreciates is a reaction to a rationalistic sort of model (church is a lecture hall with some pre-lecture and post-lecture songs). It’s a reaction to the approach which emphasizes only the sense of hearing and (primarily) the posture of sitting.
In short, it’s a reaction to the church’s failure to practice a fully-orbed, biblically-based liturgy, a liturgy with various postures (sitting, kneeling, standing) and with lots of congregational involvement (not just in singing but also in the prayers), a liturgy which culminates every week in the Lord’s Supper. And so, when he presents questions for church leaders to ask about their services, one of them is this: “Did we take the Lord’s Supper together as a church regularly?” (p. 10).
February 15th, 2007 at 7:51 am
I love liturgy. And I cannot help but think when I read Jeff Meyers and Jordan, Leithart, etc . . on liturgical covenant renewal that I am simply pandering to my own taste. I like liturgy because it feels good. When I read the Bible, I do not see any explicit commands to worship in the Anglican or Roman way. How the apostles worshipped in the synagogues is a great mystery to me. The whole idea of worship is strange. It seems to happen in several non-corporate contexts throughout the gospel.
Mat 2:11 And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.
Mat 28:16-17 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted.
Mat 14:32 And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased.
Mat 14:33 And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”
Joh 9:35 Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”
Joh 9:36 He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?”
Joh 9:37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.”
Joh 9:38 He said, “Lord, I believe,” and he worshiped him.
The emergent author Michael Frost, in his book “Exiles”, has challenged my thinking on what corporate really is. Revelation 4 & 5 appears to be liturgical. So using that as a pattern is acceptable, but I fail to see the zeal for “covenant renewal” forms being approached almost as “required”.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this further.
February 17th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
Thanks for the comments, Mark.
The term translated “worshiped” in the passages you cite means, I think, “bowed down.” These people are in the presence of Jesus Christ and they honor Him by bowing to Him.
That sort of worship is appropriate anywhere and at any time (well, maybe not while you’re driving, at least not if you’re literally bowing down).
Nothing that’s been said about “covenant renewal” liturgy implies that this is the only sort of worship that’s permissible.
There are also all sorts of other permissible forms of worship for individuals, families, and other gatherings, including other church gatherings.
It’s permissible for the church to gather to sing songs of praise to God: by itself, that isn’t “covenant renewal,” but it is worship, and there’s nothing unbiblical about it.
But in the Bible, we are taught a certain way in which we are to draw near to the Lord.
In the Old Covenant, God taught Israel to draw near following the pattern of sin (purification) offering, ascension offering, and peace offering. First, we need cleansing. Then, we need to ascend into God’s presence and be consecrated to Him. Then we get to feast with God. That’s still the same basic pattern for us today, in union with Christ’s sacrifice.
In other words, there is something special, something distinctive, about the Lord’s service on the Lord’s day. It isn’t a “worship” service, since it’s the Lord’s service to us first and foremost and our service to him (including our worship) only secondarily. But it’s different from our worship of Him while we’re driving in our car or kneeling by our bedside or standing on the golf course or celebrating at the table with our family and friends.
And so the New Testament tells us that the church assembled on the first day of the week to break bread (Acts 20). They seem to have done so on a daily basis at first (Acts 2), but later on they settled into a first day pattern.
In fact, 1 Corinthians 11 implies that they ate the Lord’s Supper whenever they assembled (or, as Paul says, they thought that’s what they were doing, but because of their sinful mistreatment of the poor they were actually eating their own suppers).
The Lord’s Supper belongs to the gathered assembly of God’s people. It’s the fulfilment of the peace offering (the one sacrifice the people got to eat in the Old Covenant), and therefore it rightly follows confession and absolution, the Word and the prayers and the tribute. It is rightly the culmination and climax of the service.
I’d be interested to hear what you’ve learned from Frost about “corporate.” I’d think that any gathering other than a gathering of the church would be corporate in a sense (e.g., a family) but only a gathering of the church is a gathering of the corpus Christi, the body of Christ. And while two believers together may be “corporate” in a sense, there is something special about the official assembly of God’s people.
These aren’t things I’ve worked out in detail, and this response could be honed and improved a lot, I’m sure. Blame any lack of clarity on the cold I’m recovering from. =)
Blessings!
I love liturgy. And I cannot help but think when I read Jeff Meyers and Jordan, Leithart, etc . . on liturgical covenant renewal that I am simply pandering to my own taste. I like liturgy because it feels good. When I read the Bible, I do not see any explicit commands to worship in the Anglican or Roman way. How the apostles worshipped in the synagogues is a great mystery to me. The whole idea of worship is strange. It seems to happen in several non-corporate contexts throughout the gospel.
Mat 2:11 And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh.
Mat 28:16-17 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted.
Mat 14:32 And when they got into the boat, the wind ceased.
Mat 14:33 And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.â€
Joh 9:35 Jesus heard that they had cast him out, and having found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?â€
Joh 9:36 He answered, “And who is he, sir, that I may believe in him?â€
Joh 9:37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and it is he who is speaking to you.â€
Joh 9:38 He said, “Lord, I believe,†and he worshiped him.
The emergent author Michael Frost, in his book “Exilesâ€, has challenged my thinking on what corporate really is. Revelation 4 & 5 appears to be liturgical. So using that as a pattern is acceptable, but I fail to see the zeal for “covenant renewal†forms being approached almost as “requiredâ€.
I would love to hear your thoughts on this further.
February 17th, 2007 at 2:11 pm
Thank you very much for responding. I will research the “peace offering” you mentioned.
“The Lord’s Supper belongs to the gathered assembly of God’s people. It’s the fulfilment of the peace offering (the one sacrifice the people got to eat in the Old Covenant), and therefore it rightly follows confession and absolution, the Word and the prayers and the tribute. It is rightly the culmination and climax of the service.”
So was Passover always to be regarded as a “peace offering” or did Christ change the symbolic feast of deliverance into the New Covenant form of a “peace offering” ?
I do not think wine was explicitly included in the Passover meal from Moses. Do you think the tradition entered in to later become redeemed by the Messiah as a type of Melchizedekian offering ?
Would you say then that liturgies in churches that do not follow the “covenant renewall” pattern are not sinning per se, but are diminishing the glorious aspect of heavenly worship by missing the typology ?
February 18th, 2007 at 3:28 pm
There’s some more good discussion of this topic here.
I don’t know if the Passover was a “peace offering,” though I suppose it may have been a sort of peace offering. But the Passover is not the only Old Covenant background (type) for the Lord’s Supper. All the sacrifices are (as are all the meals).
But of the sacrifices, it’s particularly the peace offering that involves people sharing the meal with God, and that one followed an elaborate liturgy starting with cleansing, leading to consecration, and then culminating in communion. That has to be there to teach us something.
As one of my friends pointed out, where in the Bible would you look if you were writing something on wisdom? Well, the whole Bible teaches us wisdom. But you’d be an idiot to miss the Proverbs.
What book would you be an idiot to miss if you wanted to know what the Bible teaches about worship? Leviticus. It’s all about how to draw near to God. And Leviticus teaches us a liturgical pattern.
Wine didn’t become a part of the sacrifices at all until the Israelites entered the promised land. No grapes in the wilderness = no wine for libations. But even when Israel had wine, the libations were poured out to Yahweh, not consumed by the people.
Passover seems to have included wine and eventually an extra-biblical liturgy developed, involving the wine, but we don’t know about that from the Bible and I’m not qualified to address it.
But the fact that we have bread and wine now has roots in Melchizedek, but farther back to the Third Day of creation (grain plants and fruit trees) and the Sixth Day (when grain plants and fruit trees are given to man as food).
There’s a lot of other stuff going on, too. For instance, our sitting and eating surpasses the privileges of the priests who didn’t get to sit while on duty, didn’t get to eat bread in God’s presence (showbread), and didn’t get to drink wine at all when they were serving. We get to do all three because we’re in Christ!
As for your last question, I’d agree. I’m inclined to say that it’s not sin but it’s not as glorious as it could be. If it is sin (i.e., departure from the biblical pattern), which is a possibility I’d have to consider, then it’s a sin of “wandering” not a sin with a “high hand” and therefore it’s one that God readily overlooks, according to Scripture. It’s more like Eve than Adam, you could say. =)
February 18th, 2007 at 9:37 pm
I just finished off Kimball’s “Emerging Church” and thought he was moving in the right direction. I just hope that emerging Christians are willing to handle constrctive criticism. I thought a big blind spot was that in his desire to create more personal and less rationally oriented worship services Kimball ended up fragmenting the church into individuals doing their own thing. For example, the Eucharist is done as people feel led to come up and take and the various stations that are set-up in the service (journaling, painting, prayer) are all meant to be done by individuals. Hopefully the movement can mature as it moves beyond the idealization of monastical practices performed in the corporate Divine Service.
February 19th, 2007 at 9:11 am
Once again John, thank you for your thoughts. I will seriously explore the “peace offering” aspect of covenant renewal.
Your point about Proverbs being the one place to look regarding wisdom was interesting. However, wisdom has not change from the Old Covenant to the New. Worship has. I would not pick Leviticus first but rather the Apocalypse. My main concern in researching N.T. worship will be of course where are the hints of the new feast and worship patterns drawing up into the fulfillment of Christ as a “peace offering”. Why do the N.T. authors not mention this ? Why do they not speak more of Leviticus ? I will be looking into Hebrews more extensively now.
February 19th, 2007 at 11:25 am
I agree that the Apocalypse is a primary source for learning about how the church is to worship. I’m inclined to agree with David Chilton that the book (or at least a large part of it) corresponds in some way to the liturgy.
BUT Revelation draws heavily on Leviticus and Old Covenant worship (after all, this is Temple worship) and I’m not sure that one could understand Revelation’s application to today’s worship without starting with Leviticus.
One reason there’s so little about liturgy in the New Testament, as Rob Rayburn somewhere points out, is that God already taught us about it in the Old Testament. He didn’t need to say it all again. =)
And that may be why the NT writers only make allusions and don’t spell everything out. They assume that we can read and that we’re able to catch the typology and symbolism of the Old Testament.
If you read Paul’s epistles, you find that he’s constantly making allusions. For instance, in Philippians 1, he throws in a line from Job 13 and he expects his readers (Gentiles, no less!) to recognize that line and to be able to understand what he’s saying in the light of Job 13 and its context. That requires quite a bit of sophistication on the part of his readers, though they can understand what he’s saying on a more surface level without even recognizing the allusion.
February 20th, 2007 at 6:22 am
Beautiful insights John. Thanks again. You have given me much to ponder.