When God Speaks through Worship: Stories Congregations Live By
Introduction
Disappointing Advice
My mandate was clear when they called me to be their pastor: “Help our church to grow.” Looking back, I was very naive. It honestly never occurred to me that the members of a congregation would, on the one hand, say they want to grow, and, on the other, resist the changes that would facilitate growth, such as welcoming people different from themselves and involving newer members in leadership. Yet, that is what that congregation—let’s call it Epiphany Lutheran Church—did. In fact, many of the members of Epiphany Church seemed to do whatever they could to preserve the congregation’s self-identity as a “small church” and the ways they related to each other and made decisions as “a close-knit family.” I failed to recognize these behaviors as the natural—even expected—ways people protect their world of meaning and respond to change and the losses change brings. Instead, I told myself, “These are good people. They want their church to grow. If they understand the things we are trying to do and the reasons we are doing them, they will be supportive. I just need to do a better job of explaining.” So, I taught and explained, and we changed some things to attract and integrate new members. For a couple years we experienced modest but steady growth. A few more people came to church on Sunday, and newer members became involved in activities beyond worship.
Then the congregation started to decline, numerically and in terms of participation. The major employer in town transferred a good number of our newer members out of town. Others found their way to a neighboring congregation, where “contemporary worship” had caught their fancy. I was left with the core of longtime members. Many resisted, even resented, the changes we had made to attract new members; some understandably felt ignored, displaced, and disrespected by their pastor and chose to stay away. The decline in church attendance brought a corresponding decline in giving. In response, the leaders of the congregation gave up on outreach and growth and seemed to circle the wagons and settle into a survival mode. Spending on programs all but stopped. Efforts to attract new members were replaced by efforts to get old members back, as the church council decided to contact people on our inactive rolls and ask, “What about Pastor keeps you from coming to church?”
I failed at what I was called to do, “help our church to grow.” My denomination had taught me well that faithful, successful pastors grow churches. I learned from seminary professors and denominational higher-ups that pastors are to be missionaries, who bring people to faith, and evangelists, who grow the church; pastors are not to be chaplains who care for church members. Now this congregation was declining. Worse, priorities we set and changes we made angered some members of the congregation, and they were angry with me! I was not doing well as either a missionary or a chaplain. Not knowing what to do, I contacted my bishop. My bishop was an evangelist, committed to the church’s mission. He would know what I should do next.
The advice my bishop gave me was, in a word, disappointing. In a long letter, he wrote, “Preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, teach the faith, visit the sick, bury the dead, and leave the growth to God.” I felt a bit like the man who, running up to Jesus and kneeling before him, asked, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” (Mark 10:17). “Preach the gospel, administer the sacraments, teach the faith, visit the sick, bury the dead?” I found myself thinking. “I have done all these since my ordination.” And as he did for the man in that Bible story, Jesus, looking at me, loved me, and said, “You lack one thing.” No, Jesus was not asking me to go, sell what I own, and give the money to the poor. But Jesus was saying, “Come, follow me” (Mark 10:21). Through my bishop’s letter, Jesus was asking me to give away all I thought I knew about successful pastors and growing churches and to trust God to work through the things the church does in worship—preach and teach, baptize and break bread, visit and bless—rather than trust myself, my strategies, and my ability to explain them to my congregation.
Worship Is Mission
I always trusted God to work through the things Christians do when we worship—proclaim the gospel, teach the faith, pray, sing, baptize, bless, share bread and wine in Jesus’s name—to bring grace to individuals and to empower them to live as God’s people. I also knew that for Christians and congregations to live as God’s people and be Christ’s body in the world, they need a vision for their mission and a plan for implementing it, as well as participation, commitment, and even a willingness to sacrifice. I understood that, in worship, God inspires and empowers a congregation to do the things it needs to do. But I believed that a congregation certainly has to do something more than worship. A congregation needs to worship God and respond to God in mission. Looking back, I saw worship and mission as related but distinct activities. I had bought into the alleged dichotomy, even competition, between worship and mission, which leads pastors to think they must choose between being a chaplain and a missionary and which in so many congregations fuels a “worship war.” In this tug-of-war, congregations and pastors seem to emphasize and even choose either worship or mission. The greater church often discounts congregations that choose or emphasize worship as inward looking clubs and their pastors as chaplains who only care for members. Congregations that approach worship as the prelude to or a means to carry out the real work of making disciples are praised as mission outposts and their pastors hailed as evangelists who grow churches. I am now convinced that distinguishing between mission outposts and clubs, evangelists and chaplains, and mission and worship is harmful to leaders, congregations, and the church.
In my second book for the Vital Worship, Healthy Congregations Series, When God Speaks through You: How Faith Convictions Shape Preaching and Mission, I describe three ways of understanding the relationship between worship and mission, which I call mountain, plain, and river. I used to operate out of an understanding of worship as a mountain. In worship, we encounter God, receive God’s grace, and are spiritually empowered to proclaim the gospel to those who have not heard or received it and to serve the neighbor in acts of justice and love. Worship empowers mission. I learned a different perspective on worship and mission as I watched colleagues endeavor to transform worship from a mountaintop experience for the faithful into a plain, into level ground where the church introduces Jesus to the unchurched. Worship is a means of or an occasion for mission. Yet, in both these approaches, worship and mission are distinct; the members of the congregation have to do something in addition to worship for mission to occur, whether go out from worship to proclaim the gospel and love the neighbor or gather the unchurched and bring them into the church building, where the congregation introduces them to Jesus.
I no longer subscribe to the distinction between worship and mission, nor do I think of myself as either a chaplain or an evangelist. Over the years, I have come to understand Christian worship as a river, rather than either a mountain or a plain. As my friend Lester Ruth and I wrote in our book Creative Preaching on the Sacraments, like a mighty river, “the life and history of Israel, the saving work of Jesus, and the mission of the early church as these events are proclaimed in Scripture [are] connected to one another and to the church’s worship . . . as the single, continuing story of God’s saving activity in Jesus Christ.”
Some people find it more helpful to think of God’s single, continuing, saving activity as a stone dropped in a pond, rather than a mighty river. If we think of history as a pond, rather than a line that moves from beginning to end, the stone that God drops is the event of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Like a stone dropped in a pond, Christ sends ripple effects both forward and backward in time. The backward ripple effects are recorded in the Old Testament. This view of history is evident in 1 Corinthians 10:1–4, for example, where Paul calls Israel passing through the sea “baptism” and declares that the rock from which they drank was Christ. The forward ripple effects are the church’s worship, where Christ continues to reconcile and save.
Whether we think of this perspective as a river or a stone dropped in a pond, Christian worship is God’s initiative and activity in human history and the world, as well as in our individual lives, before it is an activity of Christians or the church. Worship is a place where God’s liberating grace is already present and active in words and actions. God speaks and acts in and through the ritual of Christian worship to save, reconcile, and recreate humanity and all creation. The judgment and mercy of God, proclaimed and enacted in worship, signify God’s ultimate judgment and mercy for the world. Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann argues that the liturgy of the Eucharist is the church’s journey or procession into the presence of Christ and the dimension of the reign of God where we “arrive at a vantage point from which we can see more deeply into the reality of the world.” Like a river flowing to the sea, God’s work of reconciliation, recorded in Scripture and accomplished in Christ, continues in the church’s worship and through worship overflows into the world.
Rather than being the means or the motivation by which the church carries out its mission, worship is the location where God carries out God’s mission. Worship is the way God gathers people to witness to and participate in God’s work of reconciling the world to God’s own self. In and through worship, individuals and the community encounter, experience, and celebrate the God who is the source and goal of the rest of their lives. The church proclaims God’s reconciliation and shares in God’s mission by living in the world in ways congruent with what it experiences God doing and enacting in worship. In this way, God’s people worshiping in the midst of the world enact and signify God’s own mission for the life of the world. Rather than being distinct yet related activities the church engages in, worship and mission are God’s single activity of reconciliation. God is the first and primary actor. While Christians and congregations can participate in, be indifferent to, resist, and even undermine God’s saving activity in worship, they can neither achieve nor stop it. Like a mighty river, God’s work of salvation, accomplished in Christ and continued and enacted in worship, will not be stopped until it reaches its destination, the fullness of the reign of God.
Although theologians gave me language with which to describe this relationship of worship and mission, I did not come to understand worship and mission as God’s single activity of reconciling the world to God’s own self from either attending idyllic worship services or reading profound theological books. I experienced worship as the river of God’s mission in the Sunday services of the congregations where I served as pastor, especially after I received my bishop’s disappointing advice. Immediately after I received my bishop’s letter, preaching the gospel, administering the sacraments, teaching the faith, visiting the sick, burying the dead, and leaving growth and outreach to God seemed to me like giving up on mission and becoming a chaplain—the pastor serving the congregation rather than the congregation serving the world. I had this nagging feeling that I should be doing something more. I was wrong. Thankfully, not knowing what more to do and with nothing to lose, I took my bishop’s advice, first at Epiphany Church, then in another congregation. I have been following my bishop’s disappointing advice ever since in congregations where I serve as an interim, sabbatical, or consulting pastor. I do not approach worship as either an end in itself or a means to an end, but as the saving activity of God to which everything else a congregation does points and from which everything else a congregation does flows.
I did not come to the realization that worship is God’s way of reconciling the world to God’s own self on my own. People helped me along the way, particularly my parishioners. They seemed to know instinctively that worship is “primary theology,” an experience of God rather than the church’s reflection on its experience of God. When Epiphany Church started to decline and before I wrote my bishop, I redoubled my efforts to grow the church. I attended an evangelism conference, where we were taught that pastors need to get out of their congregations, which are full of people who go to church, and be visibly active in the community to meet the unchurched. Among other things, we were counseled to spend considerable time each week getting to know the regular patrons in a restaurant or coffee shop near the church. We could learn their concerns and needs and ways the congregation might minister to them. Then, when the opportunity presented itself, we could invite them to church. So I spent time sitting at the counter of the restaurant across the street, sipping coffee, talking with the regulars, and waiting for the moment when the Spirit would nudge me to invite them to church.
After a few weeks of this, some key members of the congregation made their way into my office. “We’re here to find out what’s wrong,” they said. “Your preaching is off. The whole service seems off.” I told them I was being an evangelist and explained how I was getting to know the unchurched. The room exploded in conversation. After listening a good while, a soft-spoken man named Ernie raised his hand. The room got quiet. “Pastor,” he said, “I understand the importance of evangelism, and I really admire you for taking it so seriously. I also appreciate how hard you’re working. How about this? I’ll go across the street and drink coffee. I know a lot of the people there, and I promise I’ll invite them to church. We need you here studying Scripture, writing your sermon, and planning worship, because that’s where we come into God’s presence.”
The people in another congregation were even clearer about how I should and should not spend my time. While I was in graduate school, I was called to be the part-time pastor of a very small congregation—St. Timothy’s Lutheran Church. The congregation had been without a pastor for a long time; when it came to their church, the people were very self-sufficient. At our first meeting together, the members of the church council laid out their expectations of their new pastor. “We only get you for a few hours a week,” they said. “You need to do the pastor stuff and stay out of the other stuff.” By “pastor stuff,” they meant preaching, leading worship, visiting the sick and homebound, providing spiritual care, attending to the dying, teaching the faith, and not much more. They understood the “other stuff” as everything else, which was their responsibility. I quickly learned that the people of St. Tim’s took their responsibility to do the “other stuff” very seriously and that the best thing I could do was to stay out of the way and do the “pastor stuff” really well.
The correspondence between the expectations these two congregations had of me as their pastor and the advice I received from my bishop is not lost on me. These congregations were not looking for a chaplain who would only take care of them. They were not inward looking. They experienced God acting powerfully in worship and knew that attempting anything apart from or at the expense of worship was fruitless, futile, foolish, and perhaps even unfaithful. These congregations did not want either a chaplain or an evangelist. They wanted a pastor who takes God’s presence and activity in worship seriously and trusts that, when God is present and active in worship, something missional will happen, because that is who God is. When these congregations perceived that I was not treating worship as the place where we encounter God, they let me know.
In an era in which congregations routinely expect pastors to be personnel officers, plant managers, financial analysts, and community organizers, I am often asked how I managed to be blessed with such wise parishioners. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that I am legally blind. Congregations that choose me as their pastor have to be unusually open to God doing something new and uncommon in their midst. I wear thick glasses, walk with a white cane, cannot easily recognize people’s faces, and do not drive; I am vulnerable and dependent in many ways. The people I serve cannot pretend their pastor is perfect and can do everything; neither can I. The congregations I served never imagined their pastor would be someone who also manages a disability; yet, when asked to consider this, they saw opportunities where other congregations only saw problems. They were excited by the possibilities even before they had answers to their practical and legitimate questions. Although they did not know all the ways their notions of church and ministry—their own as well as their pastor’s—would change, they were aware that their understanding of church and ministry would change, because conventional ways of doing ministry simply were not going to work. Many people in these congregations told me they felt the Spirit doing something new and different as we worshiped together as part of the interview process, and they wanted to be part of whatever God was doing.
It’s Not All about Us?
When my editor and friend, Beth Gaede, read the first draft of this book, where I describe worship as God’s initiative and activity in human history and the world, as well as in individual lives, before it is an activity of Christians or the church, she responded excitedly, “What an interesting notion!” Like many others, including distinguished Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard, Beth thought that in worship the members of the congregation are the actors and God is the audience. Even theologically aware worshipers find it novel to think of worship as God’s activity. In fact today, much Christian worship is people centered rather than Christ centered or God centered. What we do in and what we get out of worship is stressed over what God is doing in and through worship. We make everything about us. Congregations shape worship according to preference, taste, marketing, liturgical correctness, ideology, or agenda. The goal is worship that reflects the congregation (or individuals or groups within the congregation), the culture, or a predetermined purpose. I believe the church regularly emphasizes people rather than God in worship for several reasons.
First, understanding, analyzing, and explaining worship as something Christians do, rather than as God’s activity or mission, is the natural consequence of our individualistic, consumer-oriented culture and, in some instances, church. In both obvious and subtle ways, we are so “me centered” in every other area of our life that it never occurs to us that our perspective and participation may not be the primary lenses through which to consider Christian worship and mission. To suggest that people are not primary, that everyone who gathers for worship is subordinate to the congregation, and that the congregation is subordinate to God is a countercultural, even offensive declaration. It is also a prophetic word we need to hear.
Second, our emphasis on people rather than God is also a reaction to the state of much Christian worship. Every Christian can name worship experiences that fall short of the marvelous claim that God acts in worship to reconcile the world to God’s own self and bring new life. We can even name worship patterns and practices that diminish or contradict the gospel. We can all point to ways that an unchanging, supposedly divinely inspired order of worship perpetuates oppressive systems opposed to God’s work of reconciliation, including patriarchy, cultural insensitivity, and numerous forms of exclusion. When these things happen in worship, people frequently talk about how the service contradicted the gospel, rather than what God might be doing in—and perhaps in spite of—the service. Conversation shifts to how to change worship and make it better. People forget that all worship except that before the throne of God is imperfect and that God reveals the treasure that is Christ in the clay jars of congregational worship, “so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us” (2 Cor. 4:7). Conversation about God being the primary actor in worship is lost.
Third, in our results-oriented culture and church, permitting God to make the first move in worship makes us nervous, because God may produce something other than what we desire. I am frequently asked whether I have, in fact, “grown a church.” The inquirer, usually a pastor, wants to know whether I have produced significant, sustained numerical growth in a congregation or whether I have created a megachurch. I have not, though I am sure I could. When asked for a surefire, quick-fix approach to growing congregations, the program I frequently propose costs $5,200 a year and is guaranteed to produce numerical growth. The church treasurer goes to the bank and gets fifty-two one-hundred-dollar bills; each week, sometime during the sermon, the preacher simply hands one to someone in the congregation. The church will grow numerically. The question, of course, is: What are the hidden costs?
Understanding God as the primary actor in worship led me to reexamine what the phrase “growing churches,” which a friend likes to remind me is not found in the Bible, really means. Often, the phrase “growing churches” is used as shorthand for numerical growth. An evangelism consultant once told me that growing churches “decide how they want to grow numerically” and “do whatever it takes to grow.” If congregations must do whatever it takes to gain more members, I am not convinced that God intends every congregation to grow numerically. While God intends all congregations to grow in faith, discipleship, and sharing the life of Christ, the growth God intends for some congregations has nothing to do with numbers. As I work with congregations, I find myself both prayerfully pondering and asking others what God is doing in worship and the ways God invites us to participate in it.
God grows some congregations by inviting them to welcome the service and ministry of people whose contributions are not valued anywhere else. St. Timothy’s Church, for example, could not do what it would have taken to grow numerically when leaders were advised that growing numerically meant firing the woman who had served God as the church musician for decades so that the congregation could hire someone more professional or more talented whose music would attract more members. Congregations like St. Timothy’s might even resist numerical growth if members perceive that more people in worship will cause people to feel anonymous. Other congregations might discern that God has invited them to grow by taking a stand in the public square, fully aware that the stand they take will inhibit numerical growth. For example, in worship, members of a congregation might experience an equality as brothers and sisters in Christ, which leads them to fight for those who are not treated equally in society; the congregation’s advocacy may lead people who benefit from social inequality to find a different church. Still other congregations may determine that, rather than growing numerically by benefiting from the struggles of neighboring congregations, God is calling them to grow by partnering with and supporting those struggling congregations. A large congregation cannot include prayers for the well-being of a small, struggling congregation in worship and then achieve numerical growth by “sheep stealing” that congregation’s members. In fact, prayer may lead some members of the large congregation to join that neighboring church in order to help it.
In these and many other instances, the growth God intends for a congregation is something other than numerical. Congregations ought not do whatever it takes to grow numerically when what it takes is contrary to what God says and does in worship. Some congregations even choose not to grow beyond the number their church can accommodate in a single Sunday worship service. As they see it, the congregation must be together to hear God speak and experience what God is doing in worship; people hearing God speak and experiencing God’s activity together at a second worship service are, in effect, a second congregation. While God wants every congregation to grow, to enter more fully into God’s purpose, the growth God intends may not be numerical.
When God Speaks in Worship . . .
Yet, as I pastor churches, consult in congregations, and speak with groups of clergy and congregants at conferences, it regularly occurs to me that the primary reason for our people-centered perspective on worship is much simpler than complicity with the culture, worship that undermines God’s activity, or the desire for numerical growth. The main cause of our people-centered worship is that we don’t know how to talk about what God is saying and doing in worship. While we can describe our involvement and experience in worship personally and concretely, our talk of God’s message, activity, and involvement in worship often becomes theoretical and academic. Even those excited to think that God is the primary actor in worship and that worship is God’s mission ask how we know and name what God is saying and doing in worship. In response to the models of the relationship of worship and mission, which I discussed earlier in this introduction, a pastor once remarked, “I have been to the mountain; those experiences don’t last. I worked hard on the plain and came away empty and exhausted. I want to get wet in the river. How do I get in, and how do I know when I’m there?”
Stated simply, we get into the river by worshiping. Though the extent and intensity of God’s transformation of our lives, our congregations, and the world may remind us of a lazy river rather than a rapid stream, God works in worship over time to shape and move us, as surely as flowing water smooths stones and carries them to the sea. Even when the current of God’s reconciling love does not knock us over and sweep us away, we can worship with the expectation that God is present, speaking, and acting. Expecting God to speak and act in worship makes us actively engaged worshipers and worship leaders. In addition to remaining attentive, even anticipant, during the service, we prepare ourselves for the service, whether we are worshipers or worship leaders. We might read Scripture and pray during the week. We might center ourselves and become aware of both Christ’s presence and the presence of the community as we enter the worship space. We might risk worshiping, whether we are sitting in a pew or leading part of the service, with heart and body as well as with mind and voice. Expecting God to speak and act in worship changes our attitudes as well as our actions. We listen for God to speak as Scripture is read; we pray and attend to prayer in a manner mindful that we are speaking to God; we preach and listen to sermons trusting that God will speak to us; we sing because God and the world hear; and we come to the table in the awareness that the Lord is the host and the table is God’s before it is ours. In all these ways, we remain open to what God is doing in worship, and we strive to be alert because God often works slowly and subtly and seems to sneak up on us, both individually and as a congregation.
We also discover what God is saying and doing in worship by reflecting on our experience of worship with other members of the worshiping community. The issue is not what individuals like and do not like or how worship makes people feel, but what God is saying and doing in and through the congregation’s worship. My friend Mary Catherine Hilkert, who teaches theology at the University of Notre Dame, describes the task as “naming grace found in the depths of human experience.” As witnesses to Christ, we describe the salvation that has happened in our midst and only then speak of the power of God at work in the world. We know ourselves to be saved by God before we dare to speak to the world on God’s behalf. Of course, naming grace inevitably leads to God’s invitation to repentance and conversion, and God’s promise of power to accept that invitation.
We have a general idea of what God says and does in worship. God saves, reconciles, recreates, gives new life, and gathers people to participate in God’s work of reconciliation. The challenge is to get more specific about what God is up to, so that we can concretely name, witness to, and participate in it. Individuals rarely discover God’s particular activity on their own or by only talking with people who share their perspective. Paul’s reminder that we are the body of Christ and individually members of it and his admonition to pursue love and speak to build up the church are helpful principles for Christians exploring together what God is doing in worship (1 Cor. 12:27; 14:1, 4). Paul also provides helpful guidance for the manner of conversations about worship. This is not the occasion for “lofty words or wisdom.” We speak of God’s activity in worship “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (1 Cor. 2:1–3). In other words, we name what God is saying and doing in worship humbly, reverently, and tentatively.
Just as no Christian can name what God is saying and doing in worship apart from the worshiping community, so no congregation can identify what God is saying and doing in its midst without being in dialogue with the whole church. Our conversations about God’s speech and activity in worship include the experiences of both Jewish and Christian ancestors in the faith, in particular the story of Jesus, as these are recorded in Scripture. As part of their conversation about worship, congregations also look to church history and the global church so that they can give voice to the unique ways the church tells Jesus’s story, worships, and lives the faith from generation to generation, culture to culture, and place to place. In so doing, the worship life and faith tradition of the church furnish congregations with both a framework for considering their experience of God in worship and language with which to describe it. Hilkert calls this framework “an echo of the gospel.” For Hilkert, this gospel echo is the good news that humanity is united with God in Jesus, who invites us to “come and see” and to “go and do likewise,” to make Jesus’s story our story, and in so doing to experience worship and—from worship—experience all life as graced.
Stories Congregations Live By
I find the best way to help people to understand, enter into, and reflect upon worship as God’s mission is through stories of congregational worship in which, upon reflection, God’s ongoing presence, speech, and activity are apparent. These are the stories congregations live by, narratives of God coming, speaking God’s promise, bringing people new life, and empowering them to live and share that new life in the world. Stories keep conversations about worship real and concrete. Stories also frame the mystery of God’s involvement in worship in ways we can understand. Human beings think, dream, and imagine in stories; our hopes and fears reside in stories. We conceive of ourselves and make decisions in stories. We also come to know God in and through stories. Before it is anything else, the Bible is a collection of stories. In Scripture, God reveals Godself in the concrete, historical stories of Israel, Jesus, and the early church.
Telling stories is also increasingly recognized as an effective form of leadership. Stories inspire and motivate in ways no other forms of communication can. Stories get people’s attention, create a desire for a different reality or future, and enable people to see possibilities they may have missed. Stories possess great power to effect deep change in people and move them beyond themselves. The best stories are small and unassuming, because they spark a new story in the mind of the listener. This new story, which listeners create for themselves, connects with them emotionally and leads them to act. In fact, this new story becomes a story they live by.
More than anything else, this book—When God Speaks through Worship: Stories Congregations Live By—is a collection of small, unassuming stories of God’s involvement in the weekly worship of congregations where I served as pastor. The stories that follow are, first and foremost, my stories. While they are not about me, they are told from my perspective; they are narratives that grow out of my reflection on and conversations about God’s involvement in worship services that had a significant impact on the worshiping community. Others would undoubtedly recall and relate these stories differently. The stories in this book are also more than my stories. I regularly tell these stories when I speak in congregations and at conferences to help Christians look for God’s presence, listen to God speaking, and apprehend God’s activity in their worship, and people seem to resonate with them. Like all stories, they have been shaped and simplified as they are told and retold, particularly in ways that respect and protect people’s identities.
The themes of the stories in this book are things Christians do when they worship—preach and pray, baptize and bless, light candles and sing songs, share Holy Communion, commend loved ones to God and the communion of saints. Yet, the perspective is not what we do but what God is doing. I am reluctant to label these stories as chapters, both because they do not necessarily build upon or follow from one another and because assigning them numbers implies a determined sequence. I prefer to think of this book as an anthology. If any thread holds these stories together, that thread is the connection between God’s saving activity in Scripture and God’s saving activity in worship. As a preacher, I am never far from Bible stories, images, allusions, and connections, which surely find their way into the narratives. Also, in keeping with my custom when writing Alban books, I include questions at the conclusion of each story, which I hope stimulates your own reflection and conversation.
John D. Witvliet, who edits Alban’s Vital Worship, Healthy Congregations Series, states that this series “is designed to invite congregations to rediscover a common vision for worship, to sense how worship is related to all aspects of congregational life, and to imagine ways of preparing both better ‘content’ and better ‘process’ related to the worship life of their own congregations.” I offer these stories of actual congregational worship as a means of helping others catch the vision of worship as God’s activity—to end the old and begin the new, to bring life out of death and speech out of silence, to redeem the world through the church. I hope they will inspire and encourage worship planners and leaders, who are often diminished by opposition and disheartened by the lack of results, to “not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest-time, if we do not give up” (Gal. 6:9).
For Reflection and Conversation
- Do you consider your pastor (or yourself) to be an evangelist or a chaplain? Do you consider your congregation to be a mission post or a club? How is this evident in worship, ministry, and leadership? Are these helpful categories? Why or why not?
- Do you experience God as the primary actor in worship, or is worship something the pastor or congregation does? Why?
- What does growing a congregation mean in your context? Name three ways God may be calling or inviting your congregation to grow.
- Name one story you would tell about a worship service in your congregation. How does this story connect with the larger narrative of God’s work in the world?