How Corporate Worship Shapes Us

When we gather on Sundays, we rehearse a way of life together--we embody a foretaste of our one hope. Each Sunday we practice (in the double sense of that word) this way of life together in our liturgy, with the hope that our corporate worship not only glorifies God and coheres with our profession, but that it also forms us to be the people that God calls us to be. In other words, our Sunday worship trains us for everyday life, in the same way that what you practice, the habits and skills you develop through conditioning, drills, or scales will play out on the field, or the court, or the keyboard, or the guitar strings. And so, each Sunday we practice the practices that are generated from the revelation of God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:  we start each morning by acknowledging that God is already at work in our lives; with our prayer of invocation we say, “Lord, help us to be what you have called us to be”; we hear afresh His call to exclusive worship--for His glory and our good, remembering that we are not our own but belong to another; we praise Him for who He is and what He does,  and give thanks to Him for the gift of life and fellowship; we delight in His presence with us; we regularly acknowledge our sins, and repent from our idolatry and false hopes, and are reminded of the forgiveness that comes only through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ; we give focused attention to His word--because listening to God is our fundamental posture in life, along with praise and gratitude; we listen to His word so that we can discern His will and walk in His ways; we celebrate the Eucharist each Sunday to remember how the big, universal story of Jesus relates to us individually and corporately, that He loves us and that we belong to Him; and in response, having received God’s peace through Jesus, we pass the peace of Christ to others,  and we offer ourselves--our time, talents, and treasures--to  Him to use for His purposes; we remember that our lives are made to be an offering for others;  as priests of His kingdom, we pray for one another, looking for ways that we might draw others into fellowship with God; we bear witness to the truth of the gospel, the story of God’s work in the world,  through songs and professions of faith; and we bless and receive a blessing--a commission to go and be the people we are called to be. 

We do all this because it is a fitting response to God’s grace in our lives--it is a way to faithfully show our worship to God. But we also do it because it shapes us to be the people we want to be--a people who call upon God; a people who can discern God’s call on their lives; a people who are filled with gratitude and praise; a people who admit when they are wrong; a people who do not pretend; a people who receive God’s pardon and grace; a people who bear witness to this grace in our words and deeds; a people who are diligent to study God’s word; a people who recognize that all that they are is an offering to God; a people that receive God’s blessing in order to bless others for the life of the world.  And everyone has a part in this.

The beautiful thing about our corporate gathering is that it is not a performance; there is not an audience. We all, together, do the work of ministry--including our children, who join with us in the work of building up the body, and of offering ourselves to God through listening, singing, praising, praying, and sharing in the Eucharist!