Trevor Laurence
Corporate worship is embodied catechesis. More than a context for expressing the contents of our hearts, more than a venue for acquiring theological ideas, the gathered worship of Christ’s church is a training regimen for forming whole persons—minds, affections, even bodily senses—to dwell faithfully and fittingly in the world given and narrated by God.
The liturgy is a script, and corporate worship is a dress rehearsal wherein all the actors in God’s drama learn to fully inhabit their characters. Through the repetition of ritualized action, our bodies are immersed in a storied vision of reality, our loves are directed to their proper objects, our reflexes are primed for the responses of faith, our instinctive conceptions of God and his world and ourselves are molded in order to predispose us to worship and holiness and wisdom, to affection and action that cohere with the story of the word, which is the authoritative story of the world.
In the church’s work of rendering worship to God, God works upon his worshiping church. In the covenant community’s priestly service of praise, God serves his kingdom of praising priests. The recognition that the liturgy does something beautiful to us is not an instrumentalization of worship—as if we worship God not for who he is but for what it will do for us. It is simply an affirmation that for an ever-loving, ever-generous God, every command is always also a gift, and that by giving to God the worship of which he is worthy we are simultaneously receiving from God as he shapes our cognition, character, and imagination to make us into the people he calls and desires us to be.
In fellowship with God, we are never forced to decide between doing what is right by God and doing what is good for us. Doing what is right by God is always ultimately doing what is good for us because life with God is precisely that abundant life for which we were created. Worship ascribes to God the glory due his name, and that very worship forms us as worshipers to be fully human.
Worship in Space
Before the liturgy ever formally begins, the worshiper’s body is already oriented in space and in relation to other bodies in ways that impress upon the flesh profound realities. In the gathered congregation, the worshiper dwells side-by-side with other worshipers—in physical proximity, able to see and hear and smell and touch other human beings, sensing their presence—corporeally arranged as one body in a unified body composed of distinct bodies, facing in embodied solidarity with the whole community the direction from which God’s word will be proclaimed and the church’s liturgy led.
Before a word is uttered, then, before a text is read or musical note played, participants have already begun their induction into a cosmos in which they are united in identity and purpose with God’s worshiping people, in which many have been made one. Something as seemingly trivial as the positioning of persons together powerfully proclaims to our senses the promised reality that “in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and all were made to drink of one Spirit” (1 Cor 12:13). The weekly, repeated organization of bodies in worship generates a bodily form of knowledge—an understanding that we hold deep within our bones—in which the individual learns the self in relation to a community, learns the world as a field in which the individual is bound by the gracious action of God to other human beings.1
Of course, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many congregations are presently worshipping in atypical configurations, ranging from virtual services to outdoor gatherings to socially-distanced meetings. Nevertheless, to the extent that the physicality of corporate worship under normal circumstances in the past has marked our bodies and shaped the imaginal conception of the world that we carry in our flesh, even the abnormal conditions of pandemic worship provide an opportunity to viscerally recall—to remember with our bodies, and not just our minds—the sensations we previously experienced with unexciting regularity.2
Amid the various changes wrought by the pandemic, we may perhaps draw upon the reservoir of enfleshed memory accumulated through past action, benefitting in the present from the prior bodily conditioning that we quite possibly took for granted. As a single unexpected smell, sound, or taste may transport us to a world long past, so might the simple act of “entering” into worship—whatever that may look like during this time—transport us back into the world we regularly inhabited with the gathered church, palpably conjuring in our senses afresh the unity, solidarity, intimacy, and belonging that the physical, proximal presence of other Christians silently proclaimed.
We all ever live one turn of providence from being prevented from participating in the usual rhythms of the church’s gathered worship, a fact that shut-ins and the chronically ill understand well. As this time kindles a longing for a future comprehensive return to the regular blessings of worship, it ought also to impress upon us the necessity of prioritizing corporate worship—of being shaped by God in the liturgy—when we are able, for we neither know nor control when we will be plunged into a season when we have no other recourse but to draw upon the formation we received through Sabbaths past.
Called by God
The first words of worship belong to God. The sound waves that enter the ears and reverberate through the rib cage in the voice of the liturgical leader envelope the worshiper with the voice of God calling his people to give him praise, rendering the divine address sensable. The drama of worship begins with the sensory experience of God’s life-giving invitation wherein each worshiping body feels itself as one dignified and addressed by divine speech, the object of God’s loving call into fellowship—a subject, an agent, an I who is part of a we that is afforded the honor of being spoken to by God.
Those whom the world may regard as nobodies, and who may regard themselves as nobodies, are weekly demonstrated to be somebodies in the economy of God by his act of speaking in attentive love to them. At the same time, those who deem themselves somebodies stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the nobodies, on equal ground, to receive a word from God that reaches out to them before they ever have a chance to prove their faithfulness, present their merits, earn their place in God’s assembly. God’s call to worship, like the gospel itself, exalts the lowly and brings down the proud with a single stroke.
The community is here welcomed into a world where God’s presence and action always precedes their own, where God’s gracious initiative makes room for and beckons human response.3 In the liturgy, our confrontation with God’s grace does not commence with the assurance of pardon, and our embrace by God’s hospitality is not confined to the Table. Both are already there in God’s opening overture to come to him and worship, framing every subsequent moment that follows in the liturgy and framing every moment of our lives within the security of being acknowledged, seen, known, invited by the God who has no need and yet delights to commune with us.
The divine call that permits us to discover anew our affirmed agency in communion with God and his people also directs our agency toward its proper end in joyful apprehension of God. The first movement of the primary event of the first day of the week is a paradigmatic act that establishes the pattern for all of life, channeling the river of our affections and energies toward God.4 Every other potential activity is either subsumed under or invalidated by this primary activity of worship.
In many churches, this liturgical element routinely employs the exhortations of the Psalter, set frequently as responsive readings that permit the congregation to answer God’s address as his beckoned people. Consider this responsive setting of Psalm 66:1–5, with the congregation’s words in bold:
Shout for joy to God, all the earth;
sing the glory of his name;
give to him glorious praise!
Say to God, “How awesome are your deeds!
So great is your power that your enemies come cringing to you.
All the earth worships you
and sings praises to you;
they sing praises to your name.”
Come and see what God has done:
he is awesome in his deeds toward the children of man.
Or this arrangement of Psalm 68:32–35:
O kingdoms of the earth, sing to God;
sing praises to the Lord,
to him who rides in the heavens, the ancient heavens;
behold, he sends out his voice, his mighty voice.
Ascribe power to God,
whose majesty is over Israel,
and whose power is in the skies.
Awesome is God from his sanctuary;
the God of Israel—he is the one who gives power and strength to his people.
Blessed be God!
This back-and-forth dialogue engages worshipers in a conversation with God, enacting the reciprocity of covenant communion, practicing the reality that the God who first addressed us is simultaneously the God who listens to, cares about, and receives our speech.5 The grace of God’s address to us is underscored by the grace of his readiness to receive our address to him. Indeed, the entire liturgy is a dialogical exercise wherein God’s words to us prompt (and often supply) our words back to him. This characteristic dynamic of worship schools us to conceive not only of our speech to God but of our entire existence before the face of God as a rhythmic dance—a two-step—of reception that begets action, of attentive listening to God’s word that elicits word-formed response in our every domain.
God’s opening address that sonically surrounds and penetrates the body induces from us a bodily reply. Speaking to God is an act of faith, and as worshipers fill their lungs with air and vibrate their vocal cords in speech toward the heavens, they perform a liturgical action that functionally assumes God’s presence and receptivity and that consequently trains them to assume—with heart and abdomen alike—that there is indeed a God who lovingly hears and takes pleasure in their words.
What is more, the individual body that speaks God’s psalmic script back to God at God’s behest is in turn immersed in the sound of synchronized prayer from every angle, for the individual’s response is also the coordinated response of the corporate body. In this practice of prayer in unison—in which persons speak together, pause together, breathe together, and share identical words—the worshiper enacts her identity as a member of a community, learning through embodied participation that she lives in connection to other bodies, tasting with her senses that she is wrapped up in a family and a mission that is larger than herself. Insofar as those very words have been uttered to God across the centuries and around the globe, the worshiper’s experiential connectedness to other believers extends through time and space to the church catholic,6 an experiential connectedness that coincides with and testifies to the fact of catholic unity in Christ.
For twenty-first century westerners, what is absent from the beginning of worship may be as significant as what is present. The consumerism that dictates and is reinforced by the shape of modern life does not function as a determinative factor in the shape and substance of the liturgy. God’s initiating word to his people sets the agenda and ultimate aims of the dialogue into which he has welcomed the church, and his word even scripts the explicit speech that his people are to utter back to him. We do not enter the liturgy to say whatever we would like to say or to feel whatever we would like to feel but to be trained to speak faithfully of and to God—to be schooled in the affections that are fitting for the children of God. Persons who naturally navigate the world as consumers, choosers whose preferences are authoritative and acquirers who always need more, learn in worship how to be receivers: subjects of a fatherly king who depend upon and respond to his authoritative word, who grow increasingly to love the things that God loves as secondary preferences retreat from primacy, who seek and find fullness in the infinite God whose riches are more inexhaustible than the cravings of our hearts.7
The World of Worship
The content of the call to worship often foregrounds declarations and images of God’s kingship, sovereignty, power, authority, and steadfast faithfulness, unfolding a world where God reigns, empowers his people, and governs reality toward the fulfillment of his every good purpose. But exceeding a merely cognitive presentation of theological data, the call to worship engages the worshiper in the act of worship, evoking an affective recognition and celebration of God’s majesty and strength, entering and inhabiting a world where God is and, as king, is worthy of praise.
The church receives and performs a world in worship. Beginning with God’s call, she is thrown in medias res into a cosmos structured by the story of God, situated as a community within a shared history in which the past deeds of the God of Israel motivate the worship of his people in the present and push forward in desirous anticipation of a certain and glorious future. In the world presented and enacted in the liturgy, we are lifted out of our myopic infatuation with self, and our shallow, immanent, enclosed conceptions of what is true, real, and worth living for are exploded by the God of glory and grace.
Engaging every part of us as human beings, the inaugural call into worship thus starts our habituation into reality as defined by God, our habituation into a renewed way of understanding and being in God’s world. We are swept up into—taken captive by—a story in which God was and is and will ever be the worship-worthy, sovereign king. We are grounded in a stable reality that, through the very real instabilities of creaturely existence, is secured by a God who providentially upholds the order of his creation, moves history toward its appointed end, and reigns over his people in holy love and power. We are oriented to instinctively imagine the world as the dominion of God. And as we practice receiving God’s address, beholding his goodness, and responding in faith to his revelation, we exercise in the Spirit the muscles of Godward desire, sharpening our reflexes of praise, cultivating an impulse toward worship to be carried wherever we go.
Trevor Laurence is the Executive Director of the Cateclesia Institute
Image: Vincent van Gogh, The Church at Auvers
- James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, vol. 1 of Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 167: “In the action of gathering, there is a visceral training of our imagination that shapes how we subsequently think about our identity and calling as human, in relation to God and in relation to others.” Emphasis original.[↩]
- See the relevant reflections of James K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, vol. 2 of Cultural Liturgies (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2013), 95.[↩]
- Cf. Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Worship: Letting the Gospel Shape Our Practice (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 160–1.[↩]
- Philip Kenneson, “Gathering: Worship, Imagination, and Formation,” in The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 58.[↩]
- Cf. Nicholas Wolterstorff, The God We Worship: An Exploration of Liturgical Theology (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2015), 60–61.[↩]
- See Debra Dean Murphy, Teaching that Transforms: Worship as the Heart of Christian Education (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2004), 118–9.[↩]
- The extended reflections of Murphy, Teaching that Transforms, 125–34 on the liturgy’s challenge to consumerism are well worth consulting.[↩]