WHAT IS WORSHIP? by Rev. James Howell, Davidson UMC, Davidson, NC

The most fundamental (and unusual, compared to everything else that goes on in the world) activity of the Church is worship. Hymns are sung, prayers recited, sermons preached. Kierkegaard helped us understand worship: while a service looks like performers (the minister, the choir) on stage before an audience (the congregation), the fact is that we all are the performers (minister, choir, congregation), and God is the audience. When we plan worship at DUMC, we try to make it a mutual offering up to God, which means we strive to avoid making it feel anything like a "show" or a "performance." I guess most folks know I'm not fond of applause in worship - and it's not because we don't appreciate the skill of the choir (the usual target), or because we're stuffy. Rather, the choir is leading all of us into the presence of God. We join our hearts to their voices, and our admiration isn't for the choir, but for God. This isn't a show or concert. This is worship.

Silence has a profound role in worship. I've told preaching students that the Holy Spirit works most profoundly, not when the preacher is actually talking, but in the silences between and after the words. When we pray, when the choir sings, when we do whatever we do in worship, we respond in an awed silence, the space in which God can work, and (dare we suggest it?) even speak to us. 

In worship we declare what is worthy of our praise, another counter-cultural act in a world where everything from soap to cars is praised. In worship we offer ourselves and what we have to God. In worship we are even transformed into people we would never be had we not come. Amos Wilder put it pretty boldly: "Going to church is like approaching an open volcano, where the world is molten and hearts are sifted. The altar is like a rail that spatters sparks, the sanctuary like the chamber next to an atomic oven; there are invisible rays, and you leave your watch outside."

There is an order to worship; and yet we enter into that order with zeal, heart, enthusiasm. Lots of debate is swirling in various denominations, including Methodism, about styles of worship. Plenty of churches are focused now on style, arguing that we need zippy, popular styles of music to appeal to people. In our worship planning at DUMC, we do not focus at all on style. Everything is content-driven. We begin with the Bible text for the day. Prayers are written to pull some thread from the text. A hymn, an anthem, a response are woven into the tapestry. The sermon articulates the fabric, and most importantly, we go out and serve in ways that make sense given what we have done in worship.

Worship is not designed to be "pleasing" to the worshipper. Rather, worship is geared to honor God, and to draw the worshipper into a world very different from the one in which we are immersed all week. We speak a different language, with a different grammar. We sing different songs, and we hang out with different people. Worship will challenge, correct, flay our souls, and heal our hearts. So does the enjoyment of worship matter?

Not so much in comparison to whether the truth is told, the layers between our lives and God peeled back, the worship doing its painful surgery on our broken souls so we might recover our identity as God's people, eager to serve, to discover not that God was in the worship service, but that because of the worship we now see the hand of God everywhere else.