Worship is the arena in which God recalibrates our hearts, reforms our desires, and rehabituates our loves… Worship isn’t just something we do; it is where God does something to us. Worship is the heart of discipleship because it is the gymnasium in which God retrains our hearts. When we realize that worship is also about formation, we will begin to appreciate why form matters. The practices we submit ourselves to in Christian worship are God’s way of rehabituating our loves toward the kingdom, so we need to be intentional about the Story that is carried in those practices. — James K.A Smith, You Are What You Love
It has been a while since the last official post in this series, but there have been two more recent posts that really should make this a seven part series (it’s just that in part 4 I promised one more to tie things up; turns out I was wrong, and this is now the penultimate post because I split it in two).
So here’s a quick re-cap with tl:dr; summaries of each post so far.
- Part one argued that the fundamental truth about our humanity is that ‘you are what you worship’ and so suggested that the real worship wars aren’t so much about what style of music or liturgy your church employs on a Sunday, but about the war for our hearts, desires, and imaginations that goes on 24/7. Real worship happens as the habitual/liturgical living out of a story that shapes us by capturing our love so that we sacrifice.
- Part two argued that the fights about music in church got one thing right; how we worship really matters. It suggests that one implication of the battle for our worship between God and our idolatrous hearts is that gathering as the church on a Sunday is important, but won’t be enough to win the war.
- Part three explored this ‘worship as habits living out a story of the flourishing life’ (thanks James K.A Smith, Augustine, and the Bible) and the power of idolatrous worship by considering pornography use as a form of defective and deadly worship that conscripts the hands, hearts, and imagination such that a person (and culture) is shaped by this ‘shared’ worship.
- Part four started to chart a way forward in the worship wars; which involved: a) seeing ourselves as living in a world where lots of things vie for our worship because the evil one loves us to worship idols, b) knowing our enemies, c) seeing that winning the war requires real worship of the real God, d) seeing that attack is the best form of defence; that we beat idols via ‘the expulsive power of a new affection’ and donning the ‘armour of God’ (Ephesians 6) not just by guarding our hearts.
- As a bonus I considered how my weight loss program was a form of idolatrous worship built on these building blocks, and examined some unexpected consequences of adopting new habits.
- Then how going to Westfield to do my Christmas shopping was joining a bunch of worshippers in a modern temple.
It’ll be clear to anyone who reads the snippets of different books quoted in these posts that much of what I’ve written is simply articulating the framework James K.A Smith has been developing in his books Imagining The Kingdom, Desiring The Kingdom, and You Are What You Love. Smith loves Augustine and David Foster Wallace too, so I’ve very much enjoyed these works from the series because they are, in many ways, articulating a framework I’m deeply convinced of too… I’ve also just finished reading the most excellent and provocative Liturgy Of The Ordinary: Sacred Practices In Everyday Life by Tish Harrison Wells, which is a companion piece, of sorts, to Smith’s ‘Cultural Liturgies’ series. These books are a great resource when it comes to seeing the problem posed by our heart’s desire to be pointed at something (or claimed by something), but I’m not entirely convinced their answers (in sum: a return to ancient, tried and true ‘liturgy’) are for everybody. Smith’s emphasis is largely placed on Sunday-as-worship (and especially the liturgical shaping of a worship experience around word and sacrament), Wells expands Smith’s insight to consider how the shape of a classic liturgical service might be reflected in the shape of the everyday. I’m unpersuaded by this, at least so far as what worship that keeps my own heart pointed and ordered by the Gospel might look like, though I should say I’m thoroughly persuaded of their critique of a tendency for churches to respond to the way things outside the church are capturing our hearts by making church feel more like a cafe or the shopping centre… I also totally share their conception about what the ends, or telos, of worship and ‘church’ are, and how worship relates to the God we meet in the Gospel… I love this selection of quotes from You Are What You Love:
The practices of the church are also a spiritual workout, inviting us into routines that train our heart muscles, our fundamental desires that govern how we move and act in the world…
Our sanctification—the process of becoming holy and Christlike—is more like a Weight Watchers program than listening to a book on tape. If sanctification is tantamount to closing the gap between what I know and what I do (no longer reading Wendell Berry in Costco, essentially), it means changing what I want. And that requires submitting ourselves to disciplines and regimens that reach down into our deepest habits. The Spirit of God meets us in that space—in that gap—not with lightning bolts of magic but with the concrete practices of the body of Christ that conscript our bodily habits.
Christian worship is the heart of discipleship just to the extent that it is a repertoire of practices shaped by the biblical story. Only worship that is oriented by the biblical story and suffused with the Spirit will be a counterformative practice that can undo the habituations of rival, secular liturgies.
The Scriptures seep into us in a unique way in the intentional, communal rituals of worship. If we want to be a people oriented by a biblical worldview and guided by biblical wisdom, one of the best spiritual investments we can make is to mine the riches of historic Christian worship, which is rooted in the conviction that the Word is caught more than it is taught.
While worship is entirely embodied, it is not only material; and though worship is wholly natural, it is never only natural. Christian worship is nothing less than an invitation to participate in the life of the Triune God.
Those of us who inhabit postmodernity have so much to learn from ancient Christians… the rituals and liturgies of their surrounding culture were much more overt—for example, their civic political spaces were unabashedly temples, whereas ours traffic under euphemisms (stadiums, capitols, universities)—early Christians were more intentional about and conscious of the practices they adopted for worship. The heart and soul of their liturgical life hearkened back to Israel, but they didn’t simply “Jesufy” the synagogue. There was faithful innovation as the disciples sought to discern the rhythms and practices that would constitute the community of Christ. This included responding specifically to Jesus’s commands (giving us baptism and the Lord’s Supper, for example), but it also included careful selection, reappropriation, and reorientation of formative cultural practices into the repertoire of kingdom-indexed liturgy. Thus, over time, the body of Christ continued to discern the scripts that should characterize a worshiping community centered on the ascended Christ who prayed for kingdom come.
To be conformed to the image of his Son is not only to think God’s thoughts after him but to desire what God desires. That requires the recalibration of our heart-habits and the recapturing of our imagination, which happens when God’s Word becomes the orienting center of our social imaginary, shaping our very perception of things before we even think about them. So, like the secular liturgies of the mall or the stadium or the frat house, Christian liturgies can’t just target the intellect: they also work on the body, conscripting our desires through the senses.
All these are fantastic; but where he goes (and where Wells goes with him) will not, I suspect, work for us all; though I’d suggest they (and the others they draw on through church history and in the Bible) do provide the scaffolding for us.
Forming (or de-forming) worship in a gods-saturated age
Like Athens when Paul visited, gods are on every corner in our so-called ‘secular’ age; and this ‘habit-shaping,’ ‘ritual,’ worship takes many forms
Smith has quite a bit to say about how important the forms of our worship are, within the life of the church, not simply the content (which is pretty much taking Marshall McLuhan’s insights that ‘the medium is the message’ and applying them to the life of the church…here’s his critique of churches that have tended to simply imitate the ‘forms’ found in rival ‘worship’ (like the gym, or the shopping centre) by creating church services that are ‘hip’, consumer-driven things where worship is ‘expressive’ rather than enacted, habitual, ritual with a vision of the image of the ‘good life’ (Jesus), and a ‘narrative’ (the Gospel) shaping these habitually repeated actions (so that the form is important).
With the best of intentions, this “expressive” paradigm is then allied to a questionable distinction between the form of worship and the content of the gospel. The concrete shape and practices of Christian worship, passed down through the centuries, are considered merely optional forms—or even whited sepulchers of dead ritual—that can and should be discarded in order to communicate the gospel “message” in ways that are contemporary, attractive, and relevant. In our desire to embed the gospel content in forms that are attractional, accessible, and not off-putting, we look around for contemporary cultural forms that are more familiar. Instead of asking contemporary seekers and Christians to inhabit old, stodgy medieval practices that are foreign and strange, we retool worship by adopting contemporary practices that can be easily entered precisely because they are so familiar.
“Rather than the daunting, spooky ambience of the Gothic cathedral, we invite people to worship in the ethos of the coffee shop, the concert, or the mall. Confident in the form/content distinction, we believe we can distill the gospel content and embed it in these new forms, since the various practices are effectively neutral: just temporal containers for an eternal message. We distill “Jesus” out of the inherited, ancient forms of historic worship (which we’ll discard as “traditional”) in order to present Jesus in forms that are both fresh and familiar: come meet Jesus in the sanctified experience of a coffee shop; come hear the gospel in a place that should feel familiar since we’ve modeled it after the mall. The problem, of course, is that these “forms” are not just neutral containers or discardable conduits for a message. As we’ve seen already, what are embraced as merely fresh forms are, in fact, practices that are already oriented to a certain telos, a tacit vision of the good life…
So when we distill the gospel message and embed it in the form of the mall, while we might think we are finding a fresh way for people to encounter Christ, in fact the very form of the practice is already loaded with a way of construing the world. The liturgy of the mall is a heart-level education in consumerism that construes everything as a commodity available to make me happy. When I encounter “Jesus” in such a liturgy, rather than encountering the living Lord of history, I am implicitly being taught that Jesus is one more commodity available to make me happy. And while I might eagerly want to add him to my shelf of stuff, we shouldn’t confuse this appropriation with discipleship.”
Then he talks specifically about how these ‘forms’ work in the context of Christian worship, of the sort he believes offers a genuine solution…
“By the “form” of worship I mean two things: (1) the overall narrative arc of a service of Christian worship and (2) the concrete, received practices that constitute elements of that enacted narrative.”
Here’s one little bit of pushback on this stuff on ‘forms’ before we move on; as I was bombarded with preachy emails from The Commando during my 12 week fitness challenge, I couldn’t help but feel that he’d actually flogged his approach from the church, and there might be times when we’re actually just taking our forms back, as well as times when we might ‘plunder gold from Egypt’; if we pay attention to the ‘forms’ that form people it’s not totally beyond a robust doctrine of creation to spoil Egypt to preach Christ (that’s totally Augustinian, too, in On Christian Teaching). A ‘true form’ can be used by those peddling falsehood to achieve deformation; and we need to be careful that those ‘forms of historic worship’ weren’t simply the ‘mall’ of their day (so, for example, the Roman household, or association, or the ‘sacred’ practices designed by the culture of the church through the ages.
I’m with Smith on forms being as important as content; especially because I think there’s two more elements at play in how we do church/worship together (and how church works) that fit with this Augustinian paradigm (or indeed, with us being made as people who bear the image of whatever we worship, and people who are made to relate to others in cultures built around common objects of worship):
- The church and its worship is the plausibility structure for the Gospel; and the way we love and worship reflecting the Gospel helps us to believe, and non-believers to come to belief when they see us worship (see 1 Corinthians 14, and 1 John).
- Any persuasion to change is driven more by what we do (ethos) and imitation than by what we say; the quickest way to undermine what we say is to do differently.
The form of our community and its life and love together expressed in our shared practices has to line up with the message we preach about a crucified and resurrected Lord who loves us by laying down his life in our place to forgive our sins and restore our relationship with God. Our worship is our ‘shared practice’ of living out this message, and following the example of Jesus, of whom Marshall McLuhan said:
“In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same”
The shape of our worship matters, and I’m not so sure its enough simply for our worship to be reflecting on the Gospel story via historic liturgies, but also participating in re-telling the Gospel story via deliberate acts of sacrificial love that consciously reflect the message we believe and so shape us. That’s fundamentally what the sacraments do, of course. I’m sure that these ancient forms of worship that Smith is speaking about, and the applications of the elements of a liturgical service to daily life Wells puts forward do that; but they don’t exclusively do that (ie there are other ways to skin this cat), and I’d argue there’s a slightly more ancient form. I suspect the apostle Paul and the early church knew a thing or two about idolatry and worship and what it does to us, it’s pretty rudimentary Judaism and he was not a rudimentary Jew…
Forming practices that go beyond Sundays
In You Are What You Love Smith writes about what it looks like for a family to take the liturgical calendar and incorporate it into the rhythms of family life, and to build new ‘rhythms’ that spring from this shape, and that’s nice and has some appeal to me as I think about what sort of rhythms family life should take in the Campbell family, and what forms I want forming my kids (and us as a family). Both Smith and Wells see worship and liturgy going beyond Sunday, but because of their emphasis on capital-L Liturgy they put huge significance on Sundays-as-worship. Sundays most definitely are worship; and an especially important part of worship because they incorporate the gathered body of believers-in-community; and let’s not understate this as an important distinctive that comes with the Gospel. Lots of idolatrous worship is individualistic and so consumer-driven that you end up consuming others as objects, not sacrificing for them. Christian worship is distinctively corporate, and other-serving. This is why Sundays are important; but it’s also why the Sunday-experience of life together is limiting. I don’t think our consumer driven approach to worship as Christians is limited to the way Sundays happen; I think the way we think of ‘church’ as ‘event’ or even ‘church’ as ‘where I go to be fed/worship God’ rather than thinking of ‘church’ as synonymous with ‘people of God’ is just as damaging. There’s a danger some who might be more inclined towards Liturgy and tradition might bring the wrong expectations to those ancient forms; just as there’s a danger that this same attitude might lead some to create new forms. Here’s where I think the Bible pushes back at this… this is a contender for most quoted verse on my blog I reckon…
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship. Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. — Romans 12:1-2
Notice Paul doesn’t say:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters… view of God’s mercy… holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.
Worship is something we do, but it’s not just a thing we direct vertically; towards God; worship has a dimension that includes what we do with our bodies in this world and somehow doing what Paul goes on to talk about in the rest of chapter 12 (which is directed to other people) is proper worship of God.
Also, notice he doesn’t say:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God— on Sundays — this is your true and proper worship.
This worship is an attitude; a deliberate, formative, direction of our bodies that is caught up with not being conformed (or deformed) by the world (powerful when read in the context of Romans 1), which is somehow caught up with the transforming and renewing of our minds.
Also notice what he’s actually saying is:
Therefore, I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer youses bodies together as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship.
This is something the ‘brothers and sisters’ he writes to are to do together. Worship is caught up in the life of the church being lived as a living sacrifice. And he gets quite specific… Here’s a list of practices that have the capacity to be rituals just as powerful as capital-L liturgy if they’re caught up in living out our ‘view of God’s mercy’…
For by the grace given me I say to every one of you: Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourself with sober judgment, in accordance with the faith God has distributed to each of you. For just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we, though many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace given to each of us. If your gift is prophesying, then prophesy in accordance with your faith; if it is serving, then serve; if it is teaching, then teach; if it is to encourage, then give encouragement; if it is giving, then give generously; if it is to lead, do it diligently; if it is to show mercy, do it cheerfully.
Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in love. Honour one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervour, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. — Romans 12:3-16
What if we took this; not just the liturgical calendar (which might help us to view God’s mercy); and made it the blueprint of ‘church’ and of ‘worship’ that went a long way beyond Sundays.
Sounds nice; doesn’t it? What if our ‘worship’ was built on providing a community where the church could bless one another (and the world) by sacrificially offering our ‘gifts’; this list can’t just cover Sundays; it’s about what life together looks like. Shared life. Sharing the ups and downs of life.
Ideal even?
But perhaps it sounds too idealistic in our busy modern life. Perhaps though our busyness it actually a ritual, a liturgy, or a habit that reflects our worship of some other gods — career, success, money, our identity being caught up in our ‘job’…
Here’s the thing this is actually what the early church did. This is the ‘tradition’ of the church as it is established:
“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. Everyone was filled with awe at the many wonders and signs performed by the apostles. All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favour of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” — Acts 2:42-47
This is the sort of community life that made the Gospel plausible in the first century that attracted and cultivated disciples…
This is the Romans 12 ‘worshipping community’…
This is the ‘ethos’ that reflects the Gospel, and these are the habits of life together that reinforces the Gospel message that has just been preached in Acts 2… and
We’re not really told much about their Liturgy; but we can imagine their ‘liturgy’ from these verses; we know the sacraments were part of the life of the church from Acts and the other NT letters, but they seem to be incorporated into meals and the life of the ‘family’… not just on Sundays, but meeting together ‘every day’…
This is how to win a worship war; this is what helped the early church flourish in a world soaked with idols vying for their hearts; not least of which was the Roman Emperor via the Imperial Cult. This is the sort of thick community that was both present in the world such that they ‘enjoyed the favour of all of the people’ but also capable of keeping the church standing in the face of persecution from the empire; in fact, a little later, when the empire is just figuring out how to get Christians to recant and worship the emperor, in the governor Pliny’s correspondence with the emperor Trajan, this is how the official records describe the practices of the church:
“They asserted, however, that the sum and substance of their fault or error had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom to depart and to assemble again to partake of food–but ordinary and innocent food.”
This ‘fixed day’ was Sunday; we know from Justyn Martyr, who wrote a substantial amount about how Sunday gatherings worked in 150AD, that Sundays were important and had a ‘Liturgy’ from pretty early on; but somehow this Liturgy was not a replacement of the Acts 2 liturgy, but part of the rhythms of church life. Sundays seem to be an expression of the community of worshippers that exists throughout the week.
“…the wealthy among us help the needy; and we always keep together; and for all things wherewith we are supplied, we bless the Maker of all through His Son Jesus Christ, and through the Holy Ghost. And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succours the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Saviour on the same day rose from the dead.” — Justin Martyr, First Apology
This approach to life; and Sunday; which is very much God-centred, and so, other-centred, is what worship looks like; worship isn’t just a me-and-God thing, but an us-and-God thing, and that’s a powerful antidote to the worship of the fitness program or the shopping centre (and why, for example, the Get Commando Fit program works so hard at building an online community of people who are ‘in the program’ with you).
The practices that are going to fight the counter-forming practices of the idols of our world; our technology (be it social media or pornography), our relationships, our diets, our exercise program… all these come with an embedded vision of the ‘image of the life we want’… living together ‘in view of God’s mercy’ won’t always feel totally different, because it will still involve sacrifice, and a relationship via ‘habitual action’ with the things of our world (people, food, exercise, and sex are all good things God made)… but it has to be consciously shaped by a different story in the context of a living, breathing, community shaped by the Gospel story, united in Christ, given the Spirit, and working out what it looks like to pray, learn, suffer, struggle, rejoice, mourn, serve, give, eat, sin, and forgive together. I want to build the rhythms of life in our family around the activities listed in Romans 12 (and in Acts 2, and in Colossians 3, and Ephesians 6…); but I also want them to shape how I approach being part of the family of God, so that catching up for a coffee or sharing a meal is both a habit, and an opportunity to relate in the sort of way Paul describes here; to share life-in-Christ. I want this sort of generous service of others to shape the way I encourage people in our church community to spend their time (and energy, and money).
Worship can’t be a thing we do alone; it works best in relationships where we’re conscious that this is the human task; that discipleship starts with these ancient practices that reflect our shared story. It’s these practices throughout the week, not just the ‘Liturgy’ of traditional churches as practiced on Sundays, that will form us, and our loves, in a way that destroys the idols that would take our hearts captive. In the final, or ultimate, post I’ll consider what place the big-L Liturgy Smith and Wells advocate can have in this worship war.