What comes to mind when you read the word “worship”? Do you think about your church building, and maybe the room many churches refer to as a “sanctuary”? Does your mind picture the furnishings in the room, such as the pews or chairs, the piano or the band, and the projection screen? Do you think about singing worship songs? Do you think about the people gathered, or leading worship up front. Maybe you think about a person preaching? Maybe you join worship online?
If you think about any of those images when you see the word “worship,” you are right. When church families gather for worship, those images are the regular week-in, week-out, features of our worship. They are needed and good, and we are right to emphasize them.
But churches would also do well to experiment in worship. We experiment because we do not want to give God, ourselves, or others, the impression that we have worship all figured out. Over the years that heart of teachability has led my congregation to experiment with gathered worship services in a variety of ways. We have held Silent Sundays, Worship in the Park, Q & A Sundays, prayer in various parts of the building, Church Has Left The Building, and more. We experiment because we want to have a heart posture that says to God, “Lord, I want to learn how to worship you.”
With that in mind, I am excited about this coming Sunday’s worship service because we are featuring several creative arts in worship. There will be unique musical instruments, painting, poetry, video, special readings, and ways the whole church family can participate. All of this will be led by a variety of people from our own church family. God has blessed us each with talents and gifts that we can use to worship him, and I am excited and grateful for how many from our church family will be sharing those gifts as an act of worship.
My contribution will be a sermon, and as I do each week, I will post the sermon in five parts here on the blog. We will continue the series on the Life of David. We chose to have Arts Sunday at Faith Church on Sept. 22 because the next section of the Life of David includes a story about David dancing in worship. In 2nd Samuel chapter 6, David is praising God with unbridled joy because God has been faithful to David. Right in the middle of David’s unique worship service, tragedy strikes. Because of the tragedy, David stops the proceedings. After a few months, he feels ready to get the worship service rolling again. This time it goes really well, including the dancing. Except that just as David is reveling in God’s goodness, someone rebukes David to his face. How will David react? Check out the passage ahead of time. I look forward to discussing it with you on the blog this week.
Photo by Trnava University on Unsplash
Engaging Scripture 