Category: worship

If you were to close your eyes and imagine the perfect ‘experience’ of worship, what would it be like? Where would it begin? With the first hymn? … as you walk into the building?… as you kneel to pray?

I have learned over the years that there are lots of moments that lead me into worship and help me engage fully. Everything from walking through the door (platonic ideal: summer in the States, pushing a large wooden door open and crossing from brightness and heat to the cool soft light of the church), to the almost imperceptible pause as I move into the centre aisle and look at the altar (breath in, walk forward…), to taking off my glasses as I settle to pray.  These accidental rituals  have become part of the pattern of worship that helps me to focus on God.

The patterns depend on location, of course. In a familiar church, there are ritual greetings with the person you meet outside, the woman who hands you the hymnal, the child running towards you up the aisle. Meeting them is part of preparing to worship too. But there is a fine balancing point — we gather together for worship; yet we can’t let the business of gathering get in the way of the worship.

We have to make space for stillness and recollection. Space for God. And we make that space not only for ourselves, but for other people. Continue reading “worship: preparing” →

see worship: preface for a quick introduction to this post

Worship begins with a choice to respond to God. It begins with a choice to offer God time and energy, and demands our willingness to approach God with gratitude and with a degree of honesty about who we really are.

To that extent, I think it is a basic choice — a life choice — that we may need to reaffirm regularly, but that we make knowing that it is about who we are, and how we will live rather than a question about how we might fill a Sunday morning.

But for most of us, Sunday mornings are the start. And that demands choice too. Are we willing to get up and go out to pray while all our friends are settling in for a quiet morning with the newspaper and the dog? Are we willing to commit to worship when there are so many other demands on our time? And if we are willing to set aside time for God, are we really going to risk the precious time we have for God by gathering with other people — who might disturb us, or annoy us or distract us from God? Are we really going to choose to go to church in order to respond to God?

Well, I’m obviously biased in this, but I think if we are going to respond to God well, the answer has to be yes — because it’s in the gathering together that we learn how to respond to God. The very things that drive us crazy about church help us be more honest about who we are as we approach God. Continue reading “worship: choosing” →

Yesterday, I had lunch with friends whom I hadn’t seen since before Christmas, and we did a bit of belated evaluation on the Christmas services. ‘How did they go?’ someone asked, and between us (and thus discussing various churches) we offered such sophisticated evaluation as ‘they went well’, ‘the atmosphere was good’, ‘numbers were up’, and ‘people liked the sherry afterwards’.  That was about all our lunch time conversation demanded. But it left me thinking about how we evaluate worship. And more basically how we engage meaningfully with it.

During Lent, the congregation in Rothesay will be looking at Liturgy — and no doubt some of that teaching will find it’s way here. But first I want to look at worship from the point of view of the person worshipping. What makes for a ‘good service’? What are the factors that contribute to our having a positive, vivid sense of encounter with God, and what threatens to get in the way?

As I thought about it last night, I realised that what was consistent about my most significant experiences of worship was not the particular liturgy or the beauty of the music or the style of the celebrant, but my own preparedness and willingness to respond. So, I’m going to offer a number of posts on the mechanics of preparation and response — the stages I go through, and that I suspect many of us need to go through, to engage fully with worship.

And I’ll begin — later today — with the first step: choosing to worship.