Friday, October 22, 2004 AD
Worship and vocation
In my previous posts, I've contrasted the "Sydney Anglican" approach to worship with the Lutheran concept of worship as Gottesdienst, God's service to us in Word and Sacrament.
The Sydney Anglicans (and other, non-Sydney conservative evangelical Anglicans such as Vaughan Roberts, whose book True Worship is an excellent presentation of this approach to worship) are right to emphasise our need to serve God during the whole week, and to emphasise Romans 12:1 in this regard. However, the problem then becomes how we fit what we do at church within this framework. At times it seems as if church is the only place at which we're not engaged in worship!
And as we've seen in my previous post, even some Anglican Evangelicals have difficulty with this ultra-low church, liturgy-lite approach to worship. But what the Sydneyites and Dean Zahl's (sadly dwindling) band of liturgical evangelicals have in common is a tendency still to conceive worship as sacrificium, as being about what we do (though, to be fair, both would very strongly emphasise that we worship God as a response to His grace, not as a good work to earn salvation). The difference is that Vaughan Roberts and the Sydney(-style) Anglicans locate this sacrificium in our daily lives of service before God, whereas Dean Zahl locates it in the upward-looking verticality of our formal-liturgical worship.
But when we see worship as being first and foremost beneficium, as being about what we receive from God, then this allows us to reconcile the verticality of the historical patterns of Christian worship (busily being ditched by the disciples of Sydney) with the horizontality of our service of God in daily life. We can then see how we go to church primarily to receive, and above all to receive the forgiveness of sins as proclaimed and distributed to us in Word and Sacrament.
Worship is vertical, but it is primarily a downward vertical from God to us. As Norman Nagel puts it, "The rhythm of our worship is from Him to us, and then from us back to Him" (see earlier post; emphasis added). Finally, at the end of each service "[God's] blessing moves us out into our calling, where His gifts have their fruition."
This dynamic - of beneficium in worship followed by sacrificium in our vocations - is what is in view in that favourite verse of the Sydney-style worshippers, Romans 12:1:
Furthermore, it is not the Gospel "in the abstract" with which we have to do, but the Gospel as encountered in the public ministry of the church: as proclaimed to us in the preaching of the Word (Romans 10:14-16) and applied to us in the Sacraments (Romans 6:1-4).
That's the pattern of Romans: first we receive (beneficium) in worship, then we serve (sacrificium) in our vocations. This pattern puts the public ministry of the church at the heart of our worship, where it belongs, but it also maintains the right emphasis on the need for us to be serving God throughout the week.
The Sydney Anglicans (and other, non-Sydney conservative evangelical Anglicans such as Vaughan Roberts, whose book True Worship is an excellent presentation of this approach to worship) are right to emphasise our need to serve God during the whole week, and to emphasise Romans 12:1 in this regard. However, the problem then becomes how we fit what we do at church within this framework. At times it seems as if church is the only place at which we're not engaged in worship!
And as we've seen in my previous post, even some Anglican Evangelicals have difficulty with this ultra-low church, liturgy-lite approach to worship. But what the Sydneyites and Dean Zahl's (sadly dwindling) band of liturgical evangelicals have in common is a tendency still to conceive worship as sacrificium, as being about what we do (though, to be fair, both would very strongly emphasise that we worship God as a response to His grace, not as a good work to earn salvation). The difference is that Vaughan Roberts and the Sydney(-style) Anglicans locate this sacrificium in our daily lives of service before God, whereas Dean Zahl locates it in the upward-looking verticality of our formal-liturgical worship.
But when we see worship as being first and foremost beneficium, as being about what we receive from God, then this allows us to reconcile the verticality of the historical patterns of Christian worship (busily being ditched by the disciples of Sydney) with the horizontality of our service of God in daily life. We can then see how we go to church primarily to receive, and above all to receive the forgiveness of sins as proclaimed and distributed to us in Word and Sacrament.
Worship is vertical, but it is primarily a downward vertical from God to us. As Norman Nagel puts it, "The rhythm of our worship is from Him to us, and then from us back to Him" (see earlier post; emphasis added). Finally, at the end of each service "[God's] blessing moves us out into our calling, where His gifts have their fruition."
This dynamic - of beneficium in worship followed by sacrificium in our vocations - is what is in view in that favourite verse of the Sydney-style worshippers, Romans 12:1:
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.Yes, the whole of our lives is to be a living sacrifice, and this constant presentation of ourselves to Him is our "spiritual worship". But this is all done in the light of the mercies of God, the Gospel message which Paul has set out in the first eleven chapters of Romans.
Furthermore, it is not the Gospel "in the abstract" with which we have to do, but the Gospel as encountered in the public ministry of the church: as proclaimed to us in the preaching of the Word (Romans 10:14-16) and applied to us in the Sacraments (Romans 6:1-4).
That's the pattern of Romans: first we receive (beneficium) in worship, then we serve (sacrificium) in our vocations. This pattern puts the public ministry of the church at the heart of our worship, where it belongs, but it also maintains the right emphasis on the need for us to be serving God throughout the week.
