Worship Evangelism—Longing for God -- Part One

(This is so good that I broke it into more than one entry although part two may have to wait until I get back from Israel.)

In Chapter 2 of Worship Evangelism, we explore how to retrieve Biblical Worship. She suggests three steps:

Step 1 – Worshipping God Instead of Ourselves
As Charles said today, worship is what we are made for and Biblical worship is all about God. Furthermore, Christian worship is all about God as revealed in Christ. Worship, therefore, is not about felt needs but about our true need for God and to worship.
Step 2 – Making Worship Number One
Using David as our guide for what a life of worship looks like (yes—even with his very obvious failings), Morgenthaler points out that reading the Psalms we discover the following characteristics of David’s worship life.
• David’s kind of worship is a life.

‘Although it is a life weekly punctuated by the corporate evens we typically call “worship,” David’s kind of worship begins outside the sanctuary in the context of a daily walk with God.’

• David’s kind of worship is uncompromising. His worship is whole hearted and lavish.
• David’s kind of worship witnesses. His worship was very public.
• Worship was, unequivocally, number one in David’s life. Therefore, she suggests that the purpose of evangelism is to produce more and better worshippers. She quotes Joseph Carroll in his book How To Worship Jesus Christ as saying

Have you ever noticed in the Pauline Epistles that Paul never urges Christians to witness nor has he anything to say about foreign missions? Nothing! How interesting! If you have to constantly be telling people to witness, something is wrong with them. . . . What is Paul always doing? He is consistently bringing you to Christ and leaving you with Christ. When Christ is central in the heart of the man, what does the man want to do? He wants to tell others about Jesus, and he will do so effectively.

She then goes on to quote Christian ethicist Gustafson who said, “If God himself becomes our goal—even above evangelism—we will become better evangelists.” Therefore, she says:

When God and the worship of God are first in the life of a church, growth will follow.

Step 3 – Defining Worship
One of our problems is that Christians don’t have a good idea of what biblical worship actually is. While she points this out in her book, I must share that this is a common theme in much of the research about worship. In fact, most American Protestant Christians have a tendency to do one of two things: Either we equate worship with preaching or we equate it with the music (this is in traditions where they speak of having a time of worship then a time of teaching as if they are different things). She then quotes Paul Anderson who says:

We have so elevated the pulpit . . . that we have created stiff-necked people who think they have worshiped if they took good sermon notes.