Anglican Worship: The Focus is Not My Experience
At the heart of every church tradition lies one priority that shapes the community’s identity. This central aspect is the source of its energy and vision, and becomes the first of all other priorities.
This aspect determines much, if not all, of its distinctive traits and eventually becomes the touchstone for every other facet of church life.
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What is the Primary Focus of Worship?
For some churches, the primary focus is mission and evangelism. Discipleship includes learning and experiential growth as well as practical service, and some churches focus primarily on building relationships, while others focus on practical service. For still others, it is works of compassion. It’s not that these churches neglect other activities; it’s merely that they view them through the lens of their primary commitment. Many churches probably made evangelism their heart, some relationships (a growing trend), some discipleship, and a few works of compassion.
Nonetheless, the Anglican tradition has its heart in a different place. The heart of an Anglican parish is not its mission or discipleship. It is not relationship building; it is not works of compassion. These things are vitally important; they should always be present, but they are not the central focus of an Anglican parish. The heart of an Anglican parish lies in its worship, most visibly in its Sunday service.
Mission, Discipleship, Relationship Flowing into Worship
Mission, discipleship, relationship, and service should flow from worship. The first begins by acknowledging and praising the God whom we worship. We receive from the Christ that we proclaim, and receive the empowering presence of the Holy Spirit. Founded on the posture of worship, we find discipleship. In discipleship, the forgiven people of God acknowledge their dependence on the Spirit. Following this, they recite his wonderful saving deeds, sent out into the world as worshippers of the One True God.
The reconciled come before their God with repentance and faith, to God through Christ. They then form relationships among people that mirror God’s reconciling action. Worship transforms us, striking us with the great compassion of Christ and empowering us by the Holy Spirit, which results in compassionate works.
Some non-traditional churches would say that worship is the heart of their church, and I’m sure that is often the case, even though their worship practices look and feel different than ours. But in many cases, worship is defined as singing lots of praise songs. Often these songs, ironically, focus on the worshiper himself! “Here I am to worship.”
The Centrality of Christian Worship: The Holy Trinity
The focus is actually less on God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and his marvelous deeds, great power and love, and the works of salvation history. Instead, the focus is on how the worshipper feels while he is worshipping. This seems, to me, patently true when the top worship songs today are songs that say things like “hungry I come to you…” “Once again I look upon the cross…” “Open the eyes of my heart…” “Blessed be your name when I’m found in the desert place…”
I’m not suggesting that any of these songs are unhelpful; in fact, we sing them often at our parish. They are profoundly expressive of the worshiper’s experience of need and seeking, and, in proportion to other aspects of worship, they are great. They, by themselves, aren’t really “worship” properly understood; they are more about us than about God. Worship is about God.
A Worship-Centered, Selfless Communion
When they are all you get, they shift the focus of a church, its heart, from worship to the experience of people, and of individuals (‘I,’ not ‘we’), and push corporate, community worship of God off to the side. A church that ‘worships’ this way probably has a focus or heart closer to relationship-building or works of compassion, in that the aim of their worship is more about people feeling better and less about God receiving the glory due to his name.
In the Anglican ideal of public Sunday worship, this principle is most apparent. The care which Anglicans take to plan the service, prepare the heart, and revere the action that takes place reflects a worship-centered faith. The fact that traditional Anglican worship space is explicitly designed (and funded generously) for the worship of God attests to the priority of corporate worship.
The esteem with which Anglican Christians hold the Book of Common Prayer testifies to this identity as a community of worship. There is no other aspect of church life that shapes every other area of church life so profoundly. I find that many Anglicans are unaware of how this careful preparation helps us focus on God as the object of our worship.
Corporate Worship, Sacraments, & the Prayer Book
Sunday corporate worship is the most visible aspect of worship. As crucial as the individual spiritual life is for all Christians, for Anglicans, it is still secondary to gathering to worship in Word and Sacrament on the day of the Lord’s resurrection and in the continuing tradition of worship that connects us with those who have gone before. When Archbishop Cranmer designed simplified Morning and Evening Prayer services, he hoped that many people would be able to gather in the parish church for corporate worship. However, he knew this would not likely be possible for most families. Corporate worship, however, is the primary and first place of piety and devotion, and individual and family worship next.
That is, our prayer together as a community on Sundays is the source that flows into our private and family devotional lives. When “two or three” gather, there is Jesus in the midst. It is from this experience of his presence that Anglicans receive the strength to go off alone and pray through the week. There is no more identity-shaping moment than this. In the final analysis, we are a worshiping community before we are anything else.
Sunday Worship: A Great Renewal for Service to Christ
One must see that nothing is more renewing, humbling, and inspiring than public Sunday worship to grasp the nature of our worship. If any moment, any program, any event is our appointed time, it is Sunday mornings; if any area of parish life affects all other areas, it is worship. If any area will draw our time and energy, the first area is worship. Worship defines us. Small groups, food banks, Christian education classes, evangelism efforts, and fellowship gatherings all radiate from worship and reflect it.
Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’
Matthew 25:34-36
I think this is an area where evangelicals will most likely change little in the coming decades. The reason I suspect this is that many churches work very hard to downplay tradition and form in worship. However, creative inventiveness in today’s cultural milieu will continue to be a cycle of repetition because of the refusal to tap into and join up with historic and global communions of worship. In other words, non-traditional churches are cut off from the resources they need to reorient their Sunday activities back toward God and the simplicity of acknowledging his excellent glory.
Worship Wrongly Defined
When we define worship as singing songs, and the songs we sing are about us, and worship itself is seen as secondary to mission, service, relationship, or discipleship. The only way out is to pick up a Prayer Book and start reading old-fashioned prayers, and a hymnbook to sing old-fashioned hymns. Until those resources are restored, the tape is looped and keeps playing the same song.
That said, I don’t really think we Anglicans get this right often either. Yes, we recite the prayers, we invoke the Trinity frequently, we sing the hymns, and most of us today use contemporary forms as well. We spend a lot of time distracted from worship, as if we should be ashamed of how important it is to us.
We often believe the erroneous idea that prayer is an “inward” while mission is an “outward” focus. While our forms draw us to worship as the heart of the parish, our vision for church life borrows from contemporary culture, and that pulls us away from the true heart of every church, as seen in the opening acclamation.
Celebrant: Blessed be God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit
People: And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. Amen.
Image by Prabowo Shakti from Pixabay
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