The Saving Experience of Worship 

You find yourself talking to a friend during your lunch hour, and the topic of church comes up. Perhaps he asks you what you have planned for the weekend, and you respond that your church has a retreat planned in which you and your wife are participating. “I used to go to church,” he says, “But I finally got fed up with the whole mess. I didn’t quit believing,” he continues,” I just quit going to church.” That position, in some form or another, belong to an increasing number of Americans. They are “Believers but not Belongers” (B/NB). The lay members of a church will be in conversation with far greater numbers of such people than the clergy could ever possibly meet. The task for contemporary church members is to become aware of and be comfortable in talking about the way in which the Christian community offers people salvation on a continuing basis.

Consider how the experience of worship provides a saving experience on a continuous basis for people living in our world. Picture how this is true even if the sermon is lousy and the choir sings off key. It is not just whether we acquire new ideas from a stimulating sermon or even are moved by the beauty of the anthem, but the process of worship itself which offers us the experience of salvation from what the bible refers to as our sins.

Even as you enter a sanctuary or place of worship, often the very accouterments are a symbolic reminder that there is something more here than meets the eye. We live in a world which focuses your attention downward towards the physical properties of life. It is easy to get so caught up in the immediate events of our lives that we forget that life is more than what we can acquire or experience. We need to be saved from a myopic vision of life and worship offers us that possibility.

When we begin worship with either a call to worship or a prayer of invocation, our attention is directed beyond ourselves. However feebly, we are acknowledging the reality of God and our need to offer praise to that which is greater than ourselves. For our life to have meaning, it needs to be part of something greater than ourselves. Too often, when our life centers on ourselves or our immediate perceptions of reality, we experience failure,and our whole reason for existing is shattered. Some people try to acquire that sense of transcendence by devoting themselves to a cause or belonging to a group. The problem is that even our causes and our groups eventually can’t fulfill the hunger in our lives. In offering praise to God, we are acknowledging God who gathers up the good of our lives and can enable us to transcend even that which is not so good.

If God doesn’t exist, then any sacrifice of immediate pleasure or security may appear to be noble but only has authentic meaning if it results in success. It is only the presence of God in creation that allows for any lasting value to our efforts to achieve those higher principles which transcend our immediate moment. Jesus sacrifice only makes sense if there is a God who can redeem his faithfulness. Our praise of God, which begins in prayer and singing, reminds us of that other dimension to life.

The competitive nature of business, the violence of the streets, and many other experience move us in the direction of separateness in our world. There are many words which could describe the situation such as tribalism, distrust, selfishness, materialism but all of them seem to move against the sense of community which can add fulfillment to our lives. The Bible refers to that state of separateness or alienation from God and neighbor as the state of sin.

When we come to worship we are reminded of the importance of community which presses against that state of separateness. Most of us experience some discomfort with our failure to live in perfect harmony with our own expectations of ourselves, our need for companionship with other humans, and our communion with God. In worship, we are invited to confess those actions and lack of actions which have distorted the type of community we would like to experience. People need to hear again and again that when they confess their sins before God, they can be healed, forgiven and restored to a new beginning. We who are so aware of our failings, need to hear God’s declaration that our sins don’t fate us. That our future doesn’t have to be a product of our past. We need to hear that God through Christ has broken down the dividing walls that separate us and offers us the invitation to re-enter in full communion.

Because we are subject to tribalism which emphasizes trusting and taking care of our own kind, we need to both hear scripture which reveals God’s thrust towards universalism and share in prayers of intercession which lift us above our own concerns. A person who is experiencing trouble in their business can easily let their life be consumed by that concern. They need to enter worship and be asked to pray for someone who is dying of cancer or pray on behalf of government leaders who are making decisions that affect the whole world. Prayers of intercession lift us out of narrowness of vision and reconnect us with the one who can make all things possible. It also reminds us that our responsibility extends far beyond our immediate perceptions. In effect, it helps shift our perception of the center of the universe from just ourselves or our immediate community to God.

When we come to worship we are united in a community which reaches across time and space. We say a creed which has been recited for almost 2000 years. We hear Scripture that has been listened to an recited by people in every culture across the world, reaches back to communities of people longer than 4,000 years ago, and will continue to speak to communities in the far distant future. In effect, we are connected with a community far greater than ourselves but also given value as a person of worth within that community. When we sing, we unite body, mind, and emotion with neighbor and God.

Jesus said: “I have come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly.” Life abundant is life in community as opposed to life that moves towards isolation and desolation. When we come to the table to partake of “The Lord’s Supper,” we are reminded of what Jesus was willing to do to overcome the dividing walls that separate us one from the other. When we call that experience “Communion,” it reminds us of the present quality of our relationship with God and neighbor and the thrust of God’s efforts to form community and communion where there is alienation and separation. When we speak of that experience as the “Eucharist”, we are giving thanksgiving for the gift of life and the future hope implied in the fact that even death could not defeat God’s intentions. Christ was a willing sacrifice to overcome sin and to bond us together in his body with God, each other and the future. By this act, he gave visibility to the character of God which is to overcome death which leaves us isolated and to overcome our distance from each other and God. A “saved life” can’t wait until death to experience salvation but must begin now in the community and communion of Christ’s body.

While you wouldn’t say all of that in a casual conversation over lunch, you might well say something like the following. “I can understand your frustrations with the church, but worship within a Christian community provides me some essential ingredients for my life. I’m reminded that God is the center of life and that God has a higher purpose for my life which I sometimes forget in my daily routine. I am offered the opportunity to receive forgiveness and a fresh start each week. I experience my connectedness with humanity across time and space and my responsibility for the less fortunate in this world. I’m also given an opportunity to exercise part of that responsibility right away. And in Communion I am reconnected with the love of God which will not allow any barriers to finally defeat God’s reconciling love. It reminds me of my God-given dignity and the source of my many blessings in life. I need to be saved from all the forces that seek to destroy those realities in my life. I need it daily but at least every seven days is essential.”

The Church as a Saving Reality

There is an interesting contradiction in what is happening within the Christian community in our culture. In the last twenty-five years, the membership in churches and synagogues has fallen from 73% of the population to 65%. At the same time, a poll in 1990 reported a record 74% of Americans say they have made a commitment to Jesus Christ and that 95% of those say that they have been born again. The only conclusion you can draw is that there are a great number of what we would call “believers but not belongers” in our society. These are people who will declare that they accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior but see no necessary connection between that commitment and the Body of Christ.

I would suggest that one of the reasons for that is that we have lost sight of the “saving nature” of the Body of Christ. We say that Jesus saves us from our sins, but a great number of professed believers act as if we have no need to continue to be saved on a regular basis. If sin is rebellion against God, who asks us to love God with our whole self and our neighbor as ourselves, then it is clear that we continue sinning. The result of sin is experienced as a sense of distance or dis-ease in our relationships. Who doesn’t experience that?

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