Worship Weblog
Saturday, April 02, 2005
Welcome and Introduction: Towards Vital Worship
Every week, 100 million North Americans attend worship services. In basement apartments and vast cathedrals, in old village churches and sprawling suburban multiplexes, we join with others to pray, sing, listen to scripture and preaching, celebrate the Lord’s Supper and—depending on our particular tradition—also participate in healing rituals, testimonies, footwashing, and a host of other liturgical actions. Despite widespread skepticism about organized religion, public worship services remain one of the most common religious practices. For many, if not most Christians, “going to church” means, simply, attending a worship service. That means that worship is a key topic for Christian congregations today. Worship is also the locus of what several Christian traditions identify as the nourishing center of congregation life.
But despite this, Christian worship is often not well practiced. As Annie Dillard quips, “you’d think we’d be able to get it right after 2000 years of practice.” Indeed, on any given Sunday, the 100 million of us who wake up planning to go church have very different attitudes and hopes about the church we will attend. Some worshipers wake up with a sense of duty, but little joy. Their churches are energy-depleting. Worship is routine. Perhaps their congregation is embroiled in controversy. Perhaps it doesn’t communicate much at all. Yet, they persist in going to worship because it’s the right thing to do, because they always have, and because they hope against hope that they will experience a taste of God’s goodness despite it all. Others, however, wake up with eagerness and joy. They anticipate joining a congregation in which worship is vital and congregational life is relatively healthy. They find worship to be a source of insight, comfort, and strength. They are likely to invite others to join them. In sum, some experience worship in their churches as evocative, others as pedantic; some as vibrant, others as dreary and tedious.
Simply put, the overarching goal of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship is to help congregations make progress in moving from stagnation to renewal—from worship that is dreary to worship that is vital, from worship that is shallow to that which is profound, from worshipers who attend from duty to those who discover delight.
• For more, read our mission statement, browse our resources, and read our eight principles for a theology of worship.
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