What's the bottom line of Sunday services? Whose line is it anyway?

Today we had another mega work team meeting that went from 9:00 a.m. until 12:30 p.m. We had lots to talk about, including the Mission Radicale meeting of this past Saturday.

One thing we always talk about are the 2 Sunday morning cultes, the French term for what American evangelicals often call "worship services."

During today's discussion, Pierre DeKatow raised an pertinent question: A-t-on pu rendre un culte pendant le culte ? (During the worship service, were we able to render a service to worship to God?)

I've started reading Dan Kimball's book Emerging Worship: Creating Worship Gatherings for New Generations (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004). This is his follow up to his excellent book The Emerging Church (Zondervan, 2003).

Kimball prefer the term "worship gathering" to the traditional term "worship service," as the weekend worship "service" has become the time of the week when we go to a church building much like a car goes to an automobile service station in order to get our tanks filled up for the week (p. 2).

We need to recognize that going to a worship service is not about us, the worshipers. It is purely our offering of service and worship to God--offering our lives, offering our prayers, offering our praise, offering our confessions, offering our finances, offering our service to others in the church body. (p. 3).

Kimball proposes the following questions to ask when designing a worship gathering.

1. Did we lift the name of Jesus up as the centerpiece of why we gathered? (Rev. 5:6 & 5:13-14, Col. 3:17, Phil. 2:9-11)
2. Did we have a time in the Scriptures learning the story of God and man? Did we invite everyone to be part of his story today in Kingdom living? (2 Tim 3:14-4:4)
3. Did we pray together and ahve enough time to slow down and quiet our hearts to hear God's voice and yield to his Spirit (Actes 1:14, John 4:23-24)
4. Did we experience the joy, love, and encouragement of being together as a church? (Heb. 10:25, John 13:34-35)
5. Did we take the Lord's Supper together as a church regularly? (1 Cor. 11:20-32)
6. Did we somehow remind everyone of the mission of the church and why we exist? (Matt. 28:18-20)
7. Did we enable people to individually contribute something as part of the body of Christ? (1 Cor 12:27 & 14:26) (p. 10)

When we evaluate our worship gatherings afterward, do we ask the questions listed above, or do we ask "How good was the band?" and "How did the transition between the drama and the sermon go?" I know these things are important! But in the emerging church we must look at our worship gatherings, ask these questions first, and then design our worship gatherings with new priorities. (p. 11)

Worship gatherings are about the saints gathering to live out Psalm 95:6, whcih says, "Come, let us bow down in worship, let us kneel before the LORD our Maker." It is a multisensory approach of bowing, kneeling, listening, learning, looking, singing, caring, touching, and loving with our minds, our hearts, and our bodies. It is about seeing the results of worship, which produce in us a greater love for God and a greater love for people (Matt. 22:37-39). God forbid that we teach the people in our churches to view emerging worship as anything less. (p. 11)