Living Faith is a declaration of faith of the Presbyterian Church. You can download it at presbyterian.ca. We suggest you read the passage being discussed each month.
Additional reading: Members for Eternity (March 2011), and Ministry? What Ministry? (January 2012).
Living Faith 7.1-7.3 (The church, ministry and worship)
Many of us are accustomed to dividing our lives into compartments so that church, ministry and worship are simply categories to be added to a list, along with our job, family responsibilities, entertainment and leisure time. According to some philosophies of healthy living, it is important to keep these categories separate, lest our faith leak into our job, or our leisure pursuits distract us from our career path. If that is how we live, then it makes sense that each category is deserving of a certain portion of our personal and material resources. Our jobs and families might take the most resources, while church, ministry and worship receive a much smaller portion of our time, talent, energy and attention.
But Living Faith has a different perspective on the organization of our lives. Church, ministry and worship are not simply categories or activities that affect some of us, some of the time. They are not tasks to be scheduled according to our availability. This is what Living Faith says:
“The church is Christ together with his people called both to worship and to serve him in all of life. The church … is one family under God whose purpose it is to unite all people in Jesus Christ.” And, “All Christians are called to participate in the ministry of Christ.”
All. All of life. All of us together. These words seem to suggest that our whole lives—individual and communal—belong to God in Christ. And then comes what might just be the most challenging, even shocking, statement in this chapter: “We have no higher calling than to offer the worship that belongs to God day by day, Sunday by Sunday.” No higher calling? If worship is the most important thing, then I am living my life upside-down. If worship is the highest calling, in what way will we need to reorder our lives?
Recently, I taught a course about worship. As we began to talk about the purpose and content of the course, all of us (teacher included) made the assumption that “worship” is the hour on Sunday morning when we gather in sanctuaries. The class realized very quickly that worship cannot be limited to Sunday mornings, or Sunday evenings, or Wednesday afternoons. Worship is something more. Unless we think God wants us to spend the majority of our lives sitting on hard wooden pews, we will need to redefine worship.
What if we define worship as “an encounter with God” that can happen anywhere, anytime? In that case, worship is a verb, not a noun. Worship is not something confined to a particular time and space, but a movement in which the Triune God encounters us and we allow ourselves to be encountered. It is a movement in which God pours out love and grace and mercy upon us and we respond with singing, with prayer, with silence, with work, and play. Worship is a living thing that refuses to be contained or limited.
When I was visiting a patient in hospital, a doctor came into the room. Just as he began to check in with his patient, his iPhone beeped. He looked at the screen and said, “It’s time for my prayers.” He was Muslim and set his iPhone to remind him of his commitment to pray (there really is an app for everything). He finished his conversation with his patient and then went off to join in conversation with his Creator. How beautiful. That doctor did not separate his work from his faith—both are done in service to God.
It is not easy to make faithfulness a priority. Even those of us who try to fully live out our baptismal vows will likely spend more time in a given week watching television, accounting, drying our hair, folding laundry, driving, or shovelling snow than engaging in encounters with the divine. This is true even if we understand worship as something dynamic and organic that extends beyond Sunday morning. Worship may be our highest calling but it is rarely our highest priority.
It is easy to berate others for getting their priorities wrong. Pastoral ministers especially like to lament the semi-divine status of hockey and soccer practice. Yet those of us who judge the priorities of others might want to check for the plank that is interfering with our own eyesight. In keeping with the vision of Living Faith that all of us belong to God, we should remember that all have sinned and fallen short. We are in this together, and almost all of us struggle to orient our lives toward the Holy One.
That is the nature of being human. That is why God encountered us in Jesus Christ. So that we could focus, reorient, move toward the Giver who has already moved into our neighbourhood.
Living Faith challenges us to think carefully about living out our baptismal vows in the midst of a culture that has other plans for us. You are not alone if you struggle with these high expectations. The good news is that we are not finished yet. God is still working on us. Living Faith tells us that Jesus “intercedes for the world to which he came and for which he died.” This is a Saviour who prays for our freedom, for our liberation from the distractions that turn our eyes away from him. We already belong to God, even though we don’t fully understand what that means or how to participate fully in God’s life. The God of the universe continually tugs on our hearts, gently calls us away from everything we think is important, in order to remind us that our truest purpose is to worship and serve the Creator of all.
