A Life of Worship

I grew up surrounded by mountains in the Pacific Northwest—“God’s country,” as I was told when I came to Ontario for my first church position. I think I often took the landscape for granted while I was living there. For me, the sights and smells around Vancouver were always my default idea of what the world looked like. Moving to an area with no mountains made it feel as if something was missing on the horizon. I return to those mountains regularly and always enjoy encountering them with awe through the eyes of my husband, who has spent most of his life in Ontario. His amazement at the beauty of the surroundings, even the view from my parent’s back porch overlooking the Fraser River, opens my eyes anew to the wonder and beauty I was so privileged to grow up around.

One might be wondering what on earth this has to do with worship. As a student of biology and a lover of nature, there is something about the mountains that brings me coram deo—that sense of being pulled into the very presence of God, of gazing at the beauty before me, the intricate details and grand landscapes that only a Creator could bring about, and being able to respond only by taking a deep breath and saying, “Wow!” For me, a mountain vista is what elicits this response. For others it might be cherry blossoms in full bloom, a soaring line of choral music, or meeting a newborn child or grandchild. Wow. Our Creator is amazing.

I remember remarking to someone after a busy season of worship planning that this concept of “all of life is worship” simply means I never get enough rest. All of my life I had felt overwhelmed by the busyness and organization of worship. “All of life is worship” is a pretty daunting call for a pastor of worship. My job description includes a responsibility for “worship in the life of the church,” and my church is a hub of activity every night of the week. Busy parents rush to drop off a child at a youth program and dash to the grocery store to run errands they didn’t have time for earlier in the day. The frantic pace of modern life makes it hard to imagine that all of it—the grocery store lineups, the traffic jams, the Little League games, the board meetings—is an act of worship. How do we orient our hearts to actually see things that way? How do we reframe our perspectives to be keenly aware of God’s presence in the mundanity of everyday life?

Continuously Worshiping

In his book Unceasing Worship, Harold Best argues that we were not created to worship or for worship, but to be continuously worshiping. If this is true, then the question is: Where are we orienting our worship?

“At this very moment, and for as long as this world endures, everybody inhabiting it is bowing down and serving something or someone—an artifact, a person, an institution, an idea, a spirit, or God through Christ,” Best writes (p. 17). Regardless of our religious beliefs and convictions, humans are worshipers. But God doesn’t need our worship, Best says. God isn’t somehow diminished when we don’t worship. And if we were created for worship, that would imply that worship is just a part of who we are. Instead, worshiping God reorients the direction of our worship. God gathers us to orient our hearts and our lives toward the One who is worthy of all our worship.

If all of life is worship, then what is the purpose of corporate worship? Corporate worship is a continuation of a life of worship. If we’re being honest, our daily life of worship is not always a life oriented toward the worship of God. As humans, we spend much of our time focusing on ourselves. Our weeks are overrun with meetings, activities, and doomscrolling through social media. Yet in corporate worship, God invites us to come together as the whole body of believers, spur one another on in faith, reorient our hearts and minds toward God, and realign our hearts with God’s will. Corporate worship reorients our hearts and our eyes, reawakens us to the presence of God, and reminds us that God is God and we are not.

Corporate worship makes me think of the ebb and flow of the sea. Worship, like the oceans responding to the moon’s gravitational pull, draws us in and sends us out. Marva Dawn, referencing the Westminster Catechism, says in her book A Royal “Waste” of Time that worship should have no other end than to glorify God. She pushes back against the attractional model of worship, which has been all too present in evangelical worship services, and says the only way worship attracts unbelievers is because they are drawn into God as we worship together. In his book Worship and the Reality of God: An Evangelical Theology of Real Presence, John Jefferson Davis explains, “The Christian realizes that worship is not just incidental and preparatory to some other activity (such as mission or evangelism), but rather, worship is intrinsic and central to the purpose for which God created the universe and humanity: that we might ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever’ (Westminster Shorter Catechism, Q&A 1). Worship in the Spirit and in truth is the highest act of a human being, the act in which we are most truly human, and the highest act of the church. At its best, Sunday morning can be the high point and culmination of the believer’s week.”

The time worshipers spend together in corporate worship helps form their spiritual lives. Jean-Jacques von Allmen, who was a professor of practical theology at the University of Neuchâtel, compared the purpose of corporate worship to a whale coming up for air. I love the feeling this metaphor invokes. I enjoy swimming at my local pool, and sometimes, in an effort to expand my lung capacity, I will see how far I can go without coming up for a breath. That moment right before surfacing is an almost panicked longing to fill my lungs with a life-giving, soul-reviving breath of air. Breathing is a vital biological function, but it also can be calming or energizing. When I break the surface of the water, a burst of air fills my lungs with oxygen and feeds the continuous process of circulation. Oxygenated blood feeds the muscles and organs for as long as possible until I come up for air once more. The breath of air doesn’t benefit me only in that moment, but continues to serve a purpose as I return under water. Each breath sustains my swimming a little longer.

Worship gathers us. It reorients our hearts, distracted and tugged by competing loyalties, and turns us back toward our Creator. Corporate worship takes us on a journey through the gospel narrative as we praise the God who created us, redeems our lives from the pit, forgives and redeems us, and sends us out into the world.

Laying Down Our Burdens

Those who are gathered must also be scattered. As beings in continuous worship, our corporate worship reorients us toward God as it sends us out into the world. So how are we being formed as worshipers to prepare us to go out into our daily lives? Research is currently being done on this very topic. The Worship for Workers project through Fuller Theological Seminary is creating and curating resources to help worshipers better connect corporate worship with their daily lives. Together with The Porter’s Gate, a group of writers and musicians from various denominational and ethnic backgrounds across the U.S., Worship for Workers is writing and producing songs, prayers, and other liturgical offerings to speak to this often-neglected aspect of worship. Their songs address justice, climate action, mental health, lament, and other daily challenges. Many of these songs speak to our everyday lives as all-of-life worshipers, and soon Worship for Workers will release an album of sending songs—songs that charge and bless worshipers to go into the world and help work for the kingdom of God in their workplaces, homes, and neighborhoods.

A song from The Porter’s Gate called “Bring It to the Altar” invites worshipers to bring the joys and sorrows of their week into worship: “Bring it to the altar, don’t leave it at the door. Whatever you carry, come and give it to the Lord.” How often are we invited into worship with a call to lay down our burdens at the door, or to come to worship only with joy? Every time we come to worship, we come with the joys and the pains of our week, and God receives it all in our worship. Many of us at some point have been told to show up for worship in our “Sunday best,” to “turn that frown upside down,” and to enter into worship as a form of escape from our everyday lives. But our lives’ continuous worship is blessed when we invite those same lives into corporate worship.

When we recognize that everything we do is an act of worship of someone or something, we can start paying attention to where we notice Jesus in our everyday lives. We don’t need to segregate worship from the “real world,” especially not when all of life is lived in the presence of a holy God. Instead, we can bring our daily lives into corporate worship and carry the things we experience there into our daily lives. What practices can we incorporate into our corporate worship as the body of believers that we then can take with us into our daily worship?

At the Calvin Symposium on Worship in February, attendees were introduced to music from the forthcoming The Porter’s Gate album Sending Songs. One of the songs invites worshipers to put the events of the week at the front of mind as they worship. It asks: What will you be doing at this time tomorrow? One suggestion was to have worshipers pause at the end of a service and consider what 10:45 a.m. Monday morning might look like. Will you be in a meeting or a doctor’s appointment? Will you be working on a school project or giving a presentation? Will you be volunteering somewhere? Invite worshipers to pull out their phones and set an alarm for that time, and, when that alarm goes off, to pause, to pray, and to recognize God’s presence on a regular Monday morning.

Where will you be at this time tomorrow? As you live in continuous worship, where will you orient your praise? May your life of worship open your eyes in awe and wonder as you go about even the most mundane tasks of life. Whatever you carry, whether joy or sorrow, come and give it to the Lord.

Discussion Questions

1. What do you immediately think of when you think of “worship”? Why?
2. What in your life gives you that “sense of being pulled into the very presence of God”?
3. How well do you think your local church’s current corporate worship prepares you or forms you for your daily living in the world? “What practices can we incorporate into our corporate worship as the body of believers that we then can take with us into our daily worship?”
4. As the article asks: “Where will you be at this time tomorrow? As you live in continuous worship, where will you orient your praise?”