The longer I sit through services, especially worship services, the more frustrated with myself and the concept of these services I get. The idea of singing songs to our God is amazing; I love that we can use our skills and talents to do this. The idea of teaching is important cause if we are never taught we will never learn. The idea of Christian fellowship is good, because without community we are detaching ourselves from the body of Christ. What bothers me is the lack ‘service’ throughout the week.
Services can encourage you and prepare you for your upcoming week in the world. Services can be a place to rejoice or lament your previous week in the world. Services are not meant to be a hideout or an entity for the good of itself. Services are not meant to be church. The longer I sit in services the more I realize that they have become nothing more than an hour or two concert with boring talking. Services have been something that we have learned to depend on to ‘get us through’ the week or to ‘fill us up’ or to make us feel spiritual for a week or to take the place of church.
This whole term ‘Sunday Christian’ runs rampant through everything we hear, but I don’t even think that’s the problem. It’s not that we aren’t Christians throughout the week. Instead we are Christians but we think that fellowship, worship, teaching, reading, serving and community only happens at church, which it does, but it only begins there. If your not reading and learning on your own time; Sunday won’t be enough. If your not submersed in community outside of Sunday; then you’re not in a true community. If you’re only worshiping God by singing then your singing isn’t worship at all.
Church services should be nothing more than an overflow of your life. Everything that happens there, is simply a communal example of what goes on during the week. We have this mindset that we ‘go to church.’ That is such an unbiblical way of understanding it. None of us go to church. By saying that we are going to church that is making it seem like another even that we can throw in our calendar, once a week on Sundays. The bible says that we are the church. So when you go to a service, you aren’t going to church, you are going as the church.
Services become quite useless if we start pawning off the responsibility of church onto them. By doing that we try and lose the title of church ourselves and pass it on to a two hour time frame where the responsibility lies on the guy up front and a band. How lazy we’ve become. Instead of taking the 24/7 responsibility of living out the church mission, we try to pass it off to a two hour service where we pretty much do nothing but sit in a pew and maybe stand up and sing a song or maybe some of us work in the nursery or teach sunday school. If it is the church’s job to feed the poor, take care of widows, help struggling teens, visit the elderly, give to the needy and help those who are sick then that is our job every day all day long. We can’t expect the two hours on Sunday to do that, because that’s not it’s job.
I’m not calling my service church anymore, because it’s not. We are the church. As the church we create services where we can learn, be encouraged and grow. Through these services we aren’t experiencing ‘great church,’ instead we are empowered to become the church.
The trouble with worship services is all the people there. It’s supposed to be a time for glorifying God, but we bring all our laziness, selfishness, and hypocrisy with us. For better or worse, it’s what we’re called to be a part of.
If you haven’t seen it, you might want to check out Mike Russell’s post on worship from last week at Eternal Perspectives. It reminds me of what you write about here. Mike looks at Rom. 12:1-2 and says “Worship begins – and ends – with the sacrifice of our lives.”
Word. I like this post. ‘Church’ is often frustrating to me. I’ve been rethinking the purposes of church over the last while and I like the way you bring it all together here. I really enjoy reading your thoughts. Can’t wait to hang out next year!!
Eleo
One thing I have learned we can never do though Nathan is underestimate how the rest of the “church” body lives their faith and serves during the rest of the week. I have come to learn that people are doing some pretty amazing selfless acts of service that may never or seldom come to the attention of the rest of us. I love people like that though sometimes it does seem frustrating because we don’t see it and assume nothing is being done.
Now on the other hand you are right. There is a whole group content “go” to church and to just soak up Sundays blessings and not “be” the church.
We must labour relentlessly both inside and outside the church and never stop encouraging and teaching others about what it means to be Christlike followers of the Lord Jesus Christ and not just “Sunday Christians”.
Keep writing my friend and hope to see you soon.
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