Does Worship Need the Church?
Examining Four Spaces of Worship
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Many people worship God in nature, or during their devotions, or at a Christian gathering. But have Christians lost something when they worship in those spaces instead of worshiping in a local church?
Is there something about worship that needs the church?
Consider different meanings of the word “worship” by thinking through four different spaces where Christians worship.
Four Spaces of Worship
Consider, first, the largest space of all—the life of worship. Because God is worthy of a believer’s entire life, whatever a believer does ought to be an act of worship (1 Corinthians 10:31). In this largest sense, whenever and wherever believers express God’s worthiness, they worship Him. For example, a believer worships God whenever she spends (or saves) her money to display that God is her highest treasure. Or, a believer worships God when he spends his time to display that God is his greatest delight. Schedules and spending reveal a person's highest values and greatest treasure, so Christians worship God when they use those capacities for Him.
Worship begins in this all-encompassing realm. Sinful attempts to skip this—restricting worship to particular events and particular times—are condemned by both the prophets (Amos 5:21–23) and the Lord Jesus (Mark 7:6–13).
In each moment of their everyday lives, believers feel sometimes more and sometimes less aware of how their actions glorify God. These next three spaces are more God-oriented—directed toward the God who believers desire to glorify in every general moment of their lives.
Devotional Worship
We might label a second, still private, space of worship as devotional worship. This is the intentional, Godward, and private practices where a believer expresses and stirs her heart to the Lord. A healthy believer regularly sets aside times to retreat from the world and to cultivate her love of the Lord. These devotional activities often involve opening God’s Word (borrowing language from David Mathis) to hear his voice and praying to him because we have his ear.
True, the Psalmists clearly wrote many psalms for corporate use, but they also tailored many psalms to this private, devotional context (e.g., Psalms 9 and 18). Following their example, generations of believers used a hymnbook to aid their devotional life. Unsurprisingly, many contemporary worship songs work well in the context of private devotional worship.
Gathered Worship
We might label a third space for worship gathered worship. Here, God’s people move their private expressions of devotional worship to the public sphere, gathering with others to worship God for their encouragement and edification. For now, instead of thinking about your local church worship service, consider other types of Christian gatherings: conferences and worship concerts, Christian college chapels and citywide parachurch ministry events.
Following Jesus in a fallen world can be a very lonely experience. Large-scale gatherings encourage lonely believers with a demonstration of size and scale. Many evangelicals struggle to understand their place in American culture. Large events encourage believers by reminding them of the great worship gathering which awaits Christians when Christ returns.
Covenantal Worship
Finally, consider a fourth worship space as covenantal worship. Similar to what we just described as gathered worship, this gathering is a regular meeting a particular group of God’s people: the local church.
What distinguishes covenantal worship from the more generic “gathered worship” is the agreement (covenant) which church members make with each other. Church members enter what Jonathan Leeman describes as “a covenant between believers whereby they affirm one another’s professions of faith through the ordinances and agree to oversee one another’s discipleship to Christ” (Understanding the Congregation’s Authority, 34).
A local church promises to care for each other in particular ways, binding themselves together with those promises. Local church members have responsibilities to each other which other believers don’t have.
These promises shape corporate worship in profound ways.
Different Spaces, Different Functions
Each of these spaces serve a different function in the life of believers. The life of worship shows that every aspect of a Christian’s life happens (Coram Deo) before the face of God. Devotional worship focuses those general and everyday expressions of worship in more intentional and Godward ways. The third space of gathered worship encourages believers to sense that they are part of something big, for though the Christian life is essentially personal, it was never meant to be exclusively private.
But does worship need the church? Can attending Christian gatherings such as conferences or Christian worship concerts replace being a part of a church? What ways can this distinction between gathered and covenantal worship help us?
A worship gathering, by definition, is an assembly of people that have many things in common. Christian conferences or worship concerts, by and large, are filled with people who all love the Lord Jesus. They are gathered in his name to declare his excellencies and celebrate his work in their lives.
Because of the nature of conferences and concerts, these people also have many other things in common.
Preferentially, Christian conference attendees all respect and admire their plenary speakers. They have a shared esteem for these workshops, panels, and topics as worthy of learning. Financially, all the conference attendees can afford the conference costs: the travel, the lodging, the meals, the bookstore.
Similarly, at a worship concert, the concert-goers preferentially approve the musicians performing the concert. They know and like the songs the musicians perform. Financially, each person can afford the concert costs: the tickets, the parking, the night away from other responsibilities, the concert t-shirt and other swag.
This is why these gatherings encourage believers. Conference attenders and concert-goers will often say, “This what heaven will be like,” and in some ways they are right. But, they are also wrong. Heaven will be much, much better in ways that only our local churches can show us.
What Only the Church Can Do
Heaven will be far more diverse than any Christian conference or worship-concert. And this is why believers need the local church: Covenantal worship in a local church is bound by different unifiers and pulled by different tensions.
Church members are united by a geographic location. That is, Christians believe that God has providentially placed them to live within a particular community. Local churches are formed by believers who belong to neighborhoods and who join together for the strategic benefit of their city. By contrast, worship concerts and Christian conferences drive a long way, unconcerned about geography (the “Urbana” conference, for example, is no longer held in Urbana, Illinois).
Church members are united by a covenantal commitment. In a local church, believers agree to oversee one another’s discipleship to Christ. Conference attendees and concert-goers do not have such a commitment. If someone annoys during a conference, or if someone talks on their phone during a concert, an attendee simply notifies an usher and have security deal with them (not Matthew 18, for sure). Church members commit to community for the long haul, united for each other’s good.
Besides those different unifiers, worshipers within the space of their local church also feel different tensions. Conference attenders and concert-goers use their money to attend spaces where their preferences are shared by people like them. A church doesn’t work like that. A church has (or it ought to have) more generational diversity, more economic diversity, and more ethnic diversity than any conference or concert. Diversity leads to a wide variety of disagreements about, for lack of a more elegant phrase, which preferences will be preferred.
Tension is uncomfortable, but this is exactly why worship needs the local church. Believers discover the beauty and power of the Lord Jesus in the context of covenantal worship. That’s because the gospel of Jesus Christ has more power to unite us than the world has to pull us apart. During covenantal worship, Christians take responsibility for one another, recognizing how they can look after not only their own concerns but also for the concerns of others.
Believers discover that the glory of God and the beauty of God are far too rich, far too comprehensive to be captured by a single cultural expression. Through multi-generational worship, younger believers recognize that the Lord has been faithful in the past and he will be faithful in the future. Similarly, older believers recognize that the Lord has answered their prayers for the next generation in gloriously youthful ways. Through diversity of economic means within a church, poor church members recognize that worldly means are not essential for peace with God while wealthy church members encounter their genuine need and the needs of others.
One day, Christ will return and set all these spaces right. Each moment of our life of worship will be an untarnished declaration of his worthiness. Devotional worship will be, instead of correction, fresh discoveries of his love. Gathered and covenantal worship will be transformed. Indeed, “no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34).
Lord, haste the day!
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