Examining the Worship Service as a Whole

Christians worship God in a variety of manners, performing a variety of practices. But, as author Robert Webber notes in Planning Blended Worship: The Creative Mixture of Old and New (Abingdon Press, 1998), you can dissect worship into three distinct parts:

Content: Christian worship proclaims and celebrates God’s nature and the gospel of Jesus Christ. It can also serve as a response to what God has done in one’s life. This involves all aspects of the services, including singing, Bible reading, participating in sacraments/ordinances, praying, and listening to sermons.

Structure: Church leaders organize worship services in a particular way. Some churches are highly structured and maintain the same order at every service, while others are more loosely structured and often vary the order of a service.

Style: Because Christians don’t worship in a vacuum, worship always takes on a cultural style. Some Christians believe that churches today should stick to the style of the early Church’s worship services, while others think that style is a far more flexible issue.

Worship through the eyes of the early Church

Justin Martyr, one of the second century Church fathers, played an important leadership role in the Church when it was working hard to transition from a faith led by the original apostles to an organized Church that would soon spread throughout the world. As Christians in the 21^st century deal with the issue of worship, it’s helpful to get a perspective from someone who lived just a few decades after the apostles and well before the modern-day divisions of Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy. The following comments are taken from Martyr’s First Apology, a book he wrote concerning worship.

Who should worship together?

On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place.

On what day should the Church worship?

Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead.

What should a worship service include?

The memoirs of the apostles (the Gospels) or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president (preacher/priest) verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participating of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons.

How should believers serve others as part of worship?

They who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who helps the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need.