A Vision for Worship at Trinity
We are hiring a Music Director. Below is a vision for Worship at Trinity. If you are interested in applying please contact brian@trinitychurchdenver.org
The aim of this document is to establish a clear theological vision for Covenant Renewal worship that can be used to do a few things: a) establish a clear strategy for how to reform our Sunday worship - both liturgically and musically to reflect this vision, and b) a philosophical guide for evaluating the elements of worship (song selection, musical style, congregational singing, confessions of sin, etc.) We’ll begin by establishing what the worship of the church is followed by the particular ways this should be expressed whenever we gather for worship on a Sunday.
Some Obstacles to Start With
In order to understand what we’re doing when we gather for worship, we need to first understand what the church is and then, what the church does. Far too often we begin by assuming we know what the church is supposed to do, without first stopping to consider, theologically speaking, what the church is.
In addition to the trouble of jumping ahead of ourselves, we have been troublingly influenced by modern conceptions of the ‘self.’ We live in the age of expressive individualism wherein many Christians have lost the category of covenant altogether. The loss of covenant categories for understanding ourselves as well as the almost unavoidable adoption of individualistic notions of the self has left us with a privatized Gnosticism. Worship is something I do in my own little heart and is largely an expression of my personal relationship with Jesus. (Read Carl Trueman’s The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self)
This has left the church largely impotent with regards to building and sustaining a real Christian obedience that is both public and social. We have incidentally become precisely the thing that the early church in Rome refused to be: a private religious institution. Rome permitted private religions that did not challenge the authority of the Emperor or the ethos of the republic/empire. Early Christians got into trouble because they made claims about the authority of Jesus in every sphere and because their theology came out their fingertips. They lived what they confessed and it put them into conflict with the surrounding society and its ethics.
If worship is the most formative thing that the church does in discipling its people, then we have adopted philosophies of worship over the last century that have left people largely indistinguishable from their unbelieving neighbors. I believe that this is because we have practiced a form of worship that is framed as a collection of individuals experiencing God in a room together rather than organizing and defining worship as the covenant community - the church of the living God, together bringing her offerings before the face of God. We have made what was decidedly objective, public, and communal into something that is private, subjective, and personal. We just all happen to be in the same room together.
This has led us to substitute one sort of joy that must be cultivated (and therefore requires patience and sustained effort) for another sort of joy that can be, and often is, manufactured and manipulated. We are impotent because we have begun to live as though the authority of Jesus is private and over me rather than public and over the nations. It is a substituted joy - we sacrifice communal joys for private ones.
All of this is reflected in the aesthetics of modern worship - no matter the particular musical style used. Dark rooms eliminate perceived distractions - namely other people. Children are excluded from worship, again for the same reason, their squeals remind us that there are other people here. Music is performed by a band of professional or highly skilled musicians, and the church simply sings along. Everything is designed to drown out the presence and the work of God’s people. We listen to the musicians, we forget that anyone else is there, and we try and experience the presence of God conceived not objectively or on the basis of faith in God’s promises, but primarily as an emotional experience. This becomes the measure of whether a church is worshipping, or has the Spirit, or if God “showed up.”
In these approaches to worship what is paramount is what is felt. This has a helpful (truly!) emphasis on the affections. Worship trains us in what to love and how to love. But it has the unhelpful side effect of making my feelings the measure of all things. Such approaches to worship (helpfully!) tend to be more accessible to laypeople and visitors. But the accessibility is a catch-22 if it is merely a further extension of unbelief’s worship of the self and my feelings. We may even find ourselves training people to evaluate the love of God in terms of their own feelings rather than news that calls for faith.
So while the affections matter deeply, they must be the by-product of the work of worship and not the measure of the work itself. Our hearts should align with the realities we talk and sing of, but our hearts are still being trained and should not be manipulated. I am not the measure of whether worship was meaningful or “good”, God is, and as I am trained in the work of worship I will learn to love and enjoy what God loves and enjoys.
What are we doing when we gather, as a church for worship on the Sabbath?
The book of Ephesians teaches us that the church is the Temple of the Living God. Jesus, through his death and resurrection and subsequent sending of the Spirit, promised to build a Temple made without hands. The author of Hebrews uses temple language to describe what happens as the church gathers for worship. These are not simply metaphors but foundational descriptions of what the church is. The church is the temple of the living God. While the book of Revelation provides the church with the larger context of where it is that we worship (in the Holy of Holies and before the throne of God), it also provides us with a cosmology that defines the church as the Temple or the dwelling place of God. This language describing the church as God’s Temple is not meant to be taken as a kind of metaphor as though the church is merely like the temple from the Old Testament. Rather, this language teaches that the church is the fulfillment or the substance of what the tabernacle and temple of the Old Covenant were always pointing to. Rather than thinking that the gathering of Christians in a room for worship is, in some mysterious way, a reflection of the substance of what would’ve been seen in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day - we are to see it quite the other way round. The temple in Solomon’s day and Jesus’ is the shadow pointing to the substance of the church gathered for worship.
There are a number of implications that we can draw from this as we consider the forms of the church’s Sabbath worship. Notably, we should look to the order of worship in the old covenant to inform and shape worship in our day. When we consider worship in the New Covenant, we aren’t considering something brand new, but as something more developed or mature. We should recognize liturgical continuity even as we think through the implications of the coming of Christ, the institution of the Lord’s supper, and the end of blood sacrifices at the cross.
Foundationally we must understand what we are doing when we come to church. We are coming to the temple. The Temple is where the offerings for God’s people are made. It is where the sacrifice for sin is made. It is the place where God dwells and where he instructs the people in his word. It is where God’s people were fed, given the outward signs of belonging to God’s covenant people, and where they learned to sing God’s songs as blood offerings were accompanied by and eventually replaced by singing. Most of all it was a place of feasting and celebration, where the great grace of God in redeeming and instructing a people was remembered and embraced. This is what we do when we worship. We gather as God’s people to bring offerings to God in song, for God to instruct us in his word, to feast with God, and to be sent by God.
This means that liturgically we follow the steps in the worship established by God. We begin with a Call to Worship in which God commands his people to gather. Next, there are three offerings: the Purification Offering, the Ascension Offering, and the Communion or Peace Offering. The people of God are purified, ascend into God’s presence and there they eat and drink with the Lord. These offerings are established in Leviticus 9 under the priesthood of Aaron. These are expressed through our own Confession of Sin and Assurance of Pardon, the Reading and Preaching of the Word, and Communion. Our liturgy ends with thanksgiving and a benediction. We give thanks for God’s provision and He sends us as his people into the world.
All of our worship should be according to the bible and our worship itself should be saturated with the Bible. We should sing, read, preach, and instruct with the bible. Furthermore, our worship should be marked by prayer, publicly acknowledging and speaking as those who are doing everything we’re doing in the presence of God and unto God. And all our worship should be done together. People and children (especially!) are not distractions from what is going on inside of you. They are the context in which all the action is happening. These people are the collection of living stones that make up the walls and entryways in the temple God has constructed for us. This is where God is, out here in the midst of all these people and all these kids and all these babies making yelping noises. It is their voices and their prayers and their creaky knees and noisy slightly off-key singing that constitute the substance of worship.
The offerings are marked by singing. We pray in song, together in God’s presence. None of this is done merely as individuals, but as the covenant community built together into the dwelling place of God. So, what sort of offerings should we bring? What kind of singing should we be doing as we move through these offerings?
Paul tells us that we should sing together with Psalms, Hymns, and Spirit songs. There is some debate on what these three designations mean. Some have argued that they are simply three different titles given to different parts of the psalter. They argue for exclusive psalmody in the church’s worship. Others have argued (I believe persuasively) that these labels refer to different categories of music taken from the psalms, instructional hymns (some of which are recorded in different parts of Scripture), and songs arising in the history of the church as the Spirit leads us into singing music growing out of the testimony of Scripture. So, with regards to what kinds of songs should mark our offerings, Scripture would instruct us to sing Psalms and Hymns and Spirit Songs. But what about style?
There have been many debates about contemporary vs. traditional music. I don’t think these designations are terribly helpful. What makes a piece of music traditional? And traditional to who? Instead, I believe we should aim at a few other markers for our music that I would organize around truth, beauty, and goodness.
Truth: Does our music express biblical and confessional truth? Does our music, aesthetically speaking, appropriately reflect the content being sung and the context in which we sing it (in the presence of God)? Our singing should be about correspondence to reality. The bible describes the world and defines what is happening in the worship of the church. We should sing true things in true ways.
Beauty: Is our singing excellent (not necessarily professional)? Does it give expression to the unified diversity of Trinitarian joy (Ha!) by which I mean do we hear diverse voices and instruments singing the same song but with unique voices? Beauty is visible glory - reflecting the glory of God. Our worship should reflect the beauty and holiness of God.
Goodness: Does it involve the whole community in the work of singing? Is it understandable (both musically and lyrically)? Does it form us as members of the living covenant community? Does it help to stir the affections of God’s people for the things of God and move us to love and obey our Lord in this time and place? Is our worship marked by hospitality and clarity towards outsiders? Worship that is good will involve the work of all God’s people and will be both an expression of the church and formative for the church. Worship will faithfully maintain the tension for outsiders of clearly communicating what is true and exhibit the hospitality of the gospel.
We gather in God’s temple as God’s people to worship God in the manner that God has graciously instructed us to in his word. We give our very lives to him in offerings that respond to the grace he has given to us in the work and rule of Jesus. This worship is work. Good work. Renewing work. But it is work that we do together in his presence.
But What Should it Look Like? Some Strategic Suggestions:
It should follow the pattern of Call to Worship, Confession of Sin and Pardon (Purification Offering), Scripture and Preaching (Ascension Offering), Communion (Peace Offering), and Doxology and Benediction.
There should be a healthy dose of Psalms. While exclusive psalmody goes too far, the need to “reclaim psalm-singing” seems to indicate that our problem lies in a neglect of the Psalms, not an over-emphasis. We should learn how to sing all of them.
Our musical selections should live in the tension of being accessible and requiring us to learn how to sing them together.
Given the age in which we live, our music should generally aim to lift us out from introspection and move us towards a kind of militancy. It is not that all the church’s music should be militant, but a good deal more of it should be than is currently prevalent in evangelicalism. And by militant, I mean that it should move God’s people out towards faithful witness.
Much of the music we sing should do well around a dinner table, an elder’s table, and a group of men gathering to smoke cigars and drink whiskey. In other words, the accompaniment should aid the singing of God’s people, not be a necessary component of the worship of God’s people. Hymnals employ a certain kind of music that does well both acapella and with accompaniment. Much modern music is dependent on accompanying musicians.
There should be a great deal of scripture in our service - besides the reading of scripture before and during the sermon. Prayers should be marked by scripture, exhortations should be marked by scripture, scripture should drip from everything we do.
We should teach our people to pray corporately - or covenantally. Prayers should be offered on behalf of the people and on behalf of the city and the nation. If we are a nation of priests sharing citizenship with other Coloradoans and Americans, then we should pray like it. Elders should pray with, in front of, and as representatives of the people.
Joy should be the overarching feel of the worship service. There should be heavy moments, holy moments, but overall the worship should feel like a feast. We do not come to condemnation but to a savior who is full of grace and truth. Our worship should not be informally happy-clappy but should be marked by a kind of sober and rich joy. The heart should be lifted.
This means everyone leading the service - from liturgists to musicians to preachers to elders passing communion must lead emotionally as well as pursue proficiency in the acts being performed. Musicians should train us how to lift our hearts as we sing. Show us both how to sing and how to express the emotional content of what we are singing. Liturgists should teach us how to respond when pardon is pronounced, how to confess our sins in the faith that God has promised to forgive us, and to feel the weight and the joy of both. The steps in the liturgy are not simply boxes to be checked, they are movements of body and soul.
Singing in parts - practicing the unified diversity of Trinitarian joy, should be possible much of the time. Even if most of the room only knows the melody - we should provide people with the possibility of learning to sing in parts.
Our worship should be discernible to contemporary culture, but it also should require the learning of new skills - like how to read music or how to engage in every part of a service. Worship should not be spectator-friendly or make complete sense to seekers. It is work, specialized work that it’s okay to take time to learn how to engage in this kind of labor.
We are aiming at joy. It is a joy that is cultivated as we learn to do this work, it is not automatic and it is dependent on a room full of people and it cannot be controlled by singing the right chords. But never forget that we want to move the affections not simply do the work.