The Sermon, the Service, and Your Role

What is the most important part of the worship service? Our architecture often shows our answer. Most pastors would excitedly assert that the answer must be the preaching of God’s Word. After all, they labor for hours every week over a message that often lasts barely longer than 30 minutes. That much investment, maybe twenty minutes of study for each minute of speaking, must make preaching the most important piece of the service. The location of the pulpit itself in many evangelical churches—in the center, elevated on the stage—testifies to its centrality to what we do on Sunday when we gather together.

On the other hand, for many attending contemporary churches, the music and singing of God’s people seems the most important reason to get out of bed and attend that specific church. Instead of a pulpit, the pastor simply pulls over a music stand to preach. After all, when we refer to “worship” we often refer to the music rather than the service as a whole. I pastor in a college town, and when I ask college students why they chose their church, the most common answer is “The music.” Their tacit implication: the most important part of the church’s gathered meeting is the music.

Other traditions would offer that the celebration of the Lord’s Supper is the central act of gathered worship, the altar or communion table prominently front and center. Still others might answer that the community one enjoys is the core of gathering, maybe with the coffee table invading the worship venue. And still others see the rest and refueling offered in this Sabbath gathering as the most important.

Writing in the 1880’s, Herman Bavinck offers a different answer that each of the modern proposals. In his article, “The Sermon and the Service,” Bavinck defends the significance of preaching while surprisingly subverting the conception that it is the most important part of the worship service. Bavinck writes, “The sermon is certainly not the only, or even the most important part of our worship service—that is the priestly work of the believers together—but it is nonetheless the high point of the priestly gathering and worship.” To Bavinck, the most important part of the worship service is the gathering of believers themselves.

This idea is largely lost today. If so, it is unsurprising that an unprecedented number of people, even those who self-identify as Christians, opt out of religious worship altogether. The church must recover what I will call “involved worship,” meaning the worshippers integrally involved in the worship, countering this tendency and rightly orienting and honoring the other elements of the worship service.

When I sit down in my cushioned seat on Sunday morning, sipping my coffee and trying to ignore the faint buzz in my pocket, my role feels completely passive. In situations where the music is loud, even when I am singing my voice is largely drowned out by the performance of the musicians on stage. The most active role I take is sitting down and standing up. But would anything on Sunday be different if I were not present?

Experienced in this way, the gathered worship of the church on Sunday mornings is largely an affair that I consume and enjoy. I am here to be built up, encouraged, and established for faithful living in the world and unto God. I receive spiritual benefit in the gathering on Sunday, and I attempt to sow spiritual benefit in my scattering through the remainder of the week. Obviously, this is beautiful and wonderfully true. Gathering is for encouragement (Hebrews 10:24). Preaching is for edification (1 Timothy 4:13; 2 Tim. 4:2). Singing offers praise and thanks to God (Ephesians 5:19). The sacraments offer us our Lord, proclaiming his death and resurrection until he comes (1 Corinthians 11:23–26). We are one body, with one word dwelling richly, singing songs to one another, in the love and adoration of our God (Colossians 3:14–17).

Taken alone, these verses might seem to support a “renew, refuel, and reset” vision for worship. Taken within the grand scope of the whole Bible, however, our edification in worship is given a more expansive perspective. Romans 12:1–2 famously speaks of our “spiritual worship” or “reasonable service.” This language draws on the Old Testament’s imagery of the priestly service in the temple. At some level, then, our worship is our work and vice versa. Likewise, Ephesians 4 portrays the work of ministry as the church’s work to build up one another in love. Colossians 3 teaches us to sing spiritual songs to one another and admonish one another. Hebrews 10 teaches us not to neglect meeting so that we might encourage one another. The New Testament view is much closer to Leviticus than our local movie theatre. We are not passive recipients of the worship service; we are to be active.

Writing a century ago, Bavinck’s day wrestled with its own dechurching. A culture largely built on Christianity abandoned its heritage in pursuit of modernity. This both was caused by and deeply impacted the church. As Bavinck saw it:

Why one goes to church and what one has to do there, you see, have been almost entirely forgotten. The right concept of the public church service is being lost. The idea that we have something substantial to do in the church service, that we are not passive, that we are busy and active, that we go there to carry out priestly work, to be occupied with our Father’s business, to sacrifice in the temple of the Lord, to offer to God ourselves and all that is ours, not only to establish ourselves and to become established, but so that we and others might be truly established and built up in the most holy faith, is misunderstood.

Bavinck saw this misunderstanding as one of the leading reasons the younger generation was leaving the church. When the worshiper transitions from an integral part of what we are doing to a consumer, the service transitions from a necessity to a commodity. One then has the economic choice: is this worth my limited time? The answer in both Bavinck’s and our day seems to be no.

It is therefore no surprise when people see music as central to their choice of church. Singing is, perhaps, the most involved moment of worship for many churches, at least if you can hear yourself. If one church places great emphasis on sung worship, then, that church will engage the worshiper more than other churches. Similarly, it might not surprise us that many are now drawn to Roman and Eastern traditions. Their emphasis on the Lord’s Supper and liturgy engages the worshiper in an intimate and holistic way.

However, when preaching or music or the sacraments are elevated above the priestly service of the believers in gathered worship, we find a disordering that obscures the wonderful truth in each of these aspects of a biblical worship service. In the Lord’s Supper, God’s people prepare their hearts and come to his table. In singing, God’s people declare with breath given to them by God truths that penetrate their heart despite their circumstances. In preaching, God’s people submit themselves to its authority, asking it to transform them.

The worship of the church is necessarily involved. As obscured as it may be, no one sings, or bows their head, or holds the bread and the cup, or receives a benediction, or listens without it performing a priestly service in the covenant gathering. The task before us is not to activate worship. Worship is by definition active. Rather, the task is to recognize how active the church already is when it gathers to worship and serve that end—not obscure it—in our liturgical practice. It is to this task we now turn.

How do we recover involved worship? What would renewed and engaged worship look like in our churches? What might change, and how might we grow? Three areas immediately come to mind:

We recover involved worship through discipleship. The congregation gathered for worship on Sunday morning is a staple of the church in nearly all its manifestations around the world. Discipleship extends beyond Sunday, of course, yet the discipleship that takes place outside of Sunday rarely has recourse to that cumulative event. Too often, the implicit approach is that worship is a moment, while the rest of the week is real life. Even discussions surrounding spiritual disciples, spiritual formation, and the like rarely give the gathered worship of the church a major role to play in Christians’ spiritual lives. Without realizing it, this implicitly communicates that the believer is active in those moments, with a real role to play, whereas, unless in the band or preaching, Sunday is served like the lunch we may enjoy afterwards.

Churches instead should take a vested interest in promoting the believer’s active role in worship through discipleship. Pastors should not be shy in telling their congregations that the best thing they can do for their spiritual health and that of their family and friends is to attend worship regularly, that this is not just a spiritual discipline, but the foundational one. Music leaders should train their congregations to know that the most important aspect of the worship service’s music is their voices singing loudly to and along with one another. Discipleship relationships should hold one another accountable for their attendance, attentiveness, and activity in worship. We should recover the discipline of preparing one another’s hearts to engage in worship, often starting the evening before. Even more minimally, we should start being on time for the service! Discipleship should be attuned to promoting believers’ priestly role in all of life, including and especially when the priesthood gathers.

Many more things could be said here, but I will only highlight two more that are particularly relevant today. First, we should impress this upon our children from an early age. Bavinck was greatly concerned by the dechurching of his day, and he attributed no small part of it to the failure of young people to see the gathered worship as something that actually involved them. We have the opportunity to form our children in deep ways by simply taking them into the worship service, talking to them about the worship services—its flow, elements, and meaning—and prompting them to serve in whatever way your church tradition and context allows for children to serve. This takes work. A young, squirmy child is just being a child. Yet, he or she will never grow up to appreciate gathered worship if they are not taught how to engage. Parents, instead of checking your child into “Sunday School as childcare,” bring them with you and teach your children how to worship with the whole body of Christ.

Second, we should be discerning and bold in our use of and attitude towards technology in the worship service. Pastoral leadership should carefully consider technology’s involvement in the liturgy and service, but even more individual believers must be wary of how technology distracts and detracts from our involvement in worship. Checking fantasy football lineups, hopping in Yelp lines for lunch, and even texting friends about the sermon as its being preached put us in the seat of the casual observer, if not the critic. Technology is invasive, and it drags our attention to itself in compulsory ways, by design and by algorithm. Silence the phone, turn it off, leave it in the car, or whatever—not merely to reduce distraction for others but even more to connect ourselves with others in the spiritual service of worship. While churches should be gracious and accommodating in our welcome to those who are not believers or who are young and untrained in faith, in our discipleship we must also be serious and clear about the loss that is experienced by technology’s involvement in worship.

We recover involved worship through liturgy. All worship is involved, but we experience this involvement to a higher or lesser degree through the liturgy. First, how much thought is given to liturgy of the church’s worship service each week? Is there a story or flow to the service through which we want to move people? Are the liturgical pieces chosen with intentionality for how they will compel and impact congregation? Where are we calling for each person’s noticeable involvement?

I fear, often, worship sets are selected solely for their ability to draw out the affective side of the congregation. If we recover the concept of the priestly service of believers in worship, we will reshape our liturgies to see worshippers not merely as passive subjects who receive a product but as active participants who constitute the worship. We can achieve this in an innumerable number of ways depending on our culture, context, and tradition.

Our church recites together Psalm 23, the Lord’s Prayer, the Apostles Creed, and the Heidelberg Catechism’s question one on a rotating basis. We do not merely recite rote scripts, but we confess together as a people our shared beliefs and commitments. When the service leader rises to lead the congregation in the liturgical recitation, we teach the congregation why we do this.

Not all church cultures will lend themselves to liturgical recitation as we do it (though it took us quite some time to work towards it). I merely offer this as an example of how liturgy can compel a greater understanding of the congregation’s involvement in the worship. Corporate confession, silent prayer and reflection, call and response, and many more are other wonderful examples. Further, the manner of introduction—before prayers, songs, sermon, benediction, and more—can serve this end by reminding and teaching the congregation of their role in the element of worship.

We recover involved worship through preaching. When the priestly body of believers grows in its understanding of its own work in worship, the proclamation of the Word of God at the center of the worship service is not relativized but instead even more highly esteemed. Preaching does not happen in a vacuum, to a group without substance. Preaching happens within a context of a covenant community, a kingdom of priests. Now, as servants of the Word, we hear from him. Bavinck writes:

Through preaching, the congregation is protected in its purity, encouraged in its battle, healed in its sufferings, established in its confession. Through preaching, the flock remains with the church.

For the younger generation, “estranged from truth” by the culture, Bavinck offers:

The congregations must understand Scripture better, encounter it more clearly, and understand it more in its organic coherent interconnectivity. That will bring the advantage that the congregation will be more firmly established against the doubts and theories regarding [unbelief]in our era.

Denying preaching the seat of highest importance in worship is not a dishonor to its task. Rather, it places it at the head of the priestly service of all believers in the church. When we sit under preaching, we are offering ourselves as living sacrifices—dying to pride, the old man, to sin’s slavery—seeking to be transformed by the renewal of our minds. This is our spiritual worship. We have come here to offer ourselves completely to God in priestly service. We have confessed our sins. We have confessed his truth. We have praised his holy name and rejoiced in his forgiveness. Now, we say to him, “Speak, for your servant listens.” Seen in this way, preaching is the culmination and climax of the priestly service of worship. Though, perhaps, not as in vogue as it once was, something so tied to our priesthood before God will then never be so easily dismissed.

Wherever the church of Jesus Christ worships around the world today, there a priesthood enlivens to its service. In the remote churches planted high in the mountains of Nepal, a priesthood serves God. Along the busy streets of New York, voices might be heard from the sidewalk as a priesthood serves God. Men, women, children, rich, poor, the disabled, the foreigner, the pastor, and the people all come into the presence of God offering themselves.

In our distraction and familiarity, this fact might be obscured. But I pray we will awaken to our spiritual service and our involvement in worship. In doing so, though our eyes may not see it, by faith we will enjoy the unity of the Spirit—in the one body, one faith, and one baptism—as we worship our one Lord, one God and Father of all, by the grace given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift (Eph. 4:3–7). We will be equipped for the work of ministry and the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to the unity of the faith and the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ (Eph. 4:12–13).

That is what awaits us in worship.