This post is part of a series of reflections on the Christian Spiritual Disciplines explored in Richard Foster’s book Celebration of Discipline
I will never forget the Sunday when worship changed the direction of my life.
I was in seminary and, at the time, a member of the Presbyterian Church. During the previous year, I had lived in a Roman Catholic community, where one of the Jesuit priests had allowed me to receive the Eucharist during our small community worship services. Technically, I was not supposed to receive the sacrament because I was not a professed Catholic. But being welcomed to the table transformed me. I experienced the Eucharist as something through which Christ became present.
Then one Sunday, a seminary classmate was the guest preacher at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Pomona, California. I went to hear her preach.
The worship looked a little like the Roman Catholic liturgy I had come to love, but it also carried something of the sensibility of my Presbyterian upbringing. Before I entered the nave, I encountered an enormous baptismal font. Inside, the congregation sat in the round, gathered around the altar.
Then I began to notice the people around me.
I had grown up in a predominantly white, suburban, heteronormative congregation. At St. Paul’s, people from very different walks of life had gathered around the same table. A homeless man carrying his pack sat in the same row as a wealthy woman wearing pearls. The congregation included people who were white, Black, and Latino. One worshiper was transgender. The priest presiding at the Eucharist was a woman. The rector was an out gay man.
The clergy explained the liturgy as we prayed it. After the sermon, we proclaimed the Nicene Creed using an eighth-century chant.
Something happened to me in that room.
Richard Foster writes in Celebration of Discipline that worship is “to experience Reality” and “to touch Life.” In worship, we encounter the resurrected Christ in the midst of the gathered community. Foster describes it as being invaded by the glory—the Shekinah—of God. The Rev. Ed Bacon used a more playful expression: having a “glory attack.”
That Sunday, I had a glory attack.
The beauty of the liturgy, the diversity of the congregation, the welcome of the table, and the presence of Christ all converged. I was not simply attending a service or observing an unfamiliar religious tradition. I was encountering the living Christ in the gathered Body of Christ.
Within weeks, I joined the confirmation class. Eventually, my ordination process transferred to the Episcopal Church.
Forms That Carry Us
Every worshiping community has forms: prayers, hymns, gestures, sacraments, silence, Scripture, and patterns for gathering and being sent out. Foster compares these forms to wineskins. Because we are human beings, he says, we need them. They give shape to our worship and help carry us into the presence of God.
But the forms are not themselves the worship.
A hymn can lead us into worship, but singing a hymn is not necessarily worship. We can recite the Creed without entrusting ourselves to the God we proclaim. We can receive the bread and wine without opening ourselves to the presence of Christ. We can follow every direction in the bulletin while remaining spiritually absent.
The service is a vehicle. Its purpose is to bring us into an encounter with God.
This does not mean that the forms are unimportant. The physical forms of Episcopal worship were part of what drew me into a deeper encounter with God. I found permission to worship with my whole body: standing to praise, kneeling to pray, bowing in reverence, extending my hands to receive, and making the sign of the cross.
Our bodies were not incidental to worship. They were participating in it.
How we use our bodies in worship belongs to personal piety. The gestures are invitations—ways our physical lives can express the prayer of our hearts.
The question is not whether everyone worships in precisely the same way. The question is whether our forms are helping us encounter the living Christ. As Episcopalians who love their liturgy, it is so vital that we not become “liturgical fundamentalists.” We should always paying attention and asking, “is the form holding our experience of worship?”
Holy Expectancy
In the biblical stories, people often approached worship with what Foster calls “holy expectancy.” They believed they might actually hear the voice of God. When Moses entered the tabernacle, he expected to enter God’s presence.
What would change if we came to church with that same expectancy?
I have a strong memory of Tom Bible, Calvary’s late junior warden, sharing his practice of looking for Christ in everyone he met. He intentionally imagined each person radiating with the presence of God.
And, when he practiced looking for God, he discovered God everywhere.
Holy expectancy begins long before Sunday morning. We cultivate it by learning to notice God throughout the week: in the people we encounter, the beauty of creation, the work of our hands, the words we speak, and the quiet movements of our hearts. We learn to distinguish the voice of God amid the blare of everyday life.
Then we bring that attentiveness with us when we gather.
Foster urges us to listen to Scripture expecting God to speak. To approach the table expecting Christ to meet us. To look at the people around us expecting to see the Body of Christ.
Worship becomes more than something performed by clergy, musicians, or liturgical ministers while everyone else watches. Jesus is the ultimate leader of Christian worship, and all other leadership should respond to Jesus as the “great High Priest.” All of us are being gathered by Christ and drawn together by the Spirit.
From “I” to “We”
Something happens in corporate worship that cannot happen when we are alone.
Christian tradition calls it koinonia: a deep fellowship created by the Holy Spirit. If we are at worship, we are doing much more than simply occupying a room together. We become a worshiping people.
That requires us to loosen our grip on the question, “What did I get out of worship today?” Worship is not primarily about whether I enjoyed the music, liked the sermon, felt inspired, or received something useful.
The language of gathered worship is not only “I.” It is also “we.”
We confess together. We listen together. We pray for the world together. We gather around one table and receive one bread. We become, by God’s grace, something more than a collection of individuals.
Even the distractions belong to that gathering.
The baby crying, the person moving through the aisle, the worshiper who arrives late, or the child who asks a wonderfully inconvenient question may not be interruptions of worship. How might we see everything in worship, including the disruptions, as gifts from God? Foster encourages us to “absorb distractions with gratitude.” (Anyone seeking additional practice in this specific discipline is warmly invited to Calvary’s 9:15 a.m. Family Service!)
Worship Changes Us
Worship is meant to draw us closer to God, but more than that, to transform us.
Foster writes, “To worship is to change.”
If worship never propels us toward holy obedience—toward mercy, justice, reconciliation, generosity, and love—then we may have participated in a service without truly surrendering ourselves to God. Service flows out of worship because, having encountered the living Christ, we are drawn into the work of Christ.
But Foster also offers an important warning: “Activity is the enemy of adoration.”
Churches can become so consumed with doing good that we forget to abide in the goodness of God. We can mistake constant activity for faithfulness. We can serve, organize, advocate, teach, and lead without pausing to worship the One from whom all faithful action flows.
Worship reminds us that the life of faith with what God has already done for us rather than what we are doing for God.
Sometimes we will feel God’s presence powerfully. Sometimes we will not. There will be Sundays when worship carries us into mystery and others when we are tired, distracted, doubtful, or spiritually numb.
On those days, Foster suggests that we offer our presence as a sacrifice of praise. We might pray:
“God, I do not feel like worshiping today, but I give you this time. It belongs to you. I will waste this time with you.”
We keep returning to the prayers, the stories, the people, and the table. We trust that grace is working even when we cannot perceive it.
William Temple wrote, “To worship is to quicken the conscience by the holiness of God, to feed the mind with the truth of God, to purge the imagination by the beauty of God, to open the heart to the love of God, to devote the will to the purpose of God.”
Worship brings us into Reality.
We come expecting that Christ will meet us.
And sometimes, by grace, we find ourselves invaded by glory.
