lancaster area worship network

Wednesday morning worship

Mar 03

brettWednesday morning worship No Comments

On Wednesday mornings, Jeff Hoenshell & Ryan Smoker (two great worship leaders from my church) and I meet with the intention of discussing worship in the New Testament. Our hope and intent is to keep meeting until we get the whole way through the Bible, but at the rate we’re going, we’ll be meeting until 2110!

My plan was to write a blog post every week summarizing our discussion, but this will finally be the first post. It’s ok, though, because we have only discussed up through Matthew 4 to this point. Not because there is so much in the first 4 chapters about worship, but because we’ve really been wrestling a lot with the definition of worship that we would like to use.

Our overarching definition of worship is “giving preeminence to someone/something through adoration, sacrifice, and reverence.” This has been a labor to come up with, but we feel it really encompasses all (or at least most) of the elements we have debated including (e.g. response, glory, obedience, etc.).

We’ve also broken the definition out into a number of sub-categories:

• False Worship: giving preeminence to someone/something over/above its inherent worth or value
• True Worship: giving preeminence to the God of the Bible.

True worship also has 2 sub-categories:

• Corporate Worship: two or more people gathered in the same place/time with a united purpose of giving preeminence to the God of the Bible.
• Individual Worship: an individual giving preeminence to God.

We’ve set these definitions in place because we want to know exactly what worship is and isn’t as we read through the NT with the intent of gleaning principles by which to live and lead worship. Of course, the definitions are up for change as the Scriptures dictate, but we needed to start somewhere.

What do you think of the definitions? Too simple? Too complex? Let me know your thoughts.