I thought I'd share a few ideas that either drifted through my head or were stated out loud during my foundations of worship class today.
We started out today by telling everyone what our denomination is and it surprised me that so many of the people in the class are nondenominational. I'm trying to decide how I feel about this because its a trend that is really spreading. On the one hand I think we don't fee secure enough in our beliefs. But also it shows the quality of discipleship in the church. People are coming to believe less and less what their fathers believed (again: good thing or bad thing?). Its this non-conformist movement thats sweeping the world as well. On the other hand I think it shows that people are becoming more and more aware of the fact that people in the world don't understand there are 24,000 denominations. Why the division? Why the problems? Why do christians all believe different things? So while its good that we recognize that denominations are bad, its bad that the solution we have found is to create more churches, each with their own set of beliefs. I'm not sure if any of that made sense. I was thinking out loud.
The second topic has to do with why we go to church. The question brought up is are we going to church for what we can get out of it or for what we can give to God through worship? In other words do we go to give glory to God or to feel good about ourselves for another week? An interesting thing that came up was feeding versus consuming. We get fed so that we can have energy to work for God, but if we continue to eat without exercising our spirit its just consuming. We get spiritually unhealthy, out of shape, and fat. Isn't that a great testament to our faith? I'm goiing to be thinking about these things a lot for awhile.
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4 comments:
John Owen says that all worship is obedience. Interesting to hear your thoughts on the subject though.
What if we go to church to take part in the community of God? There are those who would argue that we are created and saved for the church rather than the other way around.
I agree with David that church is really about building community. I certainly don't go to feel better about myself. I connect there. It's a safe place of praise. It puts me out there to be in relationship with others. Now if we are talking about worship- it's certainly not just church. Like Steven said, worship is obedience...it's praising God, following God, honoring him with our bodies, our minds, our lives...
We are obedient in finding a community of believers to love and support and we are obedient in reaching out in the community...this is worship...it's not a building with a cross and a pastor and a band.
hmm.. interesting thoughts about worship. VERY interesting.
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