An Unintended Consequence of the Missional Movement
God as Mission, Worship as Expendable
“God is missional in essence.” “God is a missionary God by nature.” “The Church doesn’t do mission; it is on mission.” All true. And I’m so grateful for the recovery of “sentness” as a part our essence as image-bearers of God. Mission isn’t optional.
And yet, some unhealthy ideas have leaked in which can be exposed by this question: Is it possible for the Church to be so sent that it is never gathered?
Some in the missional movement have championed a church-on-the-move philosophy—to be the church is to be serving, to be building the kingdom in the community. So they’ve replaced some (sometimes all) weekly worship gatherings (prayer, singing, preaching, sacraments) for “worshiping through service” out in the community.
The problem with this approach is that you chop your legs out from under you. Worship fuels mission. The circulatory system that pumps lifeblood to the world (mission) is missing its heart (worship). In “ Christianity Cannot Survive the Decline in Worship,” Kazimierz Bem put it starkly:
The refrain I constantly hear is: “The Church of the future is the Church of service.” It takes all shapes and forms, but it always boils down to the same thing: Don’t focus on worship—do stuff instead! So when a denominational leader blogs that the vocation of churches is to be local community centers, food banks, daycares, or places for diaper drives, I cannot help but think that we stop ordaining people to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament and instead create an office of “Community Organizer” (with Brief Prayers).
Whew. It is probably not surprising that this strand of the missional movement has taken greatest root in traditions of Christianity with lower view of church traditions and institutions. Because worship and its leaders don’t do anything particular and special, they’re replaceable or expendable.
Some of the missional thinking that downplays worship is unintended. However, some are so zealous for mission that they avoid anything that can leave churches in a comfortable rut. I share that angst. Complacency is always deadly. But the ruts are due to worship that is poorly practiced, led, and conceived of, not worship itself.
How Worship and Mission Work Together
Worship is the goal of mission. We are on God’s mission precisely because the world has been sidetracked from its central call—the worship and glory of God. The world should be gathered for the worship of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but when human beings were manufactured and hit the market, we broke down pretty fast. Mission is God’s “factory recall” of the world’s worship.
Those who are most intense about mission ought to be most intense about worship. They will revel in the presence of God among the people of God. They will understand just how sweet and fulfilling it is to be in union and communion with the Trinity, and because they have so basked in that love, they will overflow with desire to see others taste what they have tasted.
Worship shakes up our amnesia: we remember who we were in Adam before and after the fall, and we experience who we are in our union and communion with the Second, Greater Adam—Jesus Christ. In this remembrance, we taste for a moment our full humanity—the fullness of who we were designed to be and what we were made to do. We experience wholeness, peace, shalom. And then the inevitable “aha” occurs. We realize that this is what the world is groaning for. At the benediction, we are sent out into the world with all the force that an encounter with God can muster, until we are brought back in by God’s next summons in seven days, then re-energized and sent.
Doing and Receiving
A Church that is always busy on mission is in a perilous position in an even more fundamental way. The Church is always, first and foremost, a group of receivers, not doers. In all our emphasis on being Christ’s hands and feet in the world, we may forget Christ’s hands and feet on the cross. We often functionally forget the gospel in our practice: that faith is God’s action, a Divine gift; that Christianity preaches Someone to receive, not something to do.
Ironically, worship is good medicine here. Maybe part of the reason it itches some missional thinkers is that in worship, we’re all passive. We all receive God’s Word to us and God’s grace for us. Even our singing, according to Scripture, isn’t so much our action, but Christ’s action through us (Heb 2:12), and not in our own power, but in the power of the Spirit.
Worship teaches us that serving begins with God’s service to us by providing all the resources for His forgiveness of sins and justification of the ungodly. And then, as He fills us, we go out, enabled to offer ourselves in service as living sacrifices.
About Zac Hicks
Zac Hicks is the worship pastor at Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He writes on worship regularly at zachicks.com zachicks.com and liberate.net and has recorded several albums, most recently His Be the Victor’s Name. Zac is a contributing author to the book Doxology & Theology (Nashville: Lifeway, 2013).