Articles and Studies

"Open Worship" — Is It Biblical?

Richard C. Leonard

A while ago I received in the mail, unsolicited, a pamphlet called The Rebirth of the Church. In a pointed and lively manner, the author expresses his ideas on the need for renewal in today's church, and how to bring it about. I had come across the pamphlet before, and have seen it advertised in Christian publications. Evidently it is being widely circulated in the evangelical and charismatic communities.

The key concept underlying this pamphlet is that of the open church. According to the author, the New Testament church gathering was characterized by openness of expression. "Laymen were free to obey the promptings of the Holy Spirit and speak up when they had something to say. They were born running — talking in church and witnessing outside it. And in the space of three centuries, they had conquered for Christ much of the known world, up to and including the Emperor."

But, says the author, this all changed in the fourth century, when Constantine legitimized Christianity and the church moved out of homes into large public buildings of its own. "What really killed us was the bricks." The Christian gathering became so large that personal expression was impossible. Clergy took over most functions of worship, and everyone else became a layman. As the church slid into the darkness of the Middle Ages, the rule for laymen became, "Sit down and shut up." The congregation turned into an audience. Even the Protestant reformers and their successors in various revival movements failed to fully restore the open worship of the New Testament church. But now "the time has come to end our 700-year experiment in spectator Christianity." By following the principles outlined in the pamphlet, we can restore open worship, and "learn to interact in depth with God and each other."

The Rebirth of the Church makes its case for open worship in witty, easy-to-read journalistic style. Anyone concerned with the renewal of Christian worship is likely to be impressed by its argument. (I hope I have represented it accurately in the above summary.) But I must confess that, reflecting on the full picture of worship as presented in Scripture, I have misgivings about open worship as this author presents it.

What Is Worship in the Bible?

One difficulty relates to the author's understanding of the purpose of worship. In one place he refers to it as "praise and veneration conceived and spoken by individuals." The writer derives his understanding of worship from Paul's descriptions of the gathering of the New Testament church. To the Corinthians Paul writes, "When you assemble, each one has a psalm, has a teaching, has a revelation, has a tongue, has an interpretation" (1 Cor. 14:26). Writing to the Ephesians, Paul mentions "speaking to one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody with your heart to the Lord" (Eph. 5:18).

But "praise and veneration conceived and spoken by individuals" is only one aspect of biblical worship. The biblical verbs normally translated "worship" (Hebrew shachah, Greek proskuneo) both mean "bow down, bend the knee." This suggests, first of all, that worship is not just something we speak. It may involve the whole body in acts honoring the Lord, such as kneeling or lifting the hands. More importantly, what is the context of the act of bowing down in homage? The context is the relationship between a servant and a Sovereign. Worship, in other words, is the ascription of honor to a King. We worship in order to express God's greatness and to give him the praise that is his due.

Another biblical expression for worship is "give thanks." In Hebrew the verb is hodah, which literally means "lift the hand," an ancient gesture of oath taking. To give thanks means, biblically, to take a vow of allegiance, to confess the Lord as our only Sovereign. (Therefore the verb is sometimes translated "confess.") Again, the context is the relationship of servants to a Great King. In worship, we pledge our loyalty to God, who has graciously chosen us as his own people and entered into a covenant with us. Worship is covenant making and covenant renewal.

The "open church" concept suggests that believers are fulfilled in worship only when they are free to express themselves — to speak their personal praise, to voice their needs, to utilize their gifts. While Christian worship may include these things, they are not the heart of worship. To make them central is to focus on the worshiper, not on the greatness of God. To insist that worship is true to the Scriptures only when believers can express themselves freely is to miss the whole point of worship from the biblical perspective.

The Larger Context of Worship

The author of The Rebirth of the Church is to be commended for wanting to establish our practice of Christian worship on biblical foundations. Regrettably, he has defined those foundations too narrowly. His picture of Christian worship is a snapshot of the first-century church at one phase of its development, meeting in intimate groups in private homes. Missing is the broader panorama of worship in Scripture: the festivals of Israel, the high ceremony of the Temple, the hymnody and petition of the Psalms. Also absent is the vision the New Testament church had for worship in its fulness.

Interpreting the New Testament, we should never forget that the church was a persecuted minority in a hostile religious environment. It was in no position to conduct public worship of the type we are accustomed to in Western society. It had no choice but to gather in small groups in the privacy of its members' homes. But this church saw itself as a royal priesthood, a people specially commissioned to celebrate God's great deeds. It understood itself to be the true people of God, heirs of his promise which the original recipients had rejected (1 Pet. 2:4-10). Such an identity has profound implications for worship. If in actual practice Christians met in the intimacy of the home, their sights were set on greater things to come.

To discover how the New Testament church wanted to worship, we must turn to those places where its spokesmen describe the worship of the future. The author of Hebrews, for example, tells his readers: "You have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven" (Heb. 12:22-23). This is a picture of worship on a grand scale. Paul writes of the day when "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those who are in heaven, and on earth, and under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father" (Phil. 2:10-11). And John, in the Revelation, describes worship conducted by twenty-four elders, which expands in majestic hymns to include myriads of angels and then every creature in heaven and earth (Rev. 5:8-14). Clearly the earliest Christians viewed worship in dimensions far greater than those of the four walls of the living room. To suggest that these descriptions represent the worship of heaven is to miss the point. Since every Christian has already "been raised up with Christ" (Col. 3:1) and has "passed out of death into life" (1 John 3:14), there should be no difference in motivation or quality between the worship of the church in this age — the "church militant" — and the church in heaven — the "church triumphant."

Rewriting Church History

Some of the confusion in The Rebirth of the Church results from the author's perspective on history. He participates in the great rewrite of history which regards the period from the fourth through the fifteenth centuries as an age of spiritual stagnation when biblical principles were forgotten and lay participation in worship was minimized. Careful examination shows that this image of the Middle Ages is a stereotype. If the clergy played a dominant role, this did not entirely eclipse the role of the laity nor prevent them from enjoying a vibrant and biblically grounded spiritual life in their local parishes.

One study, for example, has exposed the importance of jubilation or wordless song to the Lord (akin to the "spiritual songs" of the New Testament) in the daily life of peasants and other common worshipers. Amongst the people, religious revivals broke out which were characterized by gatherings for preaching, prayer and healing ministry. It was these lay-led revivals, not the grandiose ambition of some prelate, which gave the impetus to the building of the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe. In their sculpture, stained glass and other artistic media — all created by lay craftsmen — the medieval worshiper was confronted with biblical characters and themes, and learned to identify himself with God's people of the Old and New Testaments. Such works reveal why historian Henri Daniel-Rops claimed that the first and most fundamental characteristic of medieval religion was the influence of Holy Scripture. (See the article "The Word Made Visible" on this web site.)

The thrust for a biblically motivated style of worship was not an invention of the Protestant reformers and those who followed them. It would be a strange thing if the Holy Spirit had failed for an entire millennium to impress upon Christian worshipers the need to revere God in an acceptable way. It would be even stranger if only now, through tracts such as The Rebirth of the Church, we would providentially be given the key to rediscovery of worship consistent with biblical principles.

What "Open Worship" Can Look Like

A number of years ago we were associated with a church that experimented with open worship using The Rebirth of the Church and accompanying study materials. Prior to this experiment, worship in this church had been warmly evangelical. A skilled and dedicated musician led the people in free-flowing praise, and the Lord's Supper was celebrated with spirit in a semi-liturgical style. Suddenly one Sunday we arrived to find that the seats had been rearranged in concentric circles. The altar was no longer the focus, and worshipers faced one another. The music director had been dismissed because, according to the pastor, worship was no longer the job of professionals. Instead, members of the congregation were to exercise their gifts.

The result was a haphazard and unfulfilling experience. Worshipers "exercised their gifts" by suggesting their favorite songs at random, requesting prayer for personal needs, reading a passage of Scripture especially meaningful to them, or standing to deliver a teaching from their own life. At communion, each worshiper served the one next to him, who served the next in turn.

Typical of the "teaching" offered to the congregation was the reflection of a woman who described in detail the washing of various kinds of sheets on laundry day. It occurred to her that white sheets tend to stay in better condition over time, while colored sheets fade. She likened this to different kinds of friendships; longtime friends wear better than others. Another worshiper rose to give God thanks that he had heard from his sister who had been out of communication for some time. And so it went. Few, if any, worshipers offered anything with biblical substance as a word to the whole church.

The pastor had just attended a seminar on open worship, was convinced that this style of worship to be the pattern of the New Testament, and gave the congregation no opportunity to dissent. Those who were uncomfortable with open worship, for whatever reason, had no choice but to drift away. Eventually, the pastor resigned from a greatly weakened church. It survived because a new pastor gradually and tactfully restored a more liturgical style, in keeping with the congregation's denominational heritage.

The author of The Rebirth of the Church might well agree that this congregation was inadequately prepared for open worship, and that the concept was poorly implemented. But I suggest that it is all too typical of what occurs in a congregation when the "open church" becomes the latest fad in worship style. The ironic thing is that it was the pastor — not the laity — who imposed it upon a reluctant congregation which, for the most part, had found its needs met by the type of worship it replaced.

The Significance of Ceremony

The Rebirth of the Church lists four paradigms or models for the church which tend to suppress the practice of open worship. The first three are the school (worship as instruction), the evangelistic rally (worship as soul-winning), and the theater (worship as entertainment). To these the author adds a fourth, ceremony (worship as pure liturgy). He acknowledges the role of ceremony in the Bible, but asserts that "as a steady diet for a dynamic congregational family, it's very lacking in fiber." While thrilling is itself, he says, Sunday ceremony fails to minister to our needs in the everyday setting.

In its devaluing of ceremony, The Rebirth of the Church is at variance with the biblical tradition (see the Laudemont Press publication Processions of God). In the Bible, the ascription of honor and glory to God, and the declaration of loyalty to him as King, is almost always an orchestrated corporate action — in other words, a ceremony. This is true even for expressions of worship which appear, at first glance, to be individual acts, such as statements in the Psalms. Careful study reveals that the "I" of the Psalms is indistinguishable from the "We." The speaker is not an isolated worshiper but the representative of a covenant-keeping community, and his utterance is not a spontaneous outburst but a conventional affirmation in which all worshipers may participate. Even the life of the earliest Christians reveals its ceremonial aspects; we encounter Peter and John on their way to the Temple at the stated hour for prayer (Acts 3:1), and find Paul and Silas in the Philippian prison not just praying their own prayers, but singing hymns to God (Acts 16:25). There is a structure to all meaningful expression, or it would not be meaningful; in the case of worship expression, that structure is ceremony.

Open worship, which prizes the spontaneous expression of individuals, is like a car with many drivers. It lurches forward, stops, backs up, takes a new turn, and in the end may go nowhere. It fails to establish a directed movement toward the goal of biblical worship, the appearance of God in the midst of his faithful people. This appearance or "epiphany" of the Lord is the high point of worship in Scripture. People do not honor an absent deity, but one who is present to receive their homage and adoration.

How God comes to his people in worship is a mystery, but both Old and New Testaments witness to this event. The Psalms often speak of the Lord's coming, his entering in, his being enthroned in the context of the festive assembly. The visitor to the prophetic gathering of the early Christians is moved to fall on his face and declare that "God is certainly among you" (Acts 14:25). The Lord God and the Lamb dwell in the midst of the Jerusalem from heaven (Rev. 21—22), a metaphor for the worshiping community of the new covenant (Gal. 4:22-26; Heb. 12:22). Worship that is poorly directed or under-ceremonialized cannot build to the point where the Lord's presence becomes manifest in the way we observe it in Scripture. Ceremony helps us to share in a directed and focused expression of praise leading up to the appearance of the Holy One. It is a ceremony, the Lord's Supper, which most vividly realizes the presence of Christ with his followers: "This is my body . . .," "This is my blood . . ."

For this reason "praise and veneration conceived and spoken by individuals" should not be equated with biblical worship, nor with the activity of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit resides with the body, but this body is the body of Christ — not isolated individuals, but a community of faith, the assembly of the saints. As Paul makes clear, complete spontaneity and individualism in worship violates the sense of the body. His concern that each worshiper be responsive to the Spirit is balanced by his concern that the manifestation of the Spirit should be for the common good (1 Cor. 14).

The open worship concept tends to confuse individual acts of praise with the movement of the Spirit. But Paul reminds us that the Spirit operates in a larger dimension, that of the community of faith. Here, because God is not a God of confusion but of peace, everything should be done in order (1 Cor. 14:33, 40). Ceremony, far from suppressing the Spirit, enables the corporate experience of the Spirit's presence and provides a framework for the Lord's appearance in the midst of his people. Ceremony and liturgy are also the "work of the people," providing a Christian identity for the worshiper which sustains him or her not only during the time of formal worship but throughout the course of ordinary life.

Co-Opted by Cultural Values

Today the highest value proclaimed in Western culture is that of individual expression and personal rights. This value has become so pervasive that all else must be sacrificed to it — public decency, social order, family solidarity, even the lives of the unborn and the aged. A church that buys into this value has lost its leverage in diagnosing the sickness of our age and offering the healing ministry of the Spirit. Worse, it has adopted "another gospel," a faith unworthy of the church founded on the apostles, prophets and martyrs, and upon the rock of Christ.

People need something else to guide them through the maelstrom of individualism: a sense of historic identity, communion with Christ and his saints, a place in the life and work of God's servant people, a vision of the holy. In theory, open worship might offer these benefits. But in actual practice there is not much chance that it will.

Since January 1, 2005

©1997 Laudemont Ministries