Why worship is more important than evangelism

In a recent discussion about what you lose if you try to reproduce church worship online, a commentator posted the following response:

what does it matter? as long as people are being reached for Christ and the doctrine is sound, who cares if online worship replaces physical in-house worship for some? think of it this way, say you live in florida and really like this church in seattle. if you’re able to attend the seattle church online and be ministered to, what’s wrong with the methods used in online worship?

One comment, three questions. Let’s give this a shot.

1. What does it matter? If the primary purpose of our lives is to recruit new converts, it doesn’t matter. If the primary purpose of our lives is to glorify God and enjoy him forever, it really does matter.
2. Who cares? God.
3. What’s wrong? It’s wrong because it inverts the purpose of worship and makes it all about us. Although worship does benefit us, its primary purpose is to benefit (glorify, bring joy to) God. Although he needs nothing from us, he instituted worship as the most appropriate way for us to regularly commune with him. As the Westminster divines discovered,
   

   The acceptable way of worshipping the true God is instituted by Himself, and so limited by His own revealed will, that He may not be worshipped according to the imaginations and devices of men.

   God’s Word has so much more to say about how we worship than it does about evangelism. Just because we’re trying to attract the unsaved doesn’t mean that we get to override God’s acceptable methods of worship.

If we are to ignore and abandon proper worship just because people are being reached, why include worship in our services at all? The commentator does acknowledge that doctrine is important, though I don’t know why. If evangelism trumps the worship of God, why should doctrine matter either? Actually, if a church’s doctrine suggests that the worship of God can be jettisoned for evangelism, it’s not sound doctrine in the first place.

Recently, we’ve seen Perry Noble mock parents for being concerned about worship, and this comment is in a similar vein. Why be so uptight about worship when people are going to hell?

Why? Because worship is the whole point. Evangelism is the gateway to worship. When God saves us, he regenerates our heart and makes it capable of performing its most important function of worshipping and glorifying God. Instead, the Turnstile Church treats evangelism as a gateway to evangelism. That will work for a while, but at some point the newly recruited recruiters will ask why is it so important to be saved? If it’s just so that you can be a volunteer to help sign up more volunteers, you’re cheapening the faith by running the church the same way as a multilevel marketing scheme. When the primary value and purpose of a marketing operation is in recruiting rather than in enjoying the product itself, loyalty to the product and process is going to be tenuous and temporary.

God-directed worship gives us an answer to the question of why salvation is so important. God, by his grace, adopts us into his family, making communion with him possible and necessary. God desires our worship, and he wants us to worship in ways that he has directed. It’s appropriate to honor him by paying a great deal of attention to what those directions are.

Although it’s not its purpose, worship can be an evangelistic tool. When the unsaved see how we are able to enjoy God’s presence, a jealousy to be a part of that may suggest that the Holy Spirit is drawing that person to salvation, because we know that our natural condition is to rebel and hide from God. So, rather than considering God-directed worship as an optional extra, we should place it front and center and show the world that it is why and how we rejoice in our salvation.

Why online worship is virtually impossible

On his blog, Nick Charalambous has been engaging the question of whether church and worship can be conducted online. He has many thoughtful posts about the issue, but this section from one in January sums up the question nicely:

Could you not have a physical campus-less church and still be the church as Christ intended it?…

Is the disciple-making machinery of church the worship service or the community the worship service creates?

If the technology is here, or coming soon, where sophisticated worship services can be experienced in all their intensity anywhere in HD, the real work ahead for the church is learning how to guide and manage community, the kind of authentic community that, in Acts, added to its number daily and changed the history of the world.

I think a lot is going to boil down to questions about what’s the role of the weekly service in daily worship? And how important will it be to have a weekly physical gathering spot that belongs uniquely to a specific community of believers?

In other words, does worship need a common physical foundation as has traditionally been found in the church sanctuary? My answer to that question is yes. Without a weekly gathering spot we lose the sensuality of worship that God built into it.

Worship is inherently physical. It can’t be fully experienced by clicking a button or watching a screen. Let’s look at ways that worship engages our five physical senses.

1. Hearing. In one sense, this is the easiest sense for the online church to satisfy. We hear God’s Word read and taught by preachers. We hear prayer. We hear the worship band and worship leader. Worship can also include the absence of hearing, as found in moments of silence and reflection. One weakness of online worship, however, is that we can’t hear each other. If I do sing along, no one hears my joyful participation, or perhaps notes my lack of participation.
2. Sight. Again, another one that is served fairly well by a computer or television screen. We can see the leader. We can see Scripture texts and various artful symbols of God and his works. As with hearing, online worship, for now, doesn’t have the capability to let me see the people I am worshipping with, people who are made in God’s image. Young believers can learn and be encouraged by the behavior of older or more mature saints. The simple ability to see multiple generations of a family worship together communicates profound truths about the body of Christ that is lost if all we see is the preacher and the band.
3. Touch. God’s people don’t just assemble, they rumble. Right hands of fellowship are extended. Holy kisses are exchanged. Feet are washed, oils are poured out. We touch each other, but we also touch the sacraments of the Lord’s Supper when we break the bread and hold the cup. Baptism also requires touch.
4. Taste. The bread and wine of communion obviously engage this sense. The New Testament church often extended their fellowship into meals. Interestingly, one of the first things we’ll do in Heaven is feast, so good food is a small taste of Heaven. In a more spiritual sense, God tells us to taste and see that he is good (Psalm 34:8).
5. Smell. This is listed last because it’s one sense that we don’t engage nearly as much in contemporary worship as the other four. In Old Testament times, however, worship would have had very strong odors with the sweet smells of incense mixed with the more pungent smells of animal and crop sacrifices. To some extent, we do add some pleasant odor to worship with flowers and personal deodorants and fragrances, which some are more likely to wear on Sunday than most other days. Even though we don’t have as many obvious physical fragrances, Ephesians 5:1-2 and Philippians 4:18 tells us that our worship, including giving, is a fragrant offering to him.

When God condemns idolatry, he often does it by pointing out how sense-less the idols were. From Psalm 115:6-8:

They have ears, but cannot hear,
noses, but they cannot smell;

they have hands, but cannot feel,
feet, but they cannot walk;

nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

Those who make them will be like them,
and so will all who trust in them.

Our God, on the other hand, is a sense-able God who asks to be worshiped in a sensual way.

When we try to worship through a computer screen, we have to first take leave of our senses.