Worship Weblog

Surrey Book Group (Wilma's group) – Second meeting

Posted by cicw

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Book Groups

We invited 34 book groups across the U.S. and Canada to meet and discuss The Church of All Ages and its implications for their worship, and to share their notes here.
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We began by considering the corporate nature of Paul’s command in Corinthians to “discern the body” when partaking in communion. Rather than being a call to individual examination of sin, the text seems to be calling the church to be on the look-out for barriers of all sorts, including age barriers, that work against the unity of the body symbolized in communion. While the book emphasizes the need to break down age barriers, we felt that Christ is calling for barriers of all sorts to be removed and that race, sex, wealth all require equal attention. Discerning the body means knowing that we all, by grace, belong.

Though we all had examples of good inter-generational experiences in our local churches(Monday night soccer, family Advent readings, prayer partners for missions trips etc.), we were helpfully pushed by Darwin Glassford’s provocative question, is Sunday morning worship a corporate activity of the body of Christ or a teaching service for adults? It was clarifying to realize that the practice of the churches represented in our group leaned towards adult teaching, making the attempts to include the generations just that: attempts.

From there we wondered together if more attention paid to adult education in other places might not free up the time of corporate worship to be an action truly inclusive of the full body (in fact that, without that, you don’t really have worship.) This also helped us to better understand the significance of the little story in the book of the Japanese pastor who proudly showed the nursery space in the back of the sanctuary. What kind of a major shift would it take to include babies in Sunday morning worship?

Someone asked the question, Why have a sermon at all? It doesn’t feel like worship of a great and awesome God, though others noted that we need concrete ways and teaching to be invited in to know who we are worship. We need a place to learn. The powerful image of inter-generational worship being like martial arts training came up again. It is the quality of movement (i.e. living) which should be emphasized and this emphatically needs to be done together.

The Bible as a book also took up some of our attention. Being Biblically-centered was one of our non-negotiables for worship, not in a moralistic way but in the visionary, story-telling way that Jeff Barker commends in his chapter. We mourned a little that Profession of Faith is often one of the few chances we give in public worship to tell the story of God’s work in our individual lives and appreciated very much the challenge to make story-telling of the “God-did-it-before-He-can-do-it-again!” more common.

Someone mentioned Reginald Bibby’s reminder in Fragmented Gods that the church shouldn’t and in fact can’t compete with culture in order to attract its members, but should trust that it has something unique to offer. Not high-tech, but high-touch: real things with real people of all ages.

Our group quite passionately concludes the same. One member said, “The more I read this book, the more I think we need to eat together.” A key example of our group’s determination that there be no more cart before the horse, but instead the real spiritual needs of real people being really together.

Tags: bgsurreywilma, Book Groups 2009, intergenerational