Acts of Worship

In the past few weeks I've had occasion to see the dichotomy between two different paradigms concerning worship.

One paradigm holds that worship is any outpouring of a reverential, value-assigning attitude toward God, and can be conducted at any time in any place in essentially any form. This paradigm holds that one may worship God when learning of a raise at his job, or when enjoying the intimacies of the marriage bed, or when reveling at the sudden release of a migraine into pure comfort, or when awestruck at the body's ability to heal paper cuts, or when thrilled about knocking a homerun in a game of baseball.

The other paradigm holds that worship is a formal act or set of acts that takes place at a specified time, and which has a formal starting and stopping point. This leads to the non-Scriptural term "Worship Service" which is applied to the regular (typically thrice-a-week) Christian assemblies. In my upbringing (traditional "Church of Christ"), there are "Five Acts of Worship" found in the New Testament and which are to be incorporated into the "Worship Services". These acts are singing, praying, giving, Lord's Supper, and preaching/teaching.

Whereas I believe that Christian assemblies should incorporate worship, and should conform to the general pattern of the first century assemblies, I do not believe that worship is limited to those occasions. I hold more to the first paradigm.

Fifth and Grape (the church I'm currently attending) appears to hold to the second paradigm.

As I sat in a "worship service" (cough) there recently, it struck me that these folks are inconsistent in their application of their paradigm. They believe the "worship service" should consist only of these five "New Testament example" acts. Thus their "services" don't include non-approved acts, such as singing "Happy Birthday" to members, or clapping (yes, I may touch on that issue some other time), or drinking coffee and having donuts while listening to the preacher, etc.

Yet they do include the non-approved act of having announcements in their "services". I think most of them grew up with announcements occurring prior to or after the "worship service" time proper, but as they've aged, they haven't realized that they've allowed announcements to drift into, instead of staying before or after, the "services".

I just found that interesting.