Worship: Why We Worship

Why do Christians worship? It's a good and understandable question—and an important one too. Really, if you think about it, gathering for worship really does make us different from much of the rest of society.

The different traditions and groups within Christianity probably have a lot of different answers for why they worship. Here are some of the answers we would give out of our traditions and perspectives:

• We worship because God is worth it. As Christians, we believe that God is the author of all life, the creator of the cosmos, the source from which we all have our very being. More than that, though, we believe that God not only created us, but indeed that God loves us and all of creation. In order that we might know God and know God's love, God came to be one of us in the person of Jesus Christ, and through Jesus' death and resurrection, God demonstrated God's ultimate solidarity with us even to death, and God's ultimate victory over death and evil, gifting us with new life. All of this is good news! And all of this is more than reason for us to want to worship God: to give thanks and praise, to hear again the stories of God's people in times past, and to gather together with the community of God's people in the here and now. That is to say, we worship because God is worth it.
• We worship because in worship we encounter God and Jesus Christ—and our real selves. In our tradition within Christianity, we believe that who Jesus is and what he does are most reliably encountered in the two most-central, most-key things of worship: word and sacrament. We meet Jesus in the scriptures read and proclaimed through preaching, in the washing with water in the name of the triune God that we call baptism, and in the meal of Jesus' own self-giving that we call Holy Communion. These concrete, real things connect us to God and to the church. They also welcome us to face the full truth about ourselves and our world: sin and forgiveness, sorrow and hope, hunger and food, loneliness and community, death and life. We believe that God loves our real, concrete, flesh-and-blood world and that God came to us in the real, concrete, flesh-and-blood person of Jesus: and so, we believe we know God best by gathering with other real, concrete, flesh-and-blood people and together engaging in the real, concrete, flesh-and-blood actions of worshipping through word and sacrament.
• We worship because worship shapes who we are. When we gather for worship, we together engage in patterns, rituals, and practices that Christians have used for hundreds, even thousands of years. These practices have become central to who we are because they help shape who we are. When we engage with the stories of the Bible, we are shaped by the worldview within the stories and we learn to honor the stories and traditions of the people who came before us. When we baptize someone, we are shaped by a ritual in which we proclaim that God loves and claims that person regardless of their socio-economic status, their gender or race, their sexual orientation or physical ability, or really any human factor. When we share Holy Communion, we see a feast table where everyone is welcome and everyone is fed equally. Many of these things, and others we do in worship, are counter-cultural to our contemporary American society—but we believe that they point to the fullness of life that God wants for us, and in practicing them, they help shape our own lives toward that vision.
• We worship because worship shapes us as a community. The things we do in worship are, at their core, about a community, not about us as individuals. The stories of the Bible speak to us as a community. The waters of baptism incorporate us into a community. The bread of Holy Communion is given to a community. Especially in our particular tradition within Christianity, we take seriously the belief that the church is a people who have covenanted together to do God's work, and that the people are responsible to and for one another. Worship is never just a private matter—it belongs to the whole community.
• We worship because it empowers us to work for justice and mercy in the world. As we worship, we receive the sustenance we need from God to go back out into the world to do the ministry—the work of justice-seeking, mercy-making, and reconciliation-building—that we believe God calls us to do. Confronting the powers of injustice, violence, and oppression is not easy work, and we need worship to remind us who we are and who's we are to have the strength for that work.