Worship, Mission, and the Church Year: How Union with Christ Forms Worshipers for Mission in Every Season

Worship, Mission, and the Church Year

How Union with Christ Forms Worshipers for Mission in Every Season

Nicholas W. Monsma

WORSHIP, MISSION, AND THE CHURCH YEAR

How Union with Christ Forms Worshipers for Mission in Every Season

Copyright © 2019 Nicholas W. Monsma. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Cascade Books

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-1869-7

hardcover isbn: 978-1-4982-8607-7

ebook isbn: 978-1-4982-4447-3

Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Names: Monsma, Nicholas W., author.

Title: Worship, mission, and the church year : how union with Christ forms worshipers for mission in every season / Nicholas W. Monsma.

Description: Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2019 | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: isbn 978-1-5326-1869-7 (paperback) | isbn 978-1-4982-8607-7 (hardcover) | isbn 978-1-4982-4447-3 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Church year | Missions—Theory | Liturgics | Mission of the church

Classification: BV30 M657 2019 (print) | BV30 (ebook)

Manufactured in the U.S.A. March 18, 2019

Scriptures taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The NIV and New International Version are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Birth of Jesus

Chapter 2: The Peripatetic Ministry of Jesus

Chapter 3: The Suffering, Crucifixion, and Death of Jesus

Chapter 4: The Resurrection of Jesus

Chapter 5: The Ascension of Jesus

Chapter 6: The Return of Jesus

Epilogue

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

God has blessed me by putting a number of people in my life without whom I could not have started work on, much less completed, this book. I thank God for my mother, Leda Monsma, and my mother-in-law, Jere Meade, who each lived at my home to care for my children during the periods when I left for Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary to study many of the ideas at the heart of this book. I thank God for Paul Detterman and Jim Singleton, my professors, mentors, and friends, who explored the concepts of mission and worship with me during the three years of my DMin studies. I also am grateful for their suggestion that I go on to explore the specific topic of this book: missional worship and its relationship to the liturgical calendar.

I’m thankful for the patience and love of the worshipers at East Palmyra Christian Reformed Church who worship God with me each Sunday, and who keep me constantly aware of the reality that worship is not first of all something to be examined in books but something to be practiced by real people in a real church, with all its struggles and joys.

I’m grateful for the help of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, specifically for John Witvliet, who encouraged me to seek a publisher for this work, and for Noel Snyder, who devoted time to reviewing a draft of this book and providing invaluable feedback that helped to steer it in the right direction.

I’m grateful for the proofreading done by my lovely sister Rebecca DenHollander (who suggested that I call her lovely here). I’m especially grateful for my lovely wife Kelly Monsma (whom I’m calling lovely of my own volition). Yes, she patiently listened (or at least convincingly pretended to listen) as I excitedly talked about all the ideas in this book, and she reviewed a manuscript. But mostly, I’m grateful that she eagerly partners with me to answer all of the calls we hear from God—not just the call to work on this project, but at the same time, to raise our children, to serve our community, to love each other, and much more.

To God alone be the glory!

Introduction

Worship as Missional Formation, Participation, and Union with Christ

Talk about Jesus more. That’s the advice I’ve given to people as they struggle to discuss their Christian faith with inquisitive friends. I don’t mean that they should talk about church. I don’t mean that they should talk about the Bible. I don’t mean that they should talk about prayer. I don’t even mean that they should simply talk about God. I mean that they should talk about Jesus himself, God the Son, the person who took on human flesh, who took on our human suffering and our human guilt, who died, who rose, who ascended, who sent his Holy Spirit, and who will return. When someone asks us about our faith or why we go to church, it is easy for us to pull the plug and let all of the power of the gospel drain from the conversation. We talk about how great our church is, or we offer the vague hope that God has a plan for our lives. When we don’t talk specifically about Jesus, and about him by name, our church-going begins to sound like some kind of generic religious practice. Our faith starts to sound like some kind of generic belief in God. All of this changes, however, if we make a point of talking about Jesus Christ, specifically and by name. Talk about Jesus more, and your conversations will be oriented to the very heart of God’s mission.

It’s wisdom that many preachers have learned: Preach about Jesus more. Something is different when we start talking about Jesus Christ. Recently, I experienced this difference as I neared the end of a sermon. I read the words Jesus used to summon his disciples in the Garden of Gethsemane: Rise, let us go! Here comes my betrayer! (Matt 26:46). I took a minute or two to reflect on this profound willingness of Jesus. He was willing to sacrifice his own life for the salvation of the world. During those last few minutes, I turned the topic of the sermon to Jesus himself and his saving work. Something changed in the room—or at least it felt like it to me. I sensed that we in the room were being oriented to the heart of God’s mission. Something is different when we start talking about the saving life and work of Jesus Christ, when we preach about Jesus more.

This is also good advice for worship: Worship about Jesus more. That is what this book is about. Worship that is about Jesus goes beyond merely speaking his name in prayer or song. When worship is about Jesus, the liturgy leads us toward union with Jesus Christ. When worship is about Jesus, we are formed and transformed by that union with him. When worship is about Jesus, we are changed. When we worship about Jesus more, our whole lives are oriented to the heart of God’s mission.

This book examines what it means to be formed for our God-given mission by worshiping about Jesus throughout the seasons of the church year. The church calendar marks key events in the life and work of Jesus—from his birth at Christmas, through his suffering on Good Friday, all the way to his return during Advent. Following that calendar gives us opportunities for our worship to be about Jesus and for us to be formed through union with Christ for our God-given mission in seasonally changing ways. By saying all this, we assume three things:

• That worship should form us for our mission,

• That worshipers should be participants in worship, and

• That worship is union with Christ.

Let’s examine those three assumptions.

Worship Should Form Us for Mission

We can take the assumption that worship should form us for mission too far. Pastor and theologian Christopher J. Schoon warns about the assembly-line view of worship,¹ in which we expect that good worship will take worshipers in, do something to them, and spit out people who act in a different way. Theologian Simon Chan also identifies this as a problem and explains that when the church gathers for worship, we shouldn’t do this to accomplish some other goal. The church should gather for worship in order to worship. Worship is not a means to an end, that is, a tool to accomplish something else. The end of worship is worship.² In fact, worship (glorifying God and fully enjoying him forever) is the chief and highest end of man, to use the language of the Westminster catechisms.³ The purpose, the goal, the hoped-for outcome of engaging in worship ought to be simply that God is worshiped.

Worship should be about worship. We should treat the worship of the one, true God as an end in itself. Even so, many of us have a hard time resisting the urge to treat worship as a means to an end—especially when we are passionate about the mission of the church. This is common in congregations that have an attractional ministry mindset in which church leadership engineer[s] the church ‘product’ to attract their preferred clientele.⁴ The worship wars of previous decades were often fought by people treating worship as a means to an end. One side seemed to agitate for any change that would make worship more relevant or responsive to felt-needs or more effective at attracting large numbers.⁵ The other side—those who wanted to retain the congregation’s traditional forms of worship—also seemed to treat worship as a means to an end. I’ve personally been told by some who care deeply about the growth of the church that worship must include classic hymns and organ accompaniment because that’s what is familiar to their friends and relatives who have strayed from the church. Don’t we want worship to feel like that familiar thing they’ve been missing for so long? When one of our greatest hopes for our church building is that it would be filled with people, and our most common activity together is worship, it is hard not to turn worship into a tool for filling the pews.

Means-to-an-end thinking is common enough in congregations that are more missional too. These churches would prefer to think of the church’s task as a matter of being sent out into the world with the gospel, and worship is a tempting means to this end. Some view weekly gathered worship as a reprieve from during-the-week missional work, during which the church is reenergized for that mission.⁶ Worshipers escape from the grit and grime of their God-given mission in the world to get a taste of the heavenly banquet and a glimpse of the heavenly glory. Worship leaders ask what will best fill these worshipers up so they can be sent out for the week ahead, and soon worship is treated as a means to an end. Other missional congregations view weekly gathered worship as a means of calling worshipers to engage in mission.⁷ Some use the worship as a subtle, subconscious call to mission by modeling in worship the kind of missional engagement that the worshipers are expected to engage in during the week.⁸ For example, passing the peace becomes practice for peacemaking with others during the week. The worship leaders might not say as much, but the practice is included for the sake of encouraging worshipers to continue to do that same thing at other times. Worship leaders check to see that the language used in songs, sermons, and prayers is contextualized with local, casual idioms. The hope is that as worshipers hear this language in worship, they will sense a call to speak about the gospel in a similar way with the people they meet on Tuesday and Wednesday. Worship leaders can be more explicit too. The call to mission doesn’t have to be subconscious. At times, worshipers are directly encouraged to go out and get involved in a variety of missional activities.⁹ The worshipers are told to go and tell others about the resurrection of Jesus. The worshipers are told to volunteer at the food pantry. Worship leaders ask themselves: how can we use worship to encourage worshipers, directly and indirectly, to get involved in mission? When our greatest hope for the church is that it would be sent out to engage in missional activity, it is tempting to turn worship into a tool for getting that done.

But is it always wrong to give in to this temptation to think of worship as a means to an end? Is there some sense in which worship is both an end in itself and a means to an end? Even those who argue that worship shouldn’t be treated as a means to an end will insist at other times on treating worship that way nevertheless.¹⁰ For example, theologian Ruth Meyers writes against using worship as an instrument for mission, but then she goes on to suggest some images for understanding the relationship between worship and mission that make it look like worship is being used as an instrument for mission.¹¹ Similarly, while pleading for the church and its worship to be understood as ends-in-themselves, Chan doesn’t seem to object to all kinds of instrumental relationships between worship and the church’s mission. He writes of how worship is formational and has a missiological orientation.¹²

It might seem so compelling to say that worship is an end in itself and not a means to an end, but the connection between worship and formation for mission is more complicated than that. Worship and mission aren’t as distinct as we might think. One of the images Ruth Meyers suggests for understanding the relationship between worship and mission is a Möbius strip. A Möbius strip is a continuous belt with one twist in it. Because it has only one twist, it appears to have two sides, but it actually only has one. Try it. Go to your closet, take out an ordinary belt, and thread the end through the buckle upside down. Now run your finger along the belt, and by the time you get back to the exact place you started, you’ll have run your finger on both sides. How is that possible? With that one twist, your belt has become a Möbius strip and has only one side, even though it appears to have two. Worship and mission are related to each other just like the sides of a Möbius strip. Worship and mission, Meyers writes, might appear to be distinct activities, but they run into one another in such a way that it is impossible to find the dividing line between them. One becomes the other.¹³ For this reason, even when we treat worship as an end in itself, we should expect that worship has the capacity for worship to strengthen mission. Worship that is mission shapes a people for mission.¹⁴

Even if we treat worship as an end in itself, God the Holy Spirit might often use our worshiping as means to an end. There can be—and should be—a distinction between what we are doing in worship and what God the Holy Spirit is doing in worship. When we assemble for worship, our goal should be to worship. However, as we gather for the simple purpose of worshiping, God himself might be gathering us for other purposes, and perhaps he intends to form us for our mission. For this reason, worship leaders need to take a close look at the liturgy, the specific practices the congregation engages in during worship, like songs, prayers, preaching, sacraments, and so on, and the order in which they do these things. Ask: will your congregation’s liturgies, that specific set of practices you have planned to lead worshipers through, place obstacles in the way of this formation? Will your liturgy turn them away from or toward the potential missional-formation work of the Holy Spirit? And importantly for the sake of this book: what might missionally-formative liturgies look like during each season of the church year?

Worshipers Should Participate in Worship

The next assumption seems obvious: of course worshipers should participate in worship. Even so, we often fail to live up to this. Sure, worshipers should be active participants, but many of us have learned the habit of acting like an audience of passive observers, even consumers. We assume the posture of an audience, we observe and evaluate rather than participate. But worship is fundamentally different from a lecture, or a concert, or a play. In worship, the leaders are not performers, and the rest are not a mere audience. Together, we should all be participants. All should be singing in praise, not just the vocalists; all should praying, not just the worship leader; all should be meditating on God’s word to hear the Spirit’s message of grace, not just the preacher; all should be worshiping together according to the liturgy. But we are far too happy to observe as the worship leaders and a few super-spiritual neighbors do the actual participation. When we assume the posture of an audience, and when we begin to observe and evaluate rather than participate, we resist the Holy Spirit’s work.

This is why I find it hard to respond when people say, Good sermon! At times I have simply said, Thank you. Worshipers say these things to me as we shake hands on the way out of the worship space. There’s