I just finished reading Robert Webber’s Worship Old and New, and I’m better for.  Worship Old and New was first published in 1982 and revised in 1994 – in many ways it acts a the forerunner of Webber’s execellent Ancient-Future series of books.  For pastors or other church leaders who want to expose their congregants to some of Webber’s Ancient-Future material, Worship Old and New is a good place to start.

At time this book was published, Webber’s words issued a clear challenge to Evangelicals to re-capture an ancient (and Biblical) structure of worship.  A challenge, I might add, seems to have fallen largely on deaf ears.  Here in these pages Webber shows why so many Evangelical youth end up getting tired of Evangelical™ worship and end up moving in other directions – would that people had listened!

I re-discovered something about myself as well while I read these pages.  I am a “worship guy.”  I love to delve into the nature and structure of worship and help people see the working out of the Gospel in the experience of worship.  I am a “worship guy,” and there’s nothing wrong with that.  In fact, there is something quite good about that – a good which has come to be challenged by many of my contemporaries that Webber labelled The Younger Evangelicals.  In the thinking of a good number of my contemporaries, it makes no sense to spend so many hours of a week preparing for something that really only exists as a small portion of the congregation’s schedule.  It is better, in that mind-set, to spend more time on things that “matter” in the surrounding community.  I’m don’t knock the desire to “do good” in the community.  Heck, I’m hoping that Central really ramps this up in the coming months and years, but I have to balk at the notion so many of my contemporaries have expressed.  The fact is, the only way you can even think of a notion such as that is to believe that nothing actually happens in worship.

Webber successfully challenged that notion years before it was widely articulated in the world, and I thank him for it.  It is in worship that the congregation enters into the reality of the Gospel,  declares the great saving deeds done by our savior on the Cross, and finds itself joining the great chorus of voices on earth and aroud the heavenly throne shouting the greatness of our Lord.  It is in worship that Earth and Heaven meet, and it is in worship that the victory of Jesus on the Cross spurs us into the world to be a living light for the Kingdom.  Why do I spend so much time on worship?  Because I care deeply that this congregation be a living witness to Jesus by being a real presence in this community.  If worship were merely the singing of some sappy songs which touch our hearts, or the hearing of a lecture on some “key principles” by which we should live, then I would be in perfect agreement that spending any large amount of time on  pondering worship would be a wasted effort.  Worship, however, cannot be captured by the mere singing of songs or the presentation of a lecture – worship is a time of mystical transport into the great feast of our savior.  A point which Webber makes so wonderfully.

So, as Central moves forward into it’s restructuring, then we will also have to look at the structure of our worship (or commission people to take ownership of that responsibility).  After all, As the Church worships, so it believes.