Gather Team: Corporate Worship

As a team, we read Matt Merker’s book Corporate Worship: How The Church Gathers As God’s People. We will briefly talk a bit about the book and more broadly discuss how we as the congregation called Clough Pike Baptist Church gather for worship corporately and how we can better express our worship biblically.

I’ll start with a quote from the book:

“A local church is an assembly of blood-bought, Spirit-filled worshipers who build one another up by God’s Word and affirm one another as citizens of Christ’s kingdom through the ordinances.”

-Pg. 35

His point is that believers must gather, that is an integral part of the Christian experience. We must gather.

He shares six implications for corporate worship (pg. 36-38):

We gather as ambassadors, not consumers.

We don’t “go to church” to worship; we worship because we are the church.

Everything we do in worship should submit to Scripture.

A worship gathering is where we declare heaven’s judgments.

When we worship, we exemplify the culture of God’s kingdom.

Our worship services should be evangelistic.

One note here: He does take some time to discuss the dangers of the seeker-sensitive movement, and I liked this:

“Paradoxically, the way God calls us to be evangelistic when we meet is not to consider the non-Christian visitor as our primary audience. Rather, the service is a family meeting of God’s people, gathered around His throne for the priorities of exaltation and edification...But, in God’s surprising grace, this is precisely the way he intends to use our worship services to draw people to Christ.”

“That means, theologically speaking, there is only one “seeker” present at your church services. Jesus taught that God is the one “seeking” a people to worship in Spirit and truth (John 4:23)”

-Pg 70, 73

He also talks about the things we should do when we gather to worship and spends a bit of time talking about the regulative principle of worship.

In a nutshell, the regulative principle states that there are certain things that are prescribed or regulated in Scripture that we should do when we meet. Other things are inferred both from scripture and from historic practice. In general, it is a limited view of worship. If Scripture doesn’t affirm it, we shouldn’t do it when we gather. It sets guard rails on what we do and how we do it.

The normative principle is the flip side of this coin. The normative principle basically says that if it isn’t expressly prohibited in Scripture, it’s fair game to use in service.

Merker argues for (and I would agree) using the regulative principle.

He also talks about participation of the congregation in singing, and liturgy.

I will say, and I think we all agreed on this, that the book wasn’t earth-shattering. There was not really anything new in it, and I know for me, I didn’t mind the book, but I also felt like he came off a bit like: “you don’t have to do it my way, but you kinda should.”

I don’t think that is his heart, from what I know of him, he really is a humble guy. I felt like there was a good picture of what his church does in worship (when he wrote the book, he was at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in DC, but by the time it was published he had moved to Nashville. He is one of the songwriters for Getty Music.). I also felt like, having done this for a long time, I was able to view it a bit more critically, kinda like: “I’ve tried that, doesn’t work here. That isn’t the way our people engage. Ooh, that is something we could try.”

Not everything applied to our services, but there were some good principles.

Other thoughts from our Gather guys?

That lead us to also think about:

How is our worship?

When we met, we talked about how we structure our services, when we place certain things in the service, etc.

So I want to open it up to you guys to have a bit of a discussion on this, as far as our gathering, our worship service. How do you think we are doing?

Where do you think we can improve?