The Effective Prayer of Communal Worship Avails Much

I find myself torn between two worlds–I grew up Pentecostal, and while I see the value in expressive worship, something is missing there. It’s like everyone is coming into the same room to have their own personal worship time with God. Everyone else is just there to give them a bigger personal worship experience. And most recently, I’ve been in the Methodist world for the past eight years. Methodists like liturgy, not expressiveness. It’s like everyone is coming together to recite the same thing every Sunday, but are we connecting with God?

When I try to converse with Pentecostals about my frustration with their worship services, they think I’m being picky, because everyone is “getting into it,” so what’s the big deal? They’re all connecting with God, right? But my problem is, we’re not doing it together. The only way we’re doing it together is that everyone else at the same time is having their own personal worship experience. They would say, “Isn’t that what it means to be doing it together?” The best way I can describe how this feels is this: It’s like everyone meeting together in the same computer lab to be on Facebook at the same time. Sure, we’re all on Facebook at the same time, but we’re not really doing anything meaningful with one another. I know it’s not that extreme, but that’s often how I feel in Pentecostal worship services. Everyone is pretty much locking themselves away, trying to not let anyone else distract them, so they can have some sort of personal experience with God. I wanna say, “Didn’t Jesus say to go get a room?” Or maybe it was a closet.

But when I’m in Methodist worship circles, I end up longing for more of the Pentecostal side of things, because it feels like no one is really connecting to God in any deep, meaningful way. We all say the same lines, stand up here, sit down there. We’ve done this for so many years that we have replaced enjoying God with enjoying a ritual. The liturgy seems only there to make us feel like we did the right things and said the right things, and all at the right time in the right way. So when Methodists try the contemporary approach (where you throw out the liturgy), everyone doesn’t really know what to do, except look at the screen and mouth the words to the songs like they’re saying the Apostles’ Creed or something.

Today in worship, it was very different. I felt like for the first time in a LONG time, as a congregation we were actually praying to God together. When we sang the songs, it was corporate prayer time. I think a few things contributed to this:

CORPORATE WORSHIP FOLLOWED THE MESSAGE
1. The majority of worship time occurred after the message, not before it. The songs were tied to the message (which happens at quite a bit of churches these days), but since the message came pretty much first, the congregation could understand why the songs were chosen during the actual moments we were singing them. So we sang with intention. In addition, our hearts were already broken by hearing the word of God, so we were in a better place to connect with God than when we first walked in the doors.

CORPORATE WORSHIP INCLUDED CORPORATE SCRIPTURE/LITURGY
2. Instead of the standby of singing three fast songs, followed by three slow songs, we all read aloud a Scripture passage together which tied into the message and the first song we were about to sing. So when we sang that first song, we were ready to sing those words meaningfully and meet with God as a group. Then we read another Scripture that tied into the message and the second song we were about to sing. We only did this four times for four songs, but I felt more corporate prayer to God occurred during those four songs than many other worship services I’ve been to over the years combined.

CORPORATE WORSHIP CENTERED AROUND THE GOSPEL
3. We sang about things that really matter. The content of songs is extremely important. Not just fluffy stuff about personal, intimate encounters with our heavenly Lover, but songs that bring you to your knees as a congregation in reverence for who Jesus is and what He has done.

CORPORATE WORSHIP WAS LED BY THE PASTOR
4. Yes, yes, yes, the worship leader still led us in singing the songs (which I’m sure would have been a lot better than the pastor trying to do it), but the pastor knew what he wanted the congregation to focus on during our worship, and each time he came up for the Scripture reading, he framed it so that we would all be on the same page, having unity in purpose for our worship. He made sure our minds, as a congregation, were one.

CORPORATE WORSHIP WAS SUNG BY A BODY OF BELIEVERS
5. What I mean by this is that at the time we were singing, we were believing. We were believing that God is awesome and we are not. We were believing that God was worthy to be praised. We were believing that we need Jesus. There was corporate faith.

The long and short of it, it was a very simple liturgy that we all did as one congregation, and it was truly a moment of corporate prayer. The experience couldn’t be duplicated by throwing in a worship CD in your own room. It couldn’t be duplicated by trying to manufacture the presence of God. There’s something different when we all join together to pray as one. We are indeed sheep, which means we need to be led by Scripture, led by the sermon, led by the Gospel, led by our pastor, and led by the faith of our neighbor. We don’t need some ornate ceremony. We don’t need a rockin’ band. We don’t need a pipe organ. We don’t need hoops or an order of worship to jump through.

With just a few songs with a few Scriptures with a few fellow believers who are ready to meet the Lord together, and the effective prayer of communal worship indeed availed much.