Wonderful Worship: p2. Personal v. Corporate

As part two in this delightful collaborative study on worship, we'll be considering Personal v. Corporate Worship. This is an important topic and I've mulled it over quite a bit this past week. I've considered it while reading and church-going and wandering and while hangin' out with God. But, I kept coming back to Ye Olde Personal Testimony and the lessons I've learned from them. So, here they are.


Personal Worship and Corporate Worship:
a comparative case study

Once Upon A Time, I attended church and thought that 'church-going' was worship. This was back when I was a kid, when life was simpler. But it quickly became very complex when I began to seek God with my whole life rather than just my Sunday Morning life. I met many wonderful people who worshiped God at different churches. We'd meet and pray and study, and I began to pray and study on my own. These personal times with God, in my mind, were considered 'devotional time' rather than worship. I still considered Worship that Sunday Morning Event.

Then, as I wandered off to College, I began to become frustrated by Christian church-goers who did not seem to internalize their faith. Fellow students would attend church on Sunday but act like complete jerks the rest of the week. I didn't want to be associated with this holier-than-thou pompus parade through the dorm each Sunday Morning, so I stopped attending church. There was a weekly student chapel, so I attended that... sometimes. But, I needed to be fed and wanted to learn, so I maintained my personal study/prayer time (irregularly) and enrolled in a few theology and biblical studies classes. The classes changed my life, but they were not worship.

But, God did not abandon me and I did not abandon God. We continued our relationship, I continued to experience worship. Worship happened... during my devotional time, when I read scripture while sitting by a stream and then prayed angry prayers to God about how unjust the world was. It those times, God told me to chill out and look at the stream, to watch the water flow past the tiny fish. From that perspective, a twig disrupting an egg nest is terribly unjust, but from the bigger perspective the stream is an entire ecosystem and the tiny fish's egg nest is just a part of what must occur. In those times, I was able to experience true worship - where I could experience God's grace and submit to God's divine authority. And in those times, contemplating what I was learning in my classes, and praying about what I everything I was studying, God taught me a great deal.

Then, this cute guy from one of my biblical studies classes asked me where I was going to church. I told him (much to my own surprise) that I didn't because I could worship just fine on my own, thank you. He laughed at me and proceeded to debate with me on this very point of personal v. corporate worship. We may be able to experience God on our own, but God also wants us to live in community with others - so God calls us to experience him while worshiping with others. He was right. Eventually I started going to church with this man. And then later still, I married him.

The Moral of the Story

Going to church with cute biblical scholars might lead to marriage.
-- okay, well maybe. But that's not all...

Worship is about experiencing right relationship with God, and there are many MANY examples of Worship in scripture - both personal and corporate. But, there is a reason why 4 of the Commandments address our relationship with God and six of them address our relationships with other humans. God doesn't just want us to live in right relationship with Him. God also wants us to live in right relationship with others. What the Bible teaches us, with all of its many stories of people and their God, is that God wants to redeem us by redeeming our ability to have right relationships.

And, it is by internalizing our faith that we begin to worship properly in our personal relationship with God and in our corporate relationships with others. When we turn from God, we just ignore Him. But when we turn from other humans, we can do some serious damage to their ability to Love.

Therefore we must Worship God, entering into right relationships with both God and with other humans by allowing God to redeem these relationships. There is no better way to do this than by worshiping God both personally and corporately.

Thanks be to God.