The Missing Elements of Worship

By W. Jackson Watts

It’s Sunday. You walk across the parking lot, enter your church, and then the sanctuary. It’s service time. What do you expect to see? What do you expect to hear? Now ask yourself, “What’s biblically essential for a worship service to exalt God and edify believers?”

Comparing our expectations with the actual teaching of Scripture is revealing. We’ve come to expect certain sights and sounds that seem indispensable to an authentic worship experience. We need the guitar’s chords. We need the countdown timer to build anticipation. Or, we need an organ prelude to quiet us and nudge us to our pews. What happens musically before, during, and after the service matters. However, is it possible we’ve so reduced worship to music that we’ve now minimized two essential ingredients of Christian worship? I’m referring to Scripture reading and public prayer.

Putting the Word Into Worship

I doubt any Free Will Baptist denies Scripture should shape and direct our worship. The logic is airtight: God’s Word best tells us how He desires to be worshiped. However, the next time you participate in a service ask yourself, “When is the first time Scripture shows up? Is it used to call the church to worship? Does it direct people’s praying? Does half the service pass before the Word is explicitly mentioned or read?”

Not only is it historically odd for Scripture not to be prominent in worship, it is strange from a biblical perspective. The Apostle Paul wrote two letters to Timothy that deal extensively with how God saves, structures, and sustains His Church. His emphasis on rightly teaching the Word, sound church leadership, and enduring the last days leaps off the pages. Situated in these letters we find the practical command: “Till I come, give attendance to reading, to exhortation, to doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:13).

Absent the presence of an apostle, the early church had the words of Old Testament Scripture and the emerging New Testament documents (the earliest being letters). These Scriptures bore witness to the risen Christ and showed His followers how to approach God and follow Him. Approaching God in worship involved a few core elements: preaching and teaching, praying, singing, giving, testimony, and observing the ordinances. What these elements have in common is that Scripture supplies their rationale, their content, and even some guidance on how they are to be done.
We find all of these elements, to varying degrees, in the modern church. However, the public reading of Scripture has fallen on hard times. Often, it doesn’t happen at all, except simply to set-up the sermon immediately before it is preached. Other times, it almost seems to have an ornamental purpose. But make no mistake: reading and hearing the Word were central to early Christian worship, and they are still essential for worship today.

Scripture can permeate a service in multiple ways. Take something as familiar as singing. For many Christians, worship and singing are synonymous. However, the purest worship is to honor God as God for who He is and what He does. What better way to do that than to let Scripture drive singing, too? As my Lutheran friends put it, the point of singing in the church is to put the Word of God on the lips of the people.

This doesn’t mean songs must quote Scripture verbatim. However, the truths of Scripture can be interwoven and accentuated in many ways. This is right on target with what Colossians 3:16-17 says, to let the Word of God dwell richly in us through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs. However, if Scripture is rarely read in worship, then it’s doubtful it will shape much else in the service.

Scripture reading is one way—an overlooked way to be sure—we saturate our hearts and minds with God’s truth. It also can be accomplished through preaching and teaching, singing, and even watching the Word come alive through the visible ordinances of baptism, the Lord’s Supper, and feet washing. Just as the returning exiles in Nehemiah’s day gathered to listen to the Word for hours, we should cultivate a reverent, joyful, and attentive appetite for God’s Word in worship.

Praying Ourselves Close to God

Scripture-driven worship should also be reflected through prayer. The church enjoys closeness and intimacy with God when it prays. This is true privately but also true publicly. Just as we see scriptural scenes where the entire assembly listened to Scripture read, they also assembled to pray. We find this in Acts 2 when those early disciples devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and prayer.

First Timothy 2:1-2a says, “I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority...” Imagine the scene. The early church gathers. A brother stands, lifting holy hands to Heaven, and prays for the emperor waging a brutal campaign against the Christian church. That’s worship! When this brother stands to pray, the whole church listens and amens this radical prayer of humble confidence. They don’t understand his prayer to be an individual performance. No, he prays, “God, we ask You to help us to know and do your will. We ask You to make us holy, obedient, mature disciples.”

At times, prayers may be more expressive: “God, I worship you.” But sometimes, such praying misses the obvious fact that when we approach God biblically and sincerely, we’re already worshiping (even if we don’t use the words praise, worship, or I). Moreover, public praying is just that: it’s public. It’s corporate. It is the whole body praying in obedience to the Word of God, whether through petition, lament and confession, or praise and thanksgiving.

Not only do we need to read Scripture as God’s living, active Word, we really need to ask ourselves, “How much praying is actually going on in our services? Why do we get so shifty in our seats if a person’s prayer exceeds 90 seconds? Are we bringing a “worship problem” to the service? A commitment to public prayer means prayer itself becomes an event in the service, not just time for people to transition to different stage positions or slip out to the restroom.

Putting It All Together

My main concern for us modern worshipers is that we know 2 Timothy 3:16-17 really well (all Scripture is inspired), but we haven't allowed this truth to produce a high functional commitment to the use of Scripture in corporate worship. It’s far too easy to have a high formal commitment to Scripture, yet a low functional commitment to Scripture. We can learn about scriptural authority in Sunday School or small groups, but then if we used the worship service’s content to determine our church’s actual view of Scripture, would we see God’s authoritative Word shaping everything?

Laymen can help foster and encourage Word-centeredness and a renewed emphasis on prayer in many ways. Let me offer a few suggestions:

1. If you are asked to share special music, select a Bible passage to read before singing that reinforces or illuminates the theme of the song.
   

2. If you work with smaller kids, they likely learn a monthly memory verse. Ask your pastor or other service leaders to let the children recite these verses.
   

3. If you select material for the church bulletin or marquee, incorporate Scripture. You’ll never have to wonder if it’s true, helpful, or timely.
   

4. If you’re called on to pray, take a moment to gather yourself. Then lead the prayer, keeping the entire congregation in view. Consider its current needs and concerns. Consider how what is being taught on Sunday mornings presently might direct what you ask God for on behalf of the body. And stick to plural pronouns: “We,” “us,” and “ourselves.” After all, it’s corporate prayer, not private prayer.
   

5. Spend some time with good books on these subjects. Jonathan Leeman’s Word-Centered Church, for example, is a helpful book on this topic you might convince a few other church members to read with you, considering how Scripture could more effectively shape the life of the congregation.
   

6. Finally, value patient listening over hurried experience. We tend to value efficiency and speed in most of life. This is problematic when we try to hurry through worship, too. It’s also why we don’t pray or read Scripture more: it just takes more time! Instead, patiently value longer prayers, listening to longer Scripture readings, and services that linger on the Word. Monday will come soon enough. If worship is about exalting God and edifying others, it’s worth taking time for.
   

To download a helpful guide to incorporating Scripture and prayer into your worship services, visit nafwb.org/bettertogether/.

About the Writer: W. Jackson Watts has served as pastor of Grace FWB Church in the greater St. Louis area since 2011. He also serves Free Will Baptists at the district, state, and national levels, particularly as a member of the Commission for Theological Integrity.