Twenty4Seven Worship

I don't think it's just semantics.

The word 'worship' has a myriad of meanings today. We use it to talk about 'total life-response to God, songs, prayer, sermons, Church meetings and more. Is it helpful having the one word for all these different meanings?

I was speaking to someone I met for the first time the other day, and while introducing themselves said 'I worship at 'XYZ Church'. And I thought to me self 'No you don't'. I mean I hope you don't just 'worship' there, that would be very plain and very boring for you'.

But it got me thinking....I wonder whether by calling our corporate gatherings 'worship services' we are actually doing people a disservice. I wonder if we are actually encouraging people to think that worship only happens between 10-11am on Sundays? What if we are actually hindering people from understanding that new-covenent worship is a 'total life-response to God? Some may say it's just semantics - we know what we mean when we say 'worship'. But do we? What if its not just semantics? What if its actually doing more damage than good to followers of Jesus?

Romans 12 says 'So here's what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him'.

I don't have all the answers for this problem (and I do believe it is a problem) but can I suggest a couple of possible ways in moving forward.

1. Use the word 'worship' to refer only to our 'total life-response to God'. It may be best to speak of congregational worship as a particular expression of the total life-response that is the worship of the new covenent. ROMANS 12.

2. Be intential to reinforce and tag Sunday Church services as a time of 'CORPORATE or COLLECTIVE, or CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP'.

3. Emphasise our 'songs' or 'prayers' etc as a particular expression of our 'total life-response to God'.

4. Follow Pauls lead - Paul regularly uses the terminolgy of building up or edification, rather than the language of worship to indicate the purpse and function of Christian gatherings. 1 COR 14:3-5, 12, 17, 26; 1 THESS 5:11; EPH 4:11-16.

These are not exhaustive I know, but I wonder if we adopted these small changes to our language/terminology we would actually see large effects on people living their 24/7 lives in response to God. I wonder if we would actually see people view their decisions, their thoughts, the work, their choices as worship. I wonder if we would then see a shift and people would actually see that worship is relational; that is it's about 'WHO not HOW and WHEN'.

References: IVP: New Dictionary of Biblical Theology. Pg 861