Excerpt from The Dialogue of Worship
by Gary A. Furr and Milburn Price

The dialogue within the community is at the heart of ministry. Ministry is service to God through the spiritual nurture of others. Here we find ourselves at the formational end of the term "spiritual formation." "Spiritual" is primarily about relationship with God, but "formation" includes the space and time channels through which that connection is made flesh.

We might, therefore, subtitle this chapter "How Worship Forms People." As mentioned in the first chapter, it is always risky to talk about worship as a means to anything except a response to God. When worship is subverted for pragmatic ends, however noble-sounding, it is no longer worship. When worship is considered as spiritual formation, it is important to remember that this is a ancillary dimension that flows out of the larger purpose of praising and responding to God.

However, it is equally important to acknowledge that in the "scripting" of worship we are also communicating with other human beings. We are saying something about our faith to one another. We inevitably reflect our context, interacting with both our particular place and time. World events and local tragedies may not change the essence of our worship, but the nuances, selections, and emphases of a particular service will exhibit the context of that particular community of faith.

On a practical level, every congregation expresses these relationships in many ways, but often it does so unreflectively. Christian educator Maria Harris observes that every church has a "curriculum"--that is, an accepted "subject matter." Once curriculum was thought to be a very simple matter, confined to the Sunday School and generally considered an "educational" matter.

Now, however, we know that a "curriculum" is broader than that and includes all of the aspects of a church's life. Therefore, when we worship, we are also communicating the "curriculum" of the church. Harris identifies five broad areas of Christian ministry within the church. They are not themselves the curriculum of any particular church, but they are what she calls "curricular forms."

These five—kerygma (proclamation), didache (teaching), leitourgia (worship and prayer), koinonia (community), and diakonia (service)—are rooted in the Bible and church history and are proven to be essential and core dimensions for Christian ministry.

When we come to worship, it helps to ask, "What does our worship express about these five areas?" In the following sections, these five curricula and the ways in which they are enacted in worship are described and analyzed.

Gary Furr and Milburn Price are the authors of "The Dialogue of Worship." To order, go to the online bookpage or call 1-800-747-3016.

 

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