"One Thing I Need from My Church: Worship" Psalm 99

Should I admit that this preaching series came about because when the January newsletter deadline arrived with its demand for the sermon titles for the Sundays in January and I looked at the calendar and realized that I would only be preaching three times before Lent arrived, I quickly thought, "What might be interesting to preach about for three weeks?"  The answer that came in the rush to the deadline was, "What do I need from my church?"  Easy in, easy out!  Now I get to preach the first week on worship.

Why do we need worship?  Why do you come to worship?  Or why do you choose not to come to worship?

As I have been pondering that thought, I was reminded of what Phyllis Tickle noted in a speech I heard several years at General Assembly:  20 million Americans will have their worship experience come over the Internet.   I suspect that number has gone up by now.  Think about the ways you can worship now -- small church, big church, traditional worship, contemporary worship, worship by satellite, worship at home with a televangelist, not to mention special events like worshiping at Kirkmont Camp and Conference Center, or at weddings, or funerals.

Worship can bring out the best in us!   I asked a liturgist (the person shall remain nameless) once if the person felt weird being liturgist when the person's parents were in worship. The  person responded: “Well, we’re more likely to call each other names than read Scripture to each other!”  

Worship informs our call to mission and vice versa:  “I have come (not very originally) to envisage the two poles of Christian living in terms of mission and worship. The two flow into each other: worship without mission becomes self-indulgence (and might even imply worship of a god other than the one revealed in Jesus); mission without worship generates into various kinds of do-goodery, following agendas that may be deeply felt but are by no means necessarily connected with Jesus” (The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, Marcus J. Borg and N. T. Wright, 208) 

How do we bring the awe back to worship:  When we worship God we worship a Being our life experience does not give us the tools with which to understand. If we could, God would not inspire awe.” Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller, 202

Do we need organized worship?  George Hedley: "It is possible to worship God on the golf 

course, or driving along the highway or in a baseball park. If, however, we raise the question of statistical probability, we scarcely shall maintain that the worship of God is quite as frequent there as in houses built in his honor and devoted to his praise. To illustrate, there is the story of the
father who said, "Come on, we can sing hymns on the beach." to which the  little girl replied, "But we won't, will we?"

What thoughts to you have about worship?