Connecting the Dots Between Worship & Discipleship: Part 1

I have been very fond of the teaching of the Anglican theologian N.T. Wright over the years.  I have engaged in the majority of his works at some point or another over the past decade.  I am well acquainted with the thrust of his theological emphasis and the controversy which sometimes surrounds him.   Even though Wright has had a predominate voice within the theological world for decades now, he really didn't show up on the radar of most Americans until a few years ago.  The famed author, theologian and pastor, John Piper, decided to take Wright to task and write a book of response to some of Wright's publications in regards to his theology of justification.  Piper is also a man that I am very familiar with.  He belongs to the same Baptist denomination that I used to belong to and I read probably a couple dozen of his books during my theological education at a Baptist University.  Lets just say that I have always found Piper's theology off-putting and confusing and Wright's teachings came as a breath of fresh air to me.  All of this is neither here nor there, however.  I say all of this to make this point:

I will never forget the day that I read introduction to the book that N.T. Wright wrote in response to Piper's book of response to him.  Yes, I said that correctly: Wright wrote a book to respond to a book that Pipe wrote in response to Wright.  Within this introduction, Wright had a rather poetic and cutting way of articulating how the teaching which Piper promoted leads only to a sort of tunnel-visioned-egocentricity.  He likened his conversation with Piper (and the evangelical school of thought which he promotes) in this way (and I am paraphrasing Wright's words big time here):

Suppose you have a friend over that you have not seen in quite some time.  After spending some time catching up, you decided to go outside to observe the beautiful night sky together.  It is then that your friend says to your surprise, "Oh, how much God loves us!  He has put us and our planet at the center of the universe!  See how the night sky and all that it contains revolves around us!"  To your surprise and dismay, you think to yourself, "We have known for quite some time that we here on planet earth are not the center of the universe.  Everything does not revolve around us!  In fact, we are a part of a system of planets which revolved around the sun within our galaxy and our galaxy is very small compared to the limitless others which exist out there."  So, you gently seek to correct your friend feeling saddened that he has been confused about something so massive.  He accepts your words with confusion and with apparent reluctance, but you both decide to call it a night and go to bed.  then, in the middle of the night you hear a tapping on your door and you open it to hear your friend's beckoning voice.  "Come with me," he says, as he leads you outside to observe the night sky.  "See the movement of the stars.  See how they all move around us!  They circle around us.  How can you say that it is we who are the ones doing the circling?" 

Wright's point: like our friend in the story, many Christians today have difficulty whenever it comes to understanding that everything does not revolve around us.  We have been so fixated on notions of "personal" salvation and personal relationships with Jesus for so long that it is hard for us to grasp the bigger picture of what God is doing, not only in us, but with the wider creation as well.  It has become increasingly hard for us to understand that the Christian life does not revolve around us as individuals but that it actually revolved around the Triune God, the One seated upon the throne.  While many well-intentioned Christians will agree with my previous statement, many of them will not understand how they actually fail to live this Christ-centered orbit in practice.  They may think that they are living with Christ at the center but, in fact, it is their lives which are at the center of all their actions. 

To me, this is most clearly evidenced in the ways in which we both define and live out two key concepts within the Christian faith: worship and discipleship. 

It may seem a bit radical for me to claim that we have gotten worship and discipleship wrong in recent years but that is exactly what I am claiming.  There was a time whenever worship and discipleship meant very specific things.  Granted, both of these terms encompass quite a bit in how they can be defined in all actuality.  However, there used to be some very central ideas contained within both terms that are no longer central to the ways in which we both think about and carry out our practices of worship and discipleship.  To look at one example: both terms were always seen as highly, highly communal in ancient Christianity.  Yes, all of life is worship and all of life is discipleship.  However, the ancient Christians never ever saw these as things that we can do independently and apart from others.  Worship and discipleship had concrete communal implications for the lives of everyday Christians.  The notion that, "I am a spiritual person but I don't like institutions--so I don't God to Church," would've been an absurd idea to most Christians up until recent times.  In fact, to use modern vernacular, they very much so would've doubted that someone with this type of mentality was "saved" to begin with.  Listen to these words from Ignatius of Antioch, "He who fails to join in your worship shows his arrogance by the very fact of becoming a schismatic...If, then, those who act carnally suffer death, how much more shall those by wicked teaching corrupt God's faith for which Jesus Christ was crucified.  Such a vile creature will go to the unquenchable fire along with anyone who listens to him."  Heretics are the ones who live in isolation, who seek to do worship and establish thoughts about God in their own ways.  Not so with the Christians.  To be a Christian meant being a communal being. 

The same goes for discipleship.  In an age where no one really seems to know what "discipleship" means it is very important to understand its communal essence.  Discipleship is about more than simply having a personal relationship with Jesus (even though this is of utmost importance).  It is also, and quite centrally, about having a proper relationship with the people who are to be His icons: ministers.  Not only was (and is) discipleship about having a relationship with Jesus it is about having a living relationship with your minister.  This is also where corporate worship comes in and plays another central part: it is primarily through the worship services at Church that we are discipled by Christ through His ministers.  This happens through the liturgy, or is meant to happen at least. 

Discipleship and worship, then, are both "liturgical."  I will explain what this means more in Part 2 of this post. 

A few concluding thoughts for time being: 

We like to think that we can do worship however we like, do we not?  We define worship in the ways which seem most comfortable to us, bending the notion of worship to our own will and definition.  We are no different than our friend who points us to the beautiful night sky and sees himself as the center of it all.  Worship revolves around us; our wants and desires...our specific preferences for the feel and style of the types of worship that we want.  Although there is much comfort in embraces such a sentimental notion (that we are the center of it all), such a notion does not come without a great and tragic cost.  We will fail to see our actual place in the universe and the beauty of the orbital dance which we could be participating in.  We will fail to see how God has created all things with a specific goal in mind for each and every one of them.  Thus we will fail to see ourselves and everything else for what we are all intended to be. 

Whenever we remove ourselves from the center of it all, whenever we allow God to define both worship and discipleship for us, we can then begin to relate to Him and the created world around us in the Way that He intended for us. 

We will learn to see the beauty not in being the center, but in being the humble speck which orbits someone much greater than ourselves.