Why do the children go participate in discipleship during Sunday School while the adults are in a worship service that often does nothing of the sort? The kids play games, move around, participate in the storytelling (Who was David? Yes, David was the king. And who was his best friend?) and go through intentional learning, instruction and sharing. All this while the adults sit and listen.
If we are to truly repair our souls—to bust open the hardened layers of murk and darkness—we need a community defined by participation and doing life together. In other words, we need communities of discipleship. The big jump is learning as a faith community how this translates from small groups into Sunday morning worship. This leads to the question: how can Sunday worship be a place where we are fracking our souls?
If the church is to be a place of repairing brokenness, of allowing souls to be opened, of having lives transformed, of having true confession and beautiful repentance—if we are to be a place where our body and soul is healed and the darkness in our souls continues to be identified and extracted—then worship must be a place of discipleship.
Think about a class you have been a part of, whether in church or in school. You were expected to contribute your voice to the conversation, right? Why do so many churches remove any place for contributing to worship from our worship? Or, conversely, why do so many churches remove any place for doing life together outside of Sunday worship and committees? There are many reasons for this change in worship, but navigating back to a worship service that is discipleship focused is the only way to foster the growth of a vibrant and healthy church.
People learn how to do something through participation. If they participate enough, they become good at that activity. In other words, they become disciples of that activity. Pushing this metaphor to a worship service, what kinds of activities is your worship service making your congregation good at? Really think about that for a moment. For all too many, a worship service is making their congregation disciples of standing to sing anthems from the radio and disciples of sitting and listening to a sermon. Do we really want to be disciples of that?
I don’t.
Every church will be different. That’s a good thing. The importance is that our worship services begin to make disciples of prayer, disciples of confession, disciples of Scripture reading and disciples of faith, hope and love. That is a good and vibrant church. That is a church where souls and bodies are repaired by participation in community and disciples are formed through worship.