Back in the 1950s, the Austrian zoologist Konrad Lorenz discovered a fact of nature everyone should know: ducklings, it turns out, are gullible.
Arriving in the world without any innate picture of what a mother duck should look like, they imprint on the first moving object they see after hatching. If it happens to be their mother, all goes swimmingly. But if it’s a red balloon drifting across the barnyard, they will fall in line just the same, and that first impression orients them for life—which is either a joke played by nature’s God or a parable waiting to be overheard.
Now, granted, Christians are not ducks—Jesus likened us more often to sparrows, after all. But it is safe to say we are no less impressionable than sheep. And very often the traditions we first encounter ossify into a stubborn expectation of what Christianity is and must be—whether their origin is biblical, cultural, or merely idiosyncratic.
Small wonder, then, that for many the “worship service”—their church’s pattern of hymns, prayers, offering, sermon, and communion—becomes something like a red balloon. Whether raised in pews or “born again” in a gleaming “worship center,” we take those first communal practices as definitive. Flyers advertise “worship times.” “Worship leaders” summon us with a “call to worship.” In some traditions, even the benediction before dismissal takes this form: “We pray our worship has been pleasing and acceptable to You.” And when the church reinforces—sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly by linguistic habit—that what we do in the assembly carries the special provenance of “worship,” set apart from the rest of life, the impression only deepens.
“Very often the traditions we first encounter ossify into a stubborn expectation of what Christianity is and must be.”
And yet, when we actually open the New Testament, a startling fact confronts us: Christian assemblies are never once described as “worship services.” The phrase is utterly absent, as though the apostles had somehow forgotten the one thing we remember best.
Now at the outset I should clarify: there is nothing inherently wrong with using extrabiblical terms to name biblical realities. After all, we confess belief in the Trinity though that word itself never appears in Scripture. We speak of the Bible though the term is not found in its pages. Even the phrase “a personal relationship with Jesus”—though lacking book, chapter, and verse—can help modern believers grasp the friendship Jesus describes with his disciples (cf. John 15; Revelation 3:20).
The difficulty arises, however, when such language ceases to illuminate and instead becomes interpolation—when we smuggle our own experiences back into the text, imagining that what 21st-century Western Christians call “worship” or “liturgy,” whether dressed in high-church vestments or low-church Tommy Bahamas, bears any close resemblance to what took place in the primitive Christian assemblies or how those believers conceptualized what they were doing. This is the danger of anachronism: collapsing the distance between ourselves and the past, mistaking our categories for theirs, our rituals for theirs, our programs for their mission. Imprinting, after all, is powerful—but it can also mislead. Habit is not revelation.
“The difficulty arises, however, when such language ceases to illuminate and instead becomes interpolation.”
And this is not merely a semantic quibble or exercise in splitting hairs. Words shape imaginations, and imaginations determine the direction of life. When we collapse worship into a single hour on Sunday, we do not simply mislabel something—we stunt the growth of disciples. Believers learn how to sit through services but not how to walk in the way of Jesus. In mistaking the red balloon for the mother duck, we produce Christians who never mature beyond the form they first inherited—without pressing on to mature discipleship.
What I want to offer, then, is a course correction: a fresh look at the New Testament’s witness about the assembly, a reminder of the risks that follow imagining that the Sunday gathering somehow exhausts worship, and a proposal for something richer and more ancient—a New Testament vision of the assembly as the nursery of Christian formation, and of life itself as the arena where worship unfolds. And so, like the noble Bereans, let us search the scriptures to see whether these things are so (Acts 17:11).
Biblical Evidence: What Does Scripture Say About Worship?
To understand worship as the Bible understands it, we must let Scripture, not our traditions and jargon, define it. The New Testament primarily uses three Greek verbs variously translated as “worship”: proskuneō (“to bow down, to prostrate”), latreuō (“to serve, to render priestly service”), and sebomai (“to revere, to venerate”).
- Proskuneō appears 60-some times in the New Testament, almost always describing a physical posture of reverence and awe before a person or divinity. The magi “fell down and worshiped” the infant Jesus (Matthew 2:11, ESV). A leper “knelt before him” in supplication (Matthew 8:2, NIV). John fell at an angel’s feet and was rebuked: “Worship God!” (Revelation 22:9, NRSV). Yet strikingly, in the context of Christian assemblies, proskuneō is used only once—not for believers but for an outsider: “The secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you” (1 Corinthians 14:25, ESV). Note, this worship on the part of someone who is not a Jesus-follower arises not from the beauty of the church’s liturgy but from the piercing conviction of God’s Word through prophecy.
- Latreuō emphasizes service and obedience, often with a priestly connotation. Paul declares, “I serve (latreuō) the God of our ancestors with a clear conscience” (2 Timothy 1:3, NRSV). This service is not confined to a ritualized hour during the week but extends to the daily life of holiness and sacrifice. Romans 12:1 encapsulates this: “Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God—this is your true and proper worship (latreia)” (NIV). Worship, in this sense, is not a Sunday event but a lifelong offering.
“Present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God—this is your true and proper worship.”
- Sebomai appears primarily in Acts, describing Gentiles who revere Israel’s God, such as Lydia, “a worshiper of God” (Acts 16:14, ESV). These “God-fearers” were not yet Christians but were drawn to the synagogue’s faith. Sebomai denotes personal devotion, not corporate gatherings of the church.
Worship Beyond Place: The Logic of Worship in the New Covenant
Worship permeates the New Testament. Paul bursts into doxology: “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God!” (Romans 11:33, NIV). Revelation 4–5 portrays heaven resounding with unceasing praise. And in Acts 16, Paul and Silas, beaten and chained in a Philippian jail, are found singing hymns to God at midnight. Yet strikingly, none of these passages refers directly to Sunday assemblies. The New Testament does not restrict worship to a time, place, or ritual; rather, it extends worship to the whole pattern of existence lived under the lordship of Christ.
The torn veil at Christ’s crucifixion and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost were not arbitrary events. When we consider the unfolding drama of redemption—what theologians call salvation history—they emerge as the necessary turning point in the logic of the New Covenant. In the Old Testament, God’s presence dwelt in the temple (1 Kings 8:10–11), veiled behind the curtain (Exodus 26:33; Hebrews 9:3), accessible only through priests and sacrifices (Leviticus 16:2–3, 15–17). Holiness and right worship were bound to a sacred place.
“The torn veil at Christ’s crucifixion and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost were not arbitrary events.”
It was into this framework that Jesus spoke with the Samaritan woman, who pressed him on the ancient dispute about the proper place to worship—Jerusalem or Mount Gerizim. Jesus answered:
“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father….But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” (John 4:21, 23–24, ESV)
What Jesus announced at that well was fulfilled when the curtain was torn at his crucifixion (Matthew 27:51; Mark 15:38; Luke 23:45) and the Spirit was poured out at Pentecost. As Peter declared, interpreting Joel, God’s Spirit would now be poured out on all people (Acts 2:16–21).
The apostles seized on this shift with “temple” language of their own, no longer tied to stone and mortar but to the people of God themselves. Paul reminds the Corinthians, “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (1 Corinthians 3:16, ESV). Again he writes, “Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God” (1 Corinthians 6:19, ESV). Peter describes believers as “living stones” being built into a spiritual house (1 Peter 2:5). And to the Ephesians Paul announces that the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit” (Ephesians 2:20–22, ESV).
“In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit.”
In other words, what once stood in Jerusalem as a single holy site of pilgrimage, the abiding presence of God on the face of the earth, has now been dispersed into the lives of God’s people in every uttermost part of the earth. The presence that once dwelt behind the veil now indwells the church, consecrating ordinary bodies and ordinary communities as the very temple of the living God.
The torn veil and the outpoured Spirit therefore declare with finality that worship is no longer a matter of taking pilgrimage to a sacred site and prostrating oneself under the ceremonial obligations of the law, but of offering lives consecrated by the Holy Spirit. Yet when Sunday is mistaken for worship itself, two dangers inevitably emerge: an ethical illusion on the one hand, and a ritual obsession on the other.
The Ethical Illusion:
Casting the weekly assembly as the church’s primary “worship service” subtly suggests that God is more attentive on Sunday morning than on Monday afternoon. Consider: how tempted are you to steal, view pornography, or tell crude jokes during a church service? Likely not at all. You might say it’s because you’re in the presence of people and wouldn’t dare out of respect for them. But that doesn’t stop temptation from finding us in the office cubicle or on the school bus. The deeper reason is this: man is a worshiping creature, eternity is in our hearts, and when we sense the presence of divinity, we instinctively adjust our behavior. Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves not for the gaze of one another but to shield themselves from the Lord, who walked in the garden in the cool of the day.
We may affirm, in some abstract theological sense, that God is omniscient. Yet our habits betray us: we act as though He is primarily watching during formal settings. Why? Because we’ve been imprinted to see the “sanctuary” or “worship hour” as the sacred space and sacred time where God is nearer and more easily offended.
“We’ve been imprinted to see the ‘sanctuary’ or ‘worship hour’ as the sacred space and sacred time where God is nearer and more easily offended.”
This is an ethical disaster because it implies that, for a follower of Jesus, holiness is confined to a moment rather than expressed through the whole character of a life. James defines “religion that God our Father accepts” not in terms of ceremonies but in acts of mercy and moral integrity: caring for orphans and widows and keeping oneself unstained by the world (James 1:27, NIV). Jesus likewise warns, “These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me” (Matthew 15:8, NIV). In other words, it is entirely possible to sing the right words on Sunday while living a life that God rejects. To mistake ritual for righteousness is to trade true holiness for hypocrisy.
The Ritual Obsession:
When the assembly is labeled and spoken of exclusively as “worship,” every detail—how many songs, what style of music, whether the communion cup is passed or pre-packaged, whether one person prays or many—takes on cosmic significance. Congregations have split over hymnals versus slide decks, contemporary versus traditional music styles, the frequency with which communion is observed. Some Christians live in dread that a misstep in the “worship service” might nullify their religious offering, as if God is more a stickler about the “order of worship” than the posture of a repentant heart.
Yet the prophets thunder against such empty formalism. Isaiah declares, “The multitude of your sacrifices—what are they to me? says the Lord….Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed” (Isaiah 1:11, 17, NIV). Amos adds, “I hate, I despise your religious festivals; your assemblies are a stench to me. But let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!” (Amos 5:21, 24, NIV). And the psalmist asks in God’s own ironic voice, “Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats?” (Psalm 50:13, ESV). The point is this: God does not hunger for rituals but for righteousness; He is not impressed by ceremonies but by lives shaped in holiness and justice.
“God does not hunger for rituals but for righteousness; He is not impressed by ceremonies but by lives shaped in holiness and justice.”
Oftentimes the “regulative principle of worship” is marshaled with the illustration of Nadab and Abihu offering “strange fire” (Leviticus 10:1–3), as though the problem were a technical violation of some hidden rule about how the fire was to be kindled. But the very next verses reveal the real issue: God warns Aaron that priests must not drink wine when they enter the tent of meeting (Leviticus 10:8–9). In other words, Nadab and Abihu were struck down not for failing to follow the right liturgical blueprint, but because they staggered into God’s presence intoxicated. Their sin was not creative worship but careless holiness. To wrench their story into a proof-text for policing worship minutiae is to miss the point entirely: God is not obsessed with our ritual precision, but with whether those who approach him do so in reverence, sobriety, and obedience.
You can see this ritual anxiety amplified in modern evangelicalism and current trends. Amid consumerist Christianity—fog machines, TED-talk sermons, and churches chasing cultural relevance—many feel unmoored. In response, some drift toward Rome, Constantinople, or Canterbury, seeking stability in ancient liturgies. “Surely a liturgy that has survived centuries carries God’s authority,” they reason. But age is no guarantee of truth. Ancientness is not apostolicity. Paul rebuked the Galatians for clinging to ritual when Christ had set them free: “Now that you know God…how is it that you are turning back to those weak and miserable forces? Do you wish to be enslaved by them all over again? You are observing special days and months and seasons and years!” (Galatians 4:9–10, NIV). Whether through modern novelty or ancient habit, fastening our hope to ritual precision rather than to the living Christ is still to mistake the red balloon for the mother duck.
The Precedent of Gathering for Jesus’ Followers
Much scholarly debate has swirled around the precedent for the church, with some arguing that the Jewish synagogue provided the prototypical model, while others insist that the ekklesia is a distinctly Christian innovation. While such discussions are worth having, they are not the central concern here.
What matters for our purposes is the pattern of Jesus’ own life. Jesus was not a Christian, but a religiously formed Jew. He was presented in the temple according to the Law (Luke 2:22–24). At age twelve, he was found in the temple courts during what we might call his bar mitzvah years, sitting among the teachers, listening and asking questions (Luke 2:41–52). So much of his public ministry unfolded in the temple courts—John’s Gospel, in particular, devotes significant space to Jesus’ teaching in the particular setting of his “Father’s house.”
Not only did Jesus observe the commands of Moses by making regular pilgrimages to the Jerusalem temple, however, he also honored the tradition of the synagogue, which had no Old Testament prescription but developed in the intertestamental period. Luke tells us explicitly that “he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom” (Luke 4:16, ESV). He commended the Roman centurion who built a synagogue for the Jews (Luke 7:5). He affirmed that the Pharisees and teachers of the law “sit on Moses’ seat” (Matthew 23:2), acknowledging the authority of synagogue teaching even as he exposed its abuses. In short, there is a clear pattern in Jesus’ life of spiritual formation and engagement occurring within the gathering of fellow believers.
“There is a clear pattern in Jesus’ life of spiritual formation and engagement occurring within the gathering of fellow believers.”
The early church carried this forward. In fact, some scholars even dispute the Christian origins of the book of James because he refers not to the ekklesia but to the synagōgē—the Greek term for synagogue. James warns, “Suppose a man comes into your meeting” (synagōgē, James 2:2), employing the same word used throughout the Septuagint for Israel’s gatherings. Similarly, the writer of Hebrews exhorts believers not to give up “meeting together” (episynagōgēn, Heb. 10:25), echoing the same synagogue-rooted vocabulary. Paul, meanwhile, speaks repeatedly of “when you come together as a church” (en ekklēsia, 1 Cor. 11:18; cf. 14:26), assuming the regular rhythm of gathered life.
Though the substance of these gatherings was transformed by Christ and the outpouring of the Spirit, the form of assembling together persisted from synagogue to church. Christian assembly was not an arbitrary invention but the natural continuation of Jesus’ own formative pattern, now reshaped around his death and resurrection.
The question, then, is not whether Christians should “go to church.” That much is simply assumed in the New Testament. The real question is: what did the first-century Christians understand themselves to be doing when they gathered as the church? Was it chiefly a “worship service,” as we often call it, or does Scripture itself present an alternative vision? To that question we now turn.
The Assembly as Formation
If the New Testament does not frame the assembly as a “worship service,” what is its purpose? The answer lies in the very word ekklesia, meaning “assembly” or “called-out gathering.” In the ancient world, an ekklesia was a civic body summoned to deliberate for the common good. The New Testament baptizes this term with gospel meaning: the church is God’s people, called out of the world to gather around Christ, share His table, hear His Word, and embody His life together.
The focus of the assembly, then, is not performance before God but formation in Christ. Hebrews 10:24–25 makes this plain: “Let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together…but encouraging one another” (NIV). The author does not present gathering as a ritual obligation to check off, but as a living practice by which disciples are stirred to holiness and perseverance.
Paul, likewise, pictures the church as a body in which “each part does its work” so that the whole is built up in love (Ephesians 4:16, NIV). The assembly is the workshop where the Spirit forges unity, maturity, and faithfulness, not the stage for an hour of polished ritual. When the Corinthians abused the Lord’s Supper, Paul’s outrage was not that they had offered defective worship but that they had fractured the body of Christ. They ate without waiting for one another, despising the poor and humiliating those who had nothing (1 Corinthians 11:17–34). In other words, their failure was not liturgical error but relational betrayal.
“Paul, likewise, pictures the church as a body in which ‘each part does its work’ so that the whole is built up in love.”
This is the thread that runs through the New Testament: the assembly is not a ceremony to appease God but a communion to strengthen His people. Its end is not to flatter heaven with pious words but to equip earth with faithful disciples. It is the place where lives are knit together, where the Spirit stirs gifts for service, where believers rehearse the life of the kingdom so they may live it out in the world.
The practices of the assembly—prayer, the Lord’s Supper, singing, giving, and hearing the Word—are disciplines that form disciples. Prayer trains us in dependence on God. The Table roots us in Christ’s death and resurrection: “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26, NIV). Singing carries gratitude, lament, and hope deep into memory: “Sing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16, NIV).
I have seen this mystery firsthand—elderly relatives lost in dementia’s haze, unable to recall names or places, yet still singing hymns learned in youth, their souls remembering what their minds forgot. Giving cultivates generosity and solidarity. Teaching grounds and matures us: leaders are given “to equip his people…so that the body of Christ may be built up” (Ephesians 4:12–13, NIV).
“Teaching grounds and matures us.”
These practices are not worship set against discipleship but worship that is discipleship, shaping the body together. And because the assembly is formative rather than performative, the New Testament’s concern is never about the technicalities of ritual but the health of the body. Paul’s counsel that “everything should be done in a fitting and orderly way” (1 Corinthians 14:40, NIV) is not a liturgical manual but a pastoral plea to a church where tongues, prophecies, and prayers had descended into chaos. The assembly’s goal is relational edification (oikodomē, 1 Corinthians 14:26) and encouragement (paraklēsis, Hebrews 10:25). It is the Spirit’s workshop, where disciples are trained, affections shaped, and Christ is formed in us, equipping us to live as God’s temple in every sphere.
Church leaders—elders, pastors, shepherds—must therefore reframe the question. The primary concern is not, “Is God pleased with our worship service?” as though He were evaluating a performance. The question is, “How are we feeding the flock of God, of whom the Holy Spirit has made us shepherds?” Are we developing and nurturing men and women in the way of Christ? Are we facilitating practices that form them into his likeness, so that their righteousness rests not in polished weekly worship services but in union with the crucified and risen Lord? Their charge is nothing less than to tend the people of God until Christ is formed in them.
If the Assembly is for Formation, What is Worship?
If the assembly is for formation, what then is worship? The New Testament presents worship not as an event but as the orientation of the disciple’s entire life toward God in spirit and truth. Paul urges the church in Rome: “I urge you, brothers and sisters, in view of God’s mercy, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God—this is your true and proper worship (latreia)” (Romans 12:1, NIV). This sacrifice is not confined to an altar or an hour but encompasses the daily walk of discipleship. “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31, NIV). Even the inner movements of the mind are claimed for God, for we are to “take every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5, NIV).
The popular phrase “all of life is worship” gestures toward this vision but risks overstatement. Scripture does not call brushing teeth, filing taxes, or taking out the trash “worship” (latreia). The biblical vocabulary ties worship to sacrifice, reverence, and deliberate acts of bowing before God. What we can say, however, is that all of life should be worshipful, infused with an orientation toward God’s glory.
The distinction matters. Worship is the creature’s intentional response to the Creator in spirit and truth—through praise, obedience, and service. Yet every act, from the mundane to the profound, can be “worshipful” when performed in conscious surrender to Christ. Filing taxes honestly, cleaning bathrooms patiently, or changing diapers with love become worshipful when they echo the disciple’s posture of offering life back to God.
“Filing taxes honestly, cleaning bathrooms patiently, or changing diapers with love become worshipful when they echo the disciple’s posture of offering life back to God.”
This perspective does not diminish the gathered assembly but situates it within a broader whole. Sunday is not the sole hour of worship but a weekly anchor in the rhythm of discipleship. The practices of the assembly—prayer, communion, song, giving, teaching—are the Spirit’s training ground, forming us into people who live worshipfully in every sphere. To reframe the assembly as formation is to recover the New Testament vision: worship is not compressed into sixty minutes but expanded into a consecrated life, while the gathering equips us to offer ourselves daily as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God.
As Kierkegaard prayed: “Lord Jesus Christ, you did not come to the world to be served—and surely not to be admired, or in that sense worshipped. You yourself are the way and the life—and you have asked only for imitators. If we have dozed off into this infatuation, wake us up, rescue us from this error of wanting to admire and adore you instead of desiring to follow you and be like you” (Practice in Christianity, Part III, Section 4).
Addressing Objections
At this point, objections arise, each reflecting the power of our imprinting on Sunday routines.
- Doesn’t praise count as worship? Absolutely, praise is worship, but it is not the sum of worship. Singing on Sunday glorifies God, but so does forgiving an enemy on Tuesday, maintaining integrity in business, or showing patience with children. Worship encompasses every sphere of life lived for God’s glory (see 1 Corinthians 10:31).
- Are mundane acts like going to the bathroom or filing taxes worship, or a substitute for the “Lord’s Day” gathering? Not exactly—and certainly not. Scripture does not call every act “worship” (latreia), but it does insist that every act can be worshipful when done for God’s glory: “Whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31, NIV). The ordinary becomes worshipful when it flows from a heart oriented toward Christ, echoing Paul’s call to “offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God” (Romans 12:1, NIV).
- Doesn’t Jesus say, “Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them” (Matthew 18:20, ESV)? Yes—but the context is not a “worship service” but church discipline. Jesus promises His presence when disciples act under His authority, rendering judgments that reflect heaven’s will (Matthew 18:15–20). It is not a blank check for any gathering that happens to invoke His name, but a sober assurance of Christ’s rule when the church binds and looses in fidelity to His word.
“It is not a blank check for any gathering that happens to invoke His name, but a sober assurance of Christ’s rule when the church binds and looses in fidelity to His word.”
- Doesn’t proskuneō describe the assembly? No. As has been previously asserted and meticulously studied by Tom Wadsworth, while proskuneō denotes worship as reverence, it is never applied to Christian assemblies in the New Testament. Instead, gatherings are described with terms like edification (oikodomē, 1 Corinthians 14:26), encouragement (paraklēsis, Hebrews 10:25), and formation in Christ (Ephesians 4:11–16). The assembly’s purpose is to build up the body, not to perform worship.
- So if the assembly isn’t worship, why do I have to go? For all the reasons we’ve argued. But even apart from those biblical arguments, consider this: if you are healthy and able, why would you withhold yourself from the gathering? As a disciple you are called to “fan into flame the gift of God” (2 Timothy 1:6, NIV), and to “consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24, NIV). Even if you had attained the maturity of the apostle Paul and could “speak in the tongues of men or of angels” (1 Corinthians 13:1, NIV), the church would still need your presence as much as you need theirs. The assembly is not optional enrichment but the Spirit’s appointed means by which the body is built up in love.
What Does This Mean for You?
If you find yourself in a place of leadership, resist the urge to stand up and declare, “This isn’t worship!” That rarely helps, and it hardly builds up your brothers and sisters. Paul and Silas sang hymns to the Lord in a Philippian jail, and their song rose as a true offering. The work of leadership is not to tear down but to set straight. Remind God’s people that life itself is to be lived worshipfully—soberly, prayerfully, as a royal priesthood set apart for His service. Don’t go on crusades against the practices of others. Let love be your aim, and let your guiding question be this: What, in a decent and orderly way, most edifies the ekklesia?
That principle cuts both ways. It has the force to critique shallow, sentimental songs, and it has the weight to guard against erratic or idiosyncratic practices. Either extreme misses the point if it fails to build up the body of Christ. Prayer is to God. Song is unto the Lord. Those are vertical offerings, yes—but they are also horizontally instructive, teaching and admonishing one another even as we lift them heavenward. And all of it reminds us that worship cannot be contained in a single hour. The weekly assembly matters, but discipleship grows deeper in living rooms and at kitchen tables, in circles of prayer and in friendships where faith is worked out face to face.
“Worship cannot be contained in a single hour.”
Still, for many believers, those weekly gatherings are the only steady nourishment they receive. That is why preaching must keep God at the center, and why those who preach must carry Christ’s own compassion, seeing people as sheep in need of a shepherd. The goal is never ritual performance or the protection of traditions—whether smells and bells or the rigid “five acts.” The true gift of the assembly is formation: a space where the Word is spoken, where prayer and praise rise together, where the Lord’s Supper is shared, where the Spirit of unity shapes us into Christ’s likeness. Bread and wine, song and Scripture, fellowship and gospel equipping—all taken up into God’s redeeming work.
The gathering, then, is not about clinging to what is familiar or chasing what is novel. It is about becoming a holy people. Every disciple is a priest. Every day is an altar. Every act of faithfulness can be a worshipful offering. That is what the Psalmist came to see: “Where shall I go from your Spirit? Or where shall I flee from your presence?” (Psalm 139:7, ESV). The shadow we live under is not that of a balloon, but of the cross—where Christ alone makes His people holy, and where His Spirit leads us into lives that carry the fragrance of His presence.
