The Price of Worship
Traditional Woships Formative Vision
David Mills
January 1, 1997
The concert ended with everyone singing an Old hymn, swaying gently from side to side, many holding hands with the strangers beside them. Someone turned out the lights, and people began holding up lit matches as a feeling of brotherhood descended, it seemed, on everyone in the hall. Out in the parking lot a few minutes later, many of them were fighting, stealing, fornicating, and selling drugs to small children. It was a rock concert ending in the then-popular style. It taught me, a new Christian, that feelings of worship were easily aroused and often completely transitory and insincere in the sense that they did not reflect any change in the will, or any desire in the worshipers to turn from their wickedness and live. Such feelings may be spiritual, but they are not always Christian. People are easily moved but not easily changed. The most elevated feelings are no guide whatsoever to the formative value of an experience. To be changed people need to be made to see the world—and to act—in certain ways and not in others. This is the reason that Christians ought to worship traditionally, that is, in formal, ordered, regular, heavily textual liturgies designed by a central authority in its historical tradition. This claim does not apply to "seeker services" and the like, intended to reach the lost. It applies to the regular worship of those who have committed themselves to Christ, the church, and the local community, in which they commit by word and action their minds and hearts to God. Formative worship is, like tithing and the other disciplines of the Christian life, for those who want to be transformed into the image of Christ and are willing to pay the price. For many reasons, not least the obvious holiness of many ...
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