Gospel-Centered Corporate Worship (Part 1)

Guest Post by Dan Cruver

I often wonder what we as Christians are actually thinking about worship as we worship together through the singing of hymn texts, the giving of offerings, the responsive reading of Scripture, etc. If we could quietly pull a few aside who are engaged in these corporate expressions of worship to ask them what they think worship is, I wonder what they might say. I wonder if their answers would be more man-centered than God-centered. In A Passion for Christ: The Vision that Ignites Ministry, James B. Torrance suggests that more answers would come out on the man-centered side than they would on the God-centered side. Torrance believes that there is one particular view of worship that seems to dominate the evangelical landscape, namely, that worship is something which we do in response to who God is and what He’s done. Although that view appears God-centered at first look, when it’s really examined its true man-centered colors begin to show. He describes the thinking behind this view like this:

We go to Church, we sing our psalms to God, we intercede…, we listen to the sermon (too often simply an exhortation), we offer our money, time and talents to God. No doubt we need God’s grace to help us do it; we do it because Jesus taught us to do it and left us an example to show us how to do it. But worship is what WE do (36).

How many within evangelical churches would describe corporate worship in this way? Worship, after all, is a response to God, our response to God, is it not? In worship we offer to God that which He rightly deserves, correct? Torrance argues that this way of thinking “falls short of the New Testament understanding of participation through the Spirit in what Christ has done and in what Christ is doing for us in our humanity. It is human-centered.” (38). He adds:

Its weakness is that it falls short of an adequate understanding of the role of the vicarious humanity of Christ (emphasis mine) and of the Spirit in our worship of the Father - of why Christ became man for us and our salvation (38).

(If you want to hear an entire sermon that considers the significance of the vicarious humanity of Christ for Christian living / worship, check out my audio sermon here.) Torrance is essentially arguing that the dominant view of worship fails to give the doctrine of Christ’s vicarious humanity its rightful place. It is a view that has lost sight , in many (most?) cases, not of Christ’s vicarious death but of His vicarious humanity, his vicarious life. Sure, our church may sing songs about Christ, corportately read biblical texts that explicitly reference Christ, and listen to sermons that speak of Christ, but if our understanding of corporate worship centers on what we do in response to what God has done, it’s really not as gospel-centered as we think it is. Torrance writes:

Although [this view] stresses how God comes to meet us in Christ, the movement from us to God is still our movement, our faith, our response (emphasis mine)! This theology short-circuits the vicarious humanity of Christ and belittles union with Christ. While it seems to emphasize the vicarious work of Christ on the cross to bring forgiveness and make our faith a real human possibility, it fails to see the place of the High Priesthood of Christ as the One who leads our worship, bears our sorrows on his heart and intercedes for us, presenting us to the Father in himself as God’s dear children and uniting us with himself in his life in the Spirit.

To reduce worship to this two-dimensional thing (God and ourselves today) is to imply that God throws us back on ourselves to make our response, and to ignore the fact that God has already provided for us that Response which alone is acceptable to him - the Offering made for humankind in the life, obedience and passion of Jesus Christ. But is this not to lose the comfort and peace of the Gospel, as well as the secret of true Christian prayer as the gift of sharing in the intercessions of Christ, that we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit makes intercession for us? Whatever else our faith is, it is a response to a Response already made for us and continually being made for us in Christ (41).

Torrance is arguing that true Christian worship is worship that is swallowed up into what Christ has done in his vicarious life and death and what he continues to do as our Heavenly Intercessor. We may well be aware of Christ’s vicarious death as we gather to worship but we must not lose sight of his vicarious life and continued priestly ministry. Gospel-centered worship actively recognizes that God has not only provided us with His gracious movement toward us in Christ but also with our responding movement toward Him in Christ as well. God has not only provided that which we must respond to, namely, the gospel, but also our Response. The Gospel teaches us that Christ is our acceptable response to the Father given to us by the Father. Christian worship is never simply something we do. It is both something that already has been done in the life and death of Jesus and something that Jesus is doing for us in his High Priestly ministry. As we worship we must be careful to understand Christian worship as participation in what Christ has done in His vicarious life and death and presently is doing as our heavenly High Priest. It is never simply a response to who God is and what He has done.