Springwood Presbyterian Church: Whitsett, NC

“REFORMED AND ALWAYS BEING REFORMED - According to the Word of God in Scripture and the call of the Spirit” 

The Covenant Community and Worship:  God calls us into covenant, a relationship whose promise and privilege is being in God’s presence.  Yet the Church is much more than a collection of individual Christians called into individual relationships with God.  It’s a community—united, glued together by the Holy Spirit—which exists to make God visible to the rest of the world.  Our covenant relationship with God is extended to our relationship with other Christians, beginning with those in our own family and congregation.  Only when we can work together in the spirit of Christ’s peace can we build and sustain one another’s faith—celebrate one another’s joys—comfort one another’s grief—and work together to extend God’s kingdom to the world beyond these walls.

            Worship is the primary way we learn to do those things—the primary way we are shaped into God’s people.  Our Presbyterian worship services are designed to acknowledge God’s sovereignty: “to glorify God and enjoy God forever.” (Shorter Catechism, Q.1)  At its best, worship enriches, restores, and otherwise benefits us, the worshippers---though that’s not its purpose.  Rather, the worship service is our service to God.  We come to serve, not to be served.  God deserves our enthusiasm in singing and taking part in responses.

            Praise, adoration, thanksgiving in word and music are large parts of the order of worship each Sunday.  The high place we Presbyterians give to scripture—God’s written word—is evidence that we honor God above all else.  Much of our time together in worship time is given over to our response to God’s word: affirmation of faith, various ways of giving thanks, participation in the Lord’s Supper, offering of our material goods and of ourselves, going out into the world to serve others.  The attitude we bring to worship and the degree to which we participate (or don’t) testifies to our awe at being in God’s presence, and our desire to do what God wants us to do.

            Scripture is at the very heart of worship.  The Presbyterian order of worship is known as a “Service of the Word,” and is centered on the reading, hearing, proclamation of and response to scripture.  Preaching, by the way, is not the only means of proclaiming God’s word: music, drama, dance, and other “liturgical arts” are also ways to interpret scripture.  In fact, for some people, these visible and tangible interpretations make scripture clearer and more understandable than the spoken word.  Nonetheless, preaching has held a place of high esteem among Christians of the Reformed tradition from early times.  The Second Helvetic Confession (5.004) states that “the preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God”!  Believe me, that terrifies a preacher, and places a heavy burden on those of us who undertake it.

            But you don’t get off easily.  “It is required of those that hear the Word preached, that they attend upon it with diligence, preparation, and prayer; examine what they hear by the scriptures; receive the truth with faith, love, meekness, and readiness of mind, as the Word of God; meditate of it, confer of it; hide it in their hearts, and bring forth the fruit of it in their lives.” (The Larger Catechism, Q.160)  I invite all of us to take those words to heart, so that we may bear the fruit of God’s word into the world. 

            For many years, Presbyterian worship gave a disproportionate amount of worship time to the reading and interpretation of scripture—God’s written word—at the expense of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper—God’s enacted word.  There were at least two reasons for this: the fear that frequent celebration of the Lord’s Supper might lead to the kinds of abuses that motivated Martin Luther and others to try to reform the medieval Catholic Church; and a sense that humans are unworthy to receive this holy ordinance very often.  However, the father of the Presbyterian Church, John Calvin, thought the church should celebrate the Lord’s Supper each Lord’s Day.  It nurtures and nourishes us spiritually, and draws us into the presence of our Lord.  I’m thankful we celebrate it more often at Springwood!