Formed for Faithfulness (7): Learning to Worship Again
How the Church Is Made Porous to God
There’s an old Southern phrase for a preacher who’s drifted from offering generous goodwill into telling people how they ought to live. We say he’s gone from preachin’ to meddlin’.
So let me meddle.
Not about incense or guitars. Not about vestments or video screens. Let me meddle about something far more important than aesthetics by asking about what we think is actually happening when the Church gathers for worship.
In the last instalment, I suggested that renewal doesn’t begin with strategy or ideology but with formation — with being patiently schooled in the story of salvation until we learn to see our lives, and the life of the world, within God’s saving purposes. As we’re drawn into that scriptural story, we begin to inhabit God’s strange new world where creation is gift, sin is real, mercy is deeper still, and resurrection isn’t metaphor but reality. We learn to recognise that God has acted decisively in Jesus Christ — and that, by his Spirit, he continues to speak and act through his Body, the Church.
If that’s true, worship can’t be a neutral backdrop to parish life. It isn’t a prelude to the “real work” of mission or a weekly recharge. It’s the Church being the Church: the gathered community drawn into Christ’s self-offering to the Father, made porous to the life of God, addressed afresh by the Spirit.
That reframes everything. The main question isn’t first whether our worship should be traditional or contemporary, solemn or informal. It’s whether, in worship, we’re actually being drawn into Christ’s priestly life — participating in his reconciling act at the centre of reality.
Because if worship is what the Church has always said it is, it’s not primarily something we do. It’s something we’re taken up into. We don’t generate its power or set its direction; we’re drawn by grace into a movement that begins in the heart of the Triune God. Before a word is spoken or a hymn is sung, Christ is already offering himself to the Father in the Spirit. Our worship is our sharing in that living self-offering.
The End Isn’t a Means
There’s a familiar temptation in modern church life. When attendance dips or morale drops, we recalibrate worship. Adjust the music. Shorten the sermon. Add visual effects. None of that is necessarily wrong. But it risks making worship chiefly about us.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, we measure success by enjoyment, by atmosphere, by outcomes. Did it move people? Did it inspire them? Will they come back? The metric becomes experience rather than encounter — and not just an encounter with one another, but primarily with the living God.
When the Church gathers, it responds to an initiative that precedes it. The Father has sent the Son. The Son has offered himself once for all. The Spirit has been poured out. We don’t gather to create an experience but to enter into Christ’s self-offering, drawn into a movement of love that began before us and will far outlast us.
The Eucharist makes this plain. We give thanks because Christ has given thanks. We offer ourselves because he has offered himself. We intercede because he ever lives to intercede. The liturgy is not a performance but a participation — the Church taken up into Christ’s priestly life, his self-giving to the Father for the sake of the world.
Here our culture’s obsession with utility can distort us. We’re trained to value everything by function and results. Bring that instinct into worship and we ask the wrong questions: Is it attracting newcomers? Strengthening commitment? Increasing generosity? These aren’t trivial goods. But when they control the lens, we instrumentalise worship. We make it serve ends other than God.
The purpose of worship is God. We don’t gather because worship “works” but because God is worthy. Adoration isn’t a means; it’s the fitting response to reality made manifest to us. In worship the Church turns from itself and attends to the living God. That self-forgetful attention isn’t unproductive; it simply refuses to be reduced to function.
Paradoxically, it’s only when worship ceases to be treated as a mechanism that it becomes most life-giving. When we stop asking what it will achieve and begin asking whether it’s faithful — faithful to Scripture, to the gospel, to Christ’s self-offering — we recover its true centre. Worship isn’t the Church using God for its purposes; it’s the Church offering itself to God and being taken up into his purposes.
We gather in God’s name because he has called us. We hear his Word because he speaks. We confess because his holiness exposes and heals. We receive absolution because forgiveness flows from the cross. We proclaim the Creed because we stand within a story we did not invent. We come to the Table because Christ gives himself as food. We’re sent because his mission continues.
None of this is arbitrary. It’s the gospel enacted — the drama of salvation not merely recalled but inhabited. Over time, that pattern forms us. Not as self-improvement, but as participation in a reality larger than our preferences. Not hype. Not novelty. Participation.
The Gift of a Shared Grammar
This is why authorised forms of worship matter. If worship isn’t something we engineer but something we’re taken up into, it can’t depend primarily on our individual creativity. It needs a shape sturdy enough to bear a reality we didn’t initiate.
The prayer book or Common Worship aren’t mere resources. They’re vessels of memory. They carry the cadences of Scripture, the theological instincts of centuries, the accumulated wisdom of saints and ordinary sinners who’ve prayed before us. They bind parish to parish and to the wider Church. They give us a grammar — a way of speaking to God and about God that we don’t depend on us, and that keeps us from mistaking our own perspective for the whole faith.
In a culture devoted to customisation, that can feel restrictive. We tailor our news feeds, personalise our playlists, curate every corner of our lives. Why not our liturgies? The answer is that worship isn’t content. It isn’t a product delivered to religious consumers. It’s an inheritance received and a reality inhabited. The Church doesn’t gather to display its preferences but to be addressed by the living God and drawn into Christ’s self-offering. That requires forms resilient enough to resist constant reinvention.
Of course, liturgy develops. It lives and breathes. But when adaptation becomes incessant, the centre of gravity shifts. Worship turns into something we create rather than something into which we’re gathered. The question goes from “What has the Church received?” to “What will resonate?” — and that subtle turn places us at the centre. The congregation absorbs a destructive catechism: what matters most is whether this works for us—for me.
A shared form, prayed week by week across parishes and generations, gently unsettles that instinct. It reminds us that we stand within a story we didn’t author and a communion we didn’t construct. It trains us to receive before we revise, to inhabit before we innovate. In a world of endless choice, that can feel confining. In truth, it’s liberating. It frees us from the burden of self-creation and anchors us in the steady, saving work of God.
None of this demands liturgical rigidity. Our Anglican breadth of churchmanship can be a blessing, but only insofar as it remains tethered to a common centre: Christ’s self-offering, enacted and proclaimed in Word and sacrament. When that centre holds, diversity becomes harmony rather than euphemism for tribalism.
Renewal, then, is less about novelty than depth. Are our liturgies transparent to Christ’s action? Do they create space for the sense that something is happening here which we didn’t devise and can’t control? These questions won’t trend. But they return us to the heart of worship — not as a tool we wield, but as the place where God gathers and forms his people.
A People Made Porous to God
In the liturgy, Christ addresses us. He names us forgiven. He feeds us with his life. He draws us into his intercession for the world. And as he does, he forms a people whose life together begins to reflect his own.
The Church becomes, mysteriously, porous to God. Christ’s self-offering doesn’t remain a doctrine on a page but reverberates through this community. His reconciling act is made present and proclaimed afresh — not repeated, but participated in.
When we recognise this, something miraculous happens. The Church becomes eloquent — not merely in speech, but in the texture of its common life.
A people who confess weekly grow less threatened by truth. A people who receive absolution learn to forgive. A people who kneel side by side find it harder to sustain enmity. A people who have tasted new creation carry hope into hospital wards and council meetings, and that hope becomes a language the world desperately needs to hear.
None of this happens because of cleverly devised strategies. They happen because Christ acts.
In a society fractured by suspicion and self-assertion, a community shaped by self-giving love becomes a kind of living sentence — a phrase in God’s ongoing speech to the world. Not flashy. But eloquent.
Renewal won’t come from an endless pursuit of relevance or more opportunities for individual expression. It will come as we allow ourselves to be schooled again and again in the story of salvation and drawn ever more deeply into Christ’s priestly life — as worship becomes less showcase and more holy attentiveness, where we forget ourselves in adoration and, in that self-forgetfulness, are remade.
For in that ordinary, repeated gathering before the altar the Church is most truly herself. There the risen Christ acts. There he gathers, reconciles, feeds, and sends. And there, as he draws us into his self-offering, he forms a people who, simply by being what they are in him, become God’s living address to the world.


