We have just begun to read John Stott's little book, The Living Church, together as a staff team at our church. In the first chapter, he writes about some of the defining marks of the early church as recorded in Acts 2:42-47, one of which was a strong committment to evangelism.

The fervor the early church manifested in fulfilling its mission to be witnesses to the gospel of Jesus Christ is no secret, and Stott highlights the fact that the Lord blessed their efforts by "adding to their number daily those who were being saved" (Acts 2:47). He notes that "those early Christians did not regard evangelism as an occasional activity...[but] their witness was as continuous as their worship" (32).

Part of the reason they devoted themselves wholeheartedly to this task was because they had this eager expectation that the Spirit was actively at work drawing people to himself and believed that they were his instruments to gather the people of God from every nation, tribe, and language. They were animated by the conviction that if they faithfully proclaimed the gospel of Jesus Christ, they would see their efforts bearing fruit by the power of the Spirit.

In the West as we continue to witness the rapid decline of Christianity, it is easy to lose hope in ever seeing this kind of result in our day. And our disillusionment plays a part in leading us to neglect our call to bear witness to the risen Lord. We also lose confidence in work of the Spirit, and in some instances, may even be tempted to think that the Spirit has left the church. As a result, we turn to devising all kinds of plans and methods and programs to get people to come into our churches, and hope that in the process, the Spirit comes back.

But the Spirit already came at Pentecost, and the reality is that he has not left the church! We can rejoice in this truth, and root ourselves in the knowledge that he is always with us. Jesus promised in Matthew 16:18 that he will build his church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. We are living in a time where most of his work to build his church seems to be going on in other parts of the world, but the staggering growth of the church around the world alone should remind us how amazing the work of the Spirit can be.

Let us recover the eager expectation that characterized the early church and pray that God would work powerfully through us to gather his people to himself.

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Abraham Sangha, one of the contributors for the blog, The Institute, mentioned in his most recent post that he was once asked how you would tweet the gospel, to which he quickly replied, "You don't." I'm inclined to agree with him.

In recent months, I've noticed that some people involved in church ministry have increasingly been using Twitter as a platform for talking – though perhaps it would be better to call it preaching – about the gospel, in some cases almost exclusively (I'll attribute it to mere coincidence that this started to happen with more regularity once John Piper started tweeting). Below, I pulled a sample of some of these tweets so you could see what I'm talking about:

Reading the sample tweets I've posted above, there were a few things that came to mind. First, while I don't disagree with anything said above (although I might word them differently), these short tweets are lacking context. Now, in the case of the persons who tweeted these things, the vast majority of their followers will be Christians, with many likely coming from a similar tradition of the Twitter user and able to supply the needed context. In one sense, then, they are preaching to the choir. But perhaps one of their followers is in a place where they need to hear one of these messages, and are encouraged by it.

However, if you have people following you who are not Christians, none of this will likely make any sense to them. And though having followers who aren't Christians shouldn't stop you from tweeting thoughts that resonate with you or inspire you, it is worthwhile to consider your audience and the medium of the message. One other thing bearing consideration is the nature of social media relationships – is there some semblance of a personal relationship when following someone on Twitter such that you are sharing the gospel in the context of relationship, or is tweeting the gospel a 21st century varient of tract evangelism?

Secondly, these types of tweets seem to restrict the gospel message to the singular idea that we are saved by God's grace apart from anything we can do. While this is entirely true and was one of the major themes of the message Jesus came to proclaim, is this all the gospel is about? What about Jesus' proclamation of the Kingdom of God? The presentations of the gospel that come out of this recent Twitter trend seems to focus solely on personal salvation and individual piety. Again, while these are parts of the gospel, it is not the whole message. Is it a good practice to present bits and pieces of the gospel 140 characters at a time?

At any rate, I am probably reading too much into it this, and could just be missing the point. These are just some of my initial reactions to this increasing trend of tweeting the gospel. What do you think? If you like to tweet the gospel, why do you do so? Can you really present the gospel in 140 characters?

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Eberhard Busch, from his recently translated work, Drawn to Freedom: Christian Faith Today in Conversation with the Heidelberg Catechism, on the fellowship of believers in the church:

One can foster religious convictions on one's own, but we have Christian faith only in the fellowship of the church. Private Christianity is wooden iron. A church that is like a restaurant, where all kinds of customers sit at individual tables and are served by waiters who rush here and there attempting to meet their wishes, is wooden iron too. If any comfort consists in the fact that I do not 'belong to myself,' then there is no comfort for me without having my circling around myself taken away from me. Where the church is, there a redemption comes into view that redeems me not simply as an individual, but redeems me also from my individualism. So to be a Christian means to be in the church.

Article 55 expounds this. It says rightly first off that all Christians together and each individually – as members of Christ – 'share in one fellowship with Christ' and in his gifts. For the Head of the community is not only the key to what the community is. He is also the reason that Christian life is life in fellowship. Jesus Christ is Immanuel, God's guarantee to be God in fellowship with us humans. As such, Jesus Christ is also the fulfillment of the double command of love, in which the vertical and the horizontal, the God-human relationships and the human-human relationship are insolubly linked. If the Holy Spirit brings us into relationship with this God who in Christ keeps fellowship with us, then faith means: 'fellowship with Christ.' If we come into fellowship with him, we come into fellowship with all with whom he keeps fellowship. None of us can be a child of God in the Holy Spirit without being together with other children of God who now may and should discover one another as sisters and brothers. That 'the Son of God...gathers, protects, and preserves' the church does not take away the responsibility of those who experiences this, or make them passive. This action calls them forth and calls them out to answer in word and deed and to confess themselves part of the church gathered and supported by him. They do this because they no longer belong to themselves, but to their faithful Savior (225-226).

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One of the problems that has kept surfacing as I have been thinking about worship over the past little while is our selfishness. When we look at the music of worship as a stimulant, as Stapert suggested we often do, we are looking for something that will make us feel good. When we make the music the primary aspect of our worship, we are acting on the premise that what we say is more important than what God says to us. And, of course, there are many other ways that we make worship a thoroughly self-centred act.

The thing is – and we know this to be true despite our actions often being to the contrary – worship is not about us at all. The image of worship we get from Revelation 4 and 5, for example, makes perfectly clear that the focus of worship is the Lord. All that his creatures do in the picture John paints for us in those chapters is to praise God, ceaselessly. They have seen the glory of the Lord, and they fully understand the purpose of worship.

William Temple, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, in his book, Readings in St. John's Gospel, had this to say about worship:

Worship is the submission of all our nature to God. It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness; the nourishment of mind with his truth; the purifying of imagination by his beauty; the opening of the heart to his love; the surrender of will to his purpose – and all this gathered up in adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centredness which is our original sin and the source of all actual sin (68).

Temple understands the purpose of worship. Deep down, I think we all do too. But there are countless idols competing for our worship and adoration (some of which may even be disguised as true worship) and our sinful nature is all too eager to serve those idols. Indeed, the god we seek to worship most often is ourselves. I believe it was Luther who said that pride is the first sin, and the root of all other sins.

It would be easy to say in response that changing this is just a matter of setting our hearts on God. True as this is, it is much easier said than done. It requires the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, who empties us of ourselves and fills us with himself. For this reason we must constantly implore the Spirit to be present in our worship, because unless he is among us, there can be no true worship.

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Using a portion of Calvin R. Stapert's book, A New Song for an Old World, in my last post, I discussed how our worship, and especially the music we use in worship, has become characterised by a singular expression of something approximating joy. It raised the question of why we have become unable to express many of the feelings and emotions that are part of the worship of Scripture.

From Stapert's perspective, the problem is that we have become confused about the purpose of music in worship. He writes,

While suppressing the 'doleful' countermelody leads to a trivialization of the joy theme, a tendency toward a pagan kind of epiclesis¹ leads to a perversion of it. Those misled by this kind of epiclesis think – or at least act as though – 'we convene ourselves [for worship] and then wait for God to show up because we have said the magic words or cranked up enough volume in our praise.' They also inevitably blame the music when they feel worship to be joyless and spiritless. They see music as a stimulus to rather than a vehicle for the expression of joy, an enticement for the Spirit's presence rather than a grateful response for it, as though the Spirit were at the beck and call of our music. Granted, the border between a response and a stimulant is obscure. In addition, as Augustine and other church fathers attest, music can be a legitimate stimulant for 'inflaming' our piety and devotion. Nevertheless, it is as important for us as it was for the church fathers to keep the distinction clear, and to remember (1) that response, not stimulation, is the fundamental role of worship music; (2) that 'inflaming' can easily degenerate into manipulation; and (3) that not all that is called 'spiritual' is of the Spirit, or, as Plantinga and Rozeboom put it, 'not all that moves us is of God.' I am convinced that there would be a marked and salutary difference in the church's music and worship if we would maintain the central focus of our 'new song' to be a joyful response, offered in humble gratitude, not a stimulant 'to excite every nerve...and to create as many...synthetic passions as possible' (to quote Thomas Merton) [202].

If you have a conversation with evangelicals about worship, most of the time the debate centres around which style of music they like best. Besides the problem of such a narrow definition of worship, which sees it as nothing more than the music, it also proves Stapert's incisive observation – we want worship to be a stimulant, to make us feel something. If the music doesn't satisfy our own subjective tastes, we believe that somehow the Spirit won't be present in our corporate worship; indeed, we believe we haven't worshiped.

So how do we get the congregation to understand that worship is fundamentally an act of response?

In the first place, we need to make our worship gospel-centred. I know that this is one of evangelicalism's many buzzwords, but it is true. A proper, holistic understanding of the gospel must be at the centre of our worship. Too often the gospel is stripped down to mean nothing more than the fact that Jesus has saved us. Well, yes, of course. But saved us from what? We need to understand the counterpart, the state we were in before Jesus saved us. Praising God for our new life in Christ means very little if we don't understand our old life.

The most obvious way to do this is to saturate worship with Scripture. Don't just have Scripture read before the sermon, but take your call to worship from Scripture. Have call and response readings and prayers based on Scripture. Very important here as well is to ensure that the lyrics of the songs you sing in worship are Scriptural. In his latest book, Why Johnny Can't Sing Hymns, T. David Gordon writes about his efforts as a pastor to keep the songs used in his church theologically accurate. To that end, he went through the church's hymnal, which contained more than 700 hymns, and found over 500 of them to be lacking. Needless to say, it is remarkably easy to pen careless or even unorthodox lyrics when your primary concerns are things like rhyming, or evoking warm feelings in those singing your songs.

This is, I think, one of the biggest problems with contemporary music as well. Too many songs give the pretense of being Scriptural, using phrases here and there from the Bible, but often they are carelessly constructed. I could give a number of examples, but there is a twofold point to be made here. First, the church confesses what it sings, so biblical and theological accuracy are vitally important to the music of worship. Second, and related to this, is the fact that one of the easiest ways to memorise something is when it is set to music. At the end of the day, the congregation will be walking away from the worship service singing the music. Every effort must be made to ensure what they are singing is true to Scripture.

In addition to making worship gospel-centred, we need to have a structured liturgy if we are to teach people that worship is an act of response. For this, we need to ensure that a number of elements are present in our worship. A call to worship reminds the congregation that we don't come to worship to feel good, but because God calls us into his presence, to assemble before his throne. In response, we should sing songs of praise to him, recognising that he is the almighty God. Coming before his throne also requires that we lay our sins before him and seek his forgiveness and assurance of pardon, corporately and individually. In response, we should sing songs of lament for our sin, that seek his forgiveness, and that remind us of his grace and mercy. After hearing God speak through his written Word and the preached Word, a song of response should follow that fits with the theme of the message. In the Eucharist, the gospel is made visible and grace is imparted to us, and our song should be a song of praise to the Lord for his salvation and his faithfulness to us. When we hear the benediction, we are hearing God himself bless us, and so our song can be nothing more than a resounding 'Amen!'

David Watson, in his book, I Believe in the Church, writes, 'It is...God himself who initiates worship. It is simply our response to all that God has shown us of himself and done for us in our lives' (181).

God initiates, we respond. It is a pattern that cannot be reversed, for when it does, it ceases to be worship. Our concern that worship be joyful, then, is wholly contingent on our recognition of who God is and what he has done for us. But when we begin to grasp on to that, to truly start to understand the reality that the Lord of heaven and earth has called us to be his own, our worship will take on dimensions that we never expected, and we will say with the Psalmist, 'Come let us sing for joy to the Lord; let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation!' (Psalm 95:1).

Music certainly plays a very important role in our worship. In fact, it is one of the unique aspects of Christianity that our faith evokes from us a response of song. But we need to do a better job of thinking carefully about the music of our worship. The so-called 'worship wars' have missed the point, to a degree; the issue is not so much the style of music used in worship, but the role that music plays in worship. Using Stapert's terminology, is it a stimulant or a response?

Incoherent as these ramblings are, I thought it fitting to conclude by citing R.B. Kuiper, who in his book, The Glorious Body of Christ, had this to say about worship:

When God's people assemble for worship they enter into the place where God dwells. God meets them, and they meet God. They find themselves face to face with none other than God himself. Their worship is an intimate transaction between them and their God.

If the church were fully conscious of that truth, what dignity and reverence would characterize its worship! (347)

May that indeed be true of all our worship.

¹Epiclesis is the Greek word for 'invocation'. In worship, it refers to the invocation of the Holy Spirit.

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