Missions Resources - Bibliography
The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God's Call to Justice
Authors: Mark Labberton
ISBN: 9780830833160
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Number of pages: 200
Type of cover: Hard Cover
Summary:
reviewed by Paul Grant
One of the most tragic, or perhaps absurd, habits within contemporary evangelical imagination is our conflation of worship and music.
Musical worship is a vital component of worship, but the spirituality of worship is wider and deeper than liturgical arts. Worship involves everything. To quote from the opening words of Mark Labberton’s The Dangerous Act of Worship:
“The urgent, indeed troubling, message of Scripture is that everything that matters is at stake in worship. … Worship turns out to be the dangerous act of waking up to God and to the purposes of God in this world, and then living lives that actually show it.”
In other words, worship’s horizons extend far beyond our corporate Christian celebrations; worship involves how we live our lives, down to the smallest choices. In fact, if what we sing on Sunday morning does not resonate with how we live on Monday, we are liars.
Two fresh revivals have swept through North American evangelicalism in recent years: worship and justice. Building off John Piper’s 1993 observation that "missions exists because worship doesn’t" (Let the nations be Glad), one of the themes of Urbana 2000 was that worship leads to mission. We proclaim the gospel because we want God’s worship to be improved. (Indeed, corporate prayer, confession and praise have played central roles in Urbana conventions from the earliest years.)
The second revival within the North American evangelical church has been a growing concern for justice. These twin trends are each important in their way, Mark Labberton says, but neither is incredibly relevant, or potent, without the other: worship that does not lead to our obeying God’s call to justice is incomplete. In fact, he says, worship is profoundly dangerous, because it challenges our dearly held perspectives.
Mark Labberton, a Presbyterian pastor in California, proceeds to discuss several dangers in worship, and parses several real dangers and false ones. Out of control emotion (or the appearance thereof) is not a great concern, he says to his mainline friends, as long as God remains the object. Conversely, he reminds Pentecostals, it is quite possible to quench the Holy Spirit even in raucous worship services—which then are less than fully worshipful.
As finite creatures, we live in real places, in real history. Accordingly, our worship should be relevant to our places and times, rather than being ethereal. We need to “wake up to where we live,” Labberton says. The implication is profound: worship will look different in Manitoba than in Madagascar. Furthermore, churches in Manitoba should explore how to worship in a way that is relevant to the needs and injustices in Manitoba.
At the same time, as Christians we are in exile, in a very real sense of the word. Labberton urges us not to confuse Exodus with Exile. The former involves escaping an oppressive environment; the latter involves actually living there, and more: actively seeking the peace and well-being of our city of exile (Jeremiah 29:7). Our worship must thus take place at two levels at once: it must transcend our circumstances, extending to the poor, suffering, and lost a vision of God’s surpassing power; and it must make us desire good things for the city we’re so eager to flee.
Worship, thus conceived, will make us intimately concerned about those around us, even as we train our eyes on our father in heaven. That vision, Labberton says, is where worship gets truly dangerous.
Print
Email
Comments
Be the first one to add a comment.
To post a comment, please login or register