In retrospect, I’ll call this session: “the reality of the worship experience”

1. Recap what we have done with worship in the past weeks, Carlin gave a summary from his class last week and Michelle read from her notes on Nolan’s class on worship with the Word.

2. To set some context for discussion we read: “9.5 theses on worship” by Gary A. Parrett from Ct

3. We focused on one single theses: “worship should be a life style not just a time slot”

Having said that, I raised the question why we even need the Sunday worship at TCBC at 9:30? The reason is we really should see the 9:30 as a subset of the spectrum of worship activities of a believer. (It may well be the pinnacle of his/her worship activities.) This is a “set” time that “together” with his/her fellow believers acknowledging to the world that Christ Jesus is Lord and Savior, in other words Jesus does matter.

Focusing then on the “worship together” experience, what is the individual experience like?
Jesus did bring in the spirit so anyone, anywhere can worship Him, again what is the individual experience like?

I want to set the ideal experience against the reality. We did a “mind dump” exercise to set the stage for discussion. Mind dumping is focusing on a event or an experience and “dump” everything you can associate until a set time or there is nothing left to “dump”.

There were many interesting results:
--there were many evaluations, from who were in the worship team, to the sermon, to the surrounding people and things, to the worship experience
--some though of lingering problems from the work days
--still some thoughts are better not made public
--not many can be classified as “ideal” worship experiences

We drew some conclusions:

1. Worship as a lifestyle is actually means we’ll experience the entire range of emotions and thoughts in worship just as if life. There will be praises from joy but there are also laments in sadness. Worship will then compose of all life including the ups and the downs, sometimes we feel like worship other times we won’t.

2. Worship is then a set time, a practiced discipline, a practiced discipline motivated by love. We practice how to move all our thoughts, every single on that we dumped upwards and let him evaluate them.

3. Worship is together, together is not always “pretty”, noisy children, eccentric seniors, family sitting together, people we have not seen before, people we meet for the first time. I spoke of a “dream” scenario: when each others manner of worship is our preference; there will no longer be my preference. “Let me worship your way.”