The Corporate Nature of Worship

I am confessedly not much of a singer, a fact that belies my heritage (both of my parents are reasonably good at it and like music) and whatever musical education I had growing up. My wont during worship is to read my Bible, either to catch up on the recent readings from the one year Bible, for comfort, or whatever.

I began doing this as a defensive practice in high school youth group in response to the worship songs we would sing week to week. My distrust for youth group and the church was at an all time high then, spurred largely by the semi-pelagian perspective that dominated the church I attended at the time.

Then, as now, my interest remains more in doctrine and less in praxis. I have always been more interested in the meaning of baptism than the mode of baptism, the motivation for worship rather than the regulative principle, and so on. I have found, however, that as my interests in theology grew, I couldn't really divorce the study of doctrine from its implementation. This is probably earning me a big fat "duh" from the three readers or so that this blog enjoys, and it's well-deserved.

(This is not to give credence to ridiculous debates about the mode of baptism or any other nonsense; just that doctrine and praxis are inseparably woven together, I think.)


Worship is one area in which my feelings regarding practice and theology have not really had much time to settle. The beginning of the connection between the practice of worship and the theology of worship was the phrase "Proper orthodoxy breeds proper doxology," or "Right theology breeds right worship." This makes sense in many respects; worship without theology is idolatry, because we worship a god of our own devising.

All this is a pretty long introduction to the main story, for which I apologize.

I have been a little under the weather, which tends to exacerbate my logorrhea. However, it also has provided me a different excuse lately for not singing during church. There is a member of our group who has a pretty strong baritone (his father sings up front, and this one definitely takes cues from him) and isn't ashamed to use it.

As I was listening this past Wednesday to the various songs—the selection is usually better on the off days—it struck me more fully that worship really is a corporate experience. We worship together. And so in Psalm 34, we read, "O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his name together" (verse 3).

One of my complaints about praise and worship songs is that they're hard to sing harmony for if you're at all like me. There's no songbook in our church, so I can't even make any pitiful efforts to read the music, so I'm stuck with the melody, which is generally out of my range (if not also my theological purview). But as this fellow was bravely adjusting the music for his baritone, I saw a glimmer of what worship used to be like for me: an opportunity to sing with other people, to commune in the things that cause us to praise God. It was not an individual's experience, but the body's.