Worship and Mission

“Missions exists because worship doesn’t” is an oft-repeated quote from John Piper (and right now my Calvinist friends are both excited and apprehensive that I have quoted Piper). With apologies to those friends, I must say that this quote has perplexed and confused me. In fairness, I think the fault does not truly lie at Dr. Piper’s feet.

“Missions” and “worship” are both terms that come to us heavy with meaning; 140 characters or less will never be enough to clearly say what we mean by them. So let me craft my own soundbite: “Mission is not only worship; it is the ultimate act of worship.” 63 characters! Marvel at the strength of my Twitter-Fu. Alas, my would-be viral tweet suffers from the same affliction as Dr. Piper’s. These words simply cannot convey adequate meaning in such a short soundbite. When we speak of “worship” the image that most comes to mind is the “Praise and Worship” portion of a Christian gathering. We have come to conflate the two ideas almost entirely: praise = worship. This is not so much untrue as it is incomplete; our English word “worship” does triple-duty as the translation for three different Greek words. The “worship” part of “Praise and Worship” represents one of those - an absolutely necessary piece - but without any consideration of the other two. Having done some digging to pull some context for Dr. Piper’s quote I found that, while it did not explicitly affirm this limited definition of “worship”, it also did nothing to point the reader toward a more comprehensive understanding of the term. I’m fairly certain that Dr. Piper does, in fact, have a much larger theology behind his use of this term; I merely point out that it is not unpacked within the soundbite or the larger context from which it was pulled. Obviously, I’m not qualified to speak in depth about Greek translations, for that I refer you to Dr. Alan Kreider’s excellent book, “Worship and Mission after Christendom”. I have only very recently cracked the spine on that volume myself but even a few pages in it does a better job of exploring those ideas than I could in a thousand blog posts (which I doubt even our most loyal readers would be willing to slog through). Thankfully, I can sum up my position with one passage of Scripture: Isaiah 58. It’s a familiar passage; Jesus himself quoted from it (along with Isaiah 61) when proclaiming his mission in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4). Essentially God says to Israel through the prophet, “You go through all the right motions and say all the right things but that is not what I am asking from you, nor does it please me. I want you to worship me by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and freeing the oppressed. You worship me by joining in my mission.” The apostle Paul says as much when he asks us in Romans 12 to offer ourselves as “living sacrifices” as our act of worship. Throughout the Scriptures we see a God who loves mercy, who hates injustice and who is on the side of the oppressed. What truer expression of worship could there be than to live as reflections of Him and to be transformed by the renewing of our minds so we can know what kind of people He asks us to be? In the intervening years this aspect of worship has become more and more the realm of “extraordinary” people of faith. We marvel at the love of Mother Teresa and we thrill ourselves with stories of great daring by our heroes in the faith, but instead of joining wholeheartedly in the mission of God we delegate our call - a call to radical lives of Christlike sacrifice - to a subcategory we call “missions”. In doing so, I fear we have lost much of what it means to worship with our whole selves - and, to be clear, being a "missionary" doesn't put me any further ahead in that regard. I propose that if we truly worshiped the way the early church did, there wouldn’t be anything left to call “missions” because it would be as natural to us as breathing. Huh. I guess “missions exists because worship doesn’t” after all. Evan