Worship And Spirituality

This author suggests that Christians reexamine the specific nature of worship and spirituality. Worship has to do with interiority and with patterns of living that are shaped by the living, dying, rising, and coming again of Christ. In worship, the emphasis is less on the mind and more on the spirit. In spirituality, the emphasis is less on rules by which we live and more on the formation of the person. Until fifteen years ago, my spiritual pilgrimage was within the context of a Protestant intellectual Christianity. The emphasis in this tradition was on believing the right things and doing the right things. In this context, the relationship between worship and spirituality was tied to the sermon. The sermon was the main event and everything else was regarded as a preliminary. A major purpose of the sermon was to clarify right belief and to inspire the congregation to live by those beliefs. In the early 1970s, I came to a dead end in this intellectual tradition of worship and spir…