Worship And The Mission Of The Church

The act of Christian worship is itself a witness to the world. Particularly important is the Eucharist, or Lord's Supper, which proclaims the coming kingdom of God. This argument resists two extremes: the denial of the relationship between worship and mission on the one hand and the promotion of worship as merely an evangelistic service on the other. The following article is a detailed but persuasive presentation of this theological argument. "The church has missionary power in direct proportion to its liturgical integrity. " In this thesis Stanley Hauerwas proposes that liturgy and mission have a necessary and essential relationship. The mission of the church in its most comprehensive sense is explicit witness to the kingdom of God, to Jesus, the Christ, as its ultimate grounding and final consummation. Such an understanding of mission includes calling persons to conversion, initiating them into the church. But calling, converting, initiating is not in itself the mission. Rather i…