Principle Seven: Worship Makes Effective Use Of God’s Creative Gifts

The Bible envisions worship as an offering of the entire person in living sacrifice to the Lord. Creative and thoughtful use of space and art, as well as attention to the traditional church calendar, combine to make worship an experience that involves body, soul, and spirit. Worship Involves the Whole Person Worship is an activity that includes every aspect of the human awareness: heart and mind, senses and intellect. St. Paul bids us,"offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God-this is your spiritual act of worship" (Rom. 12:1). We can see how he is using the word "spiritual" here: not in contrast to the physical but rather as a quality of worship that includes the physical and ultimately transcends it. Nothing in the human experience lies outside the scope of true Christian worship. For too long, at least in the West, and perhaps especially among the Protestant churches, worship has been an activity primarily of the mind. It has been reduced to a process of ed…