Worship and Mission – inextricably linked!

It is by its worship that the Church lives, it is there that its heart beats … As the heart is for the body, so worship is for Church life a pump which sends into circulation and draws in again, it claims and it sanctifies. It is from the life of worship … that the Church spreads itself abroad into the world to mingle with it like leaven in the dough, to give it savour like salt, to irradiate it like light.

Jean-Jacques von Allmen, Worship: Its Theology and Practice, 1965

I’m very much appreciating Zac Hicks’s scholarly work The Worship Pastor (Zondervan, 2016) at the moment. He argues strongly and persuasively that the worship pastor must be (among other things) a missionary. He develops the ideas of von Allmen and others to show that the relationship between worship and mission is like the connection between the heart and the circulation – in other words inextricably linked.

In this metaphor, the world is like a body in which the church lives. The heart, the centre, the true core of the work of the church, is worship. In a body, if the heart stops, everything stops and soon dies. It is the fuel cell, the boiler room, the source of oxygen and life, and in our worship Christ is revealed not only to the church but to the watching world.

But the heart doesn’t beat alone: it beats to pump blood around the body. Similarly, our worship fires up the people of God to take the love of God and the good news of the gospel of Jesus Christ out to the world! As the blood goes out to every part of the body, so the good news is sent out to every part of our communities and our world. The mission goes forth, but it also gathers back in, as those going out return with the joyful harvest of souls.

I leave the final word on this to Zac Hicks: “Just as a heart has no purpose without veins and arteries, and just as those veins and arteries are useless without a heart, so worship is inherently missional and mission is essentially doxological.”