Real Worship [antikvár]

CHAPTER 1 In which the author admits his frustratim YOU MUST UNDERSTAND from the begimiing that the writing of this book has been a frustrating experience for me. At first, I blamed my frustration on the breadth of the subject; and I wondered if any writer was capable of dealing with so vast a theme as Christian worship. Beside that, certain aspects of worship are not easy to define or explain; and at times I felt like a man trying to lay sunbeams in a row while evening was marching in. Then I decided that the problem was not the vastness of the subject but the narrowness of my own experience. After all, most of my worship experience has been in the fundamentalist "independent church" tradition where the word worship was found only on the cover of the hymnal. If not by word, at least by example, my peers taught me to be suspicious of "liturgy" and to major on winning the lost and sending out foreign missionaries. Even my ministerial training added little to my appreciation of Christian worship. Imagine my surprise years later when I discovered that every church followed a liturgy—either a good one or a bad one—and that I could learn a great deal about the worship of God from churches that I had excluded from my fellowship. What a rude awakening! In recent years I have shared worship experiences in many varied settings: mission stations and churches in Africa, South America, Central America, and Europe; English cathedrals; Brethren assemblies; churches of one denomination or another across the United States and Canada; house churches; camps and conferences; and even a few denominational conventions. At the same time, I have been closely studying the lives and ministries of the great preachers and missionaries of the evangelical tradition, people as far apart on the religious spectrum as Charles Haddon Spurgeon and John Henry 13