Worship Services & How Progressive Christians Worship

When Progressive Christians talk about How We Worship, the discussion usually centers on the goings-on inside the Church walls. While Sunday worship services have an important role to play, what matters even more is the worship that happens during the course of our every-day lives. This daily interactive worship with our immediate neighbors and our inner divinity (Christ) concerned Jesus more than the performance of rituals.

Washing the feet of others (i.e. humbling ourselves in service to our community) is the kind of worship activity that mattered most to Jesus–much more than public hallelujahs¹ and orthodox practices such as recognizing the Sabbath or submitting oneself to formal baptism, a ritual which he told John that they must “suffer” for religion’s sake² not because God demands it–because, after all, rituals only point toward spiritual truths; they are not truths in and of themselves.

When we Christians focus too much on worship rituals in defining “how we worship” we run the risk of elevating the metaphor to God-ordained law, just as the Pharisees did with the Sabbath. Progressive Christian Reverends should begin using the power of the pulpit on Sunday mornings to begin talking more about the daily bread of worship: worship that includes being better stewards of the Garden; caring better for the bodies God has granted us; listening closer for the sound of the Holy Spirit as it struggles to make itself known within us and others; and attending more generously to the needs of family, friends, co-workers, and community as a whole.

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1. “When you pray, you are not to behave as hypocrites do. They like to pray standing in the synagogues and at the corners of the streets, that they may be seen by men. There, I tell you, is their reward! – Matthew 6:5 [↩]
2. “Suffer it be so for the present,” Jesus answered, “since it is fitting for us thus to satisfy every claim of religion.” Matthew 3:15 [↩]

Progressive Christians & The New Reverend’s Role

Having put forward the idea that as Progressive Christians we are all ministers, albeit in various forms, the question now follows, just what is the role of the Reverend, the Minister of the bricks and mortar church? Like other Pastors, Progressive Reverends guide religious ceremonies (such as weddings and funerals), as well as serve as spiritual counselors and community organizers of good works aimed towards those in need. But what separates them from Pastors of the religious right is the way they manage the pulpit.

In our current age of dumbing down and superficiality (where even elected officials are so self-absorbed that they feel compelled to “Twitter” their trivial thoughts and actions to the world), we need more than ever the Reverend who possesses both great erudition and an expansive soul: Pastors who are well-versed in scripture, the humanities, and the sciences, and who serve their congregations as daily conduits within which the wisdom of God and Man merges and re-emerges with strength and vitality.

Progressive Christian Reverends therefore must speak from the pulpit with more than just the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other–an image which strikes much too close to the Bible-pounding preacher of old. Instead, they should be able to move effortlessly from the Gospels, to the Talmud, to Shakespeare, to Carl Jung, to Einstein, to the Newspaper, and back again: so that the teachings of Jesus Christ are re-imagined, refashioned, and retold in ways that can inspire and challenge the mind and spirit of the contemporary parishioner: the individual upon whose shoulders the revitalization of our communities, neighborhoods, families, and sense of purpose rests.

To read our suggestions for how Progressive Christians should think about worship, please go to: How We Worship.