Everything is at Stake

Everything is at stake in worship.  “The urgent, indeed troubling, message of Scripture is that everything that matters is at stake in worship.”¹  In his compelling book The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice, Fuller professor Mark Labberton shares his journey as a pastor who discovered in the worshiping life of his congregation—and across the pages of scripture—why this statement is true. I’ve written about worship and justice in the context of youth ministry in the past, and was thankful to finally read this book for more insights.

Labberton argues that in church culture—especially American Protestant church culture, and even more especially White American Protestant church culture—there’s no apparent connection between worship and justice at all.

In contrast, “Worship turns out to be the dangerous act of waking up to God and to the purposes of God in the world, and then living lives that actually show it” (p 13). Especially as we embody the heart of God toward the poor and marginalized of the world.  Living God’s call to justice is, in fact, the dangerous result of worship.

Sadly, we’ve largely missed the point in our worship and our arguments about worship (which are really mostly about ourselves), and have fallen asleep to the needs of the world around us—the very needs that worship is supposed to stir us to rise up and meet. In fact, Labberton urges, “Biblical worship that finds God will also find our neighbor” (p 21).  Rather than false worship, which speaks in God’s name but fails to show God’s life to the world, true worship reorders our reality to see that justice and worship cannot be separated.  Tomorrow I’ll share more from Labberton about what we can do with that reality.

1. Mark Labberton, The Dangerous Act of Worship: Living God’s Call to Justice (Downers Grove: IVP, 2007), 13. [↩]

©2010 Fuller Youth Institute