The Metropolis of Worship
Like other “worship leaders,” I walk a fine line of terminology when describing the area of ministry where I serve. Worship. Musical worship. Worship-through-music. And I’m everything from a “worship leader” to a “lead worshiper” to the “guy facilitating worship.” It gets a bit ridiculous sometimes, but I try to avoid the theological pitfalls of the vernacular.
I choose to be careful (even if it means being wordy) because I know that Christians vary in their understanding of the word worship. For many Christians, that word refers to the musical portion of a church service, to the exclusion of other service elements (let alone other components of life). Other Christians emphasize that the entirety of life is worship; it’s not something that happens during a church service, but on the other six days of the week. A lot of books written about Christian worship prefer this latter take–they often proof-text the beginning of Romans 12 for their purposes. In this sense, sleeping is worship. Studying is worship. Long walks? Sewing? Kickboxing? It’s all worship.
So what is worship, really? Is it something I do with my guitar and voice, or is it good friendship, helping those in need and loving God’s creation? Can I categorically separate any of this?
Yes and no.
A good image to understand the relationship between worship services and a life of worshipful actions is the metropolis. We know that metropolitan areas are never constructed around a particular suburb; they’re built around the urban center (hence sub-urb). The Cleveland-metro area is all Cleveland, in a sense–the suburbs are connected to the city. But when it needs to be specified, we have the terms proper and metro–anything within city limits is Cleveland-proper, while suburbs sit in Cleveland-metro.
While no metaphor is perfect, this analogy helps us to understand worship. Consider the terms proper and metro: In the metropolis of worship, there is a worship-proper which consists of seeking God in prayer, learning the Judeo-Christian story as told in Scripture, and talking with God through the mysteriously vulnerable language of song–all of those “churchy” things. These things are the core, the urban center, of the worship metropolis. From this core, Christians “commute” from worship-proper out to worship-metro – to the suburbs of the Christian life. Suburban sprawl is a good thing in this context–it’s called building God’s Kingdom.
Again, no metropolitan area is built around a suburb. The urban center predicates the suburb’s existence and quality. Take away the city and the suburb is just some town in the middle of a field. If a person only hangs out in the suburbs and never steps into the city, that person has a distorted idea as to how and why the suburbs exist.
The same applies to worship. Volunteering at a soup kitchen is worship (in the suburban sense) if and when the action is committed by someone who participates in worship-proper (someone who comes to the suburbs from the city) because the action is a sincere overflow of a relationship with God that is cultivated in worship-proper, the center of all worship. Such is the difference between “doing good” and “building the Kingdom,” between “social activism” and “enacting God’s heart for the needy.”
A worshiper can’t base his or her entire Christian walk around residency in worship suburbia (worshipful actions) to the exclusion of worship-proper (communication with God and time spent in Christian community). In the same way, a Christian can’t claim an entire life of worship if they never set aside time to connect with God through prayer, teaching and the like.
Maybe it seems odd or wrong to you that a song could be elevated to such importance (as to be called worship) when there are so many practical needs in a world where people are starving, being abused, and dying every day. Who has time to sing, right? Yes, if all we ever did was sing, we’d have a problem, certainly. But not singing at all is just as worrisome. There is something about giving God the song in our lungs that postures us to appreciate him and cooperate with his Spirit, and that cannot be underestimated.
Worship begins when we spend time with God’s Spirit. Seeking God, especially through something as vulnerable and participatory as prayer-through-songs, provides an irreplaceable foundation for the worshipful life. We set that time aside for spiritual surgery, if you will–letting the Spirit have access to us in a unique way. From there, we don’t just settle for urban gluttony, seeking an experience while ignoring the outside world like consumers. No, we take it to the suburbs, building God’s Kingdom in a way that testifies to the spiritual surgery we’ve undergone. In this sense, you could say that worship begins in the city and lasts through the suburban commute.
Paul Glavic is a writer and worship leader in Portland, Oregon. He attempts to use phrases from the video game NBA Jam (”He can’t buy a bucket!”) in everyday situations. 
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Great word, Paul. This is a terrific way to bring into context the term that we have been using to describe our church… “externally-focused.” We absolutely want to have a sense of vision for what lies outside the boundaries of our various campuses. But the term also seems exclusionary. We must be cautious not to lose site of the “internal” that requires our focus as well. That is where the fire is lit that can bring light and warmth to the hearts of those who become the beneficiaries of our external focus.
Worship indeed has an external component, but it will be short-lived and become flat in its effectiveness if the internal component is not fueled.
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