There is a difference between what the Church is and what the Church does.
When we focus on what the Church does, people will often ask if the Church exists primarily to care for and/or disciple the Body of Christ, or if it exists primarily for the world, either through acts of justice and/or evangelism. All of these are important matters, but the truth is that the church exists for the glory of God. This is the ontology of the Church. In other words, it is what makes the Church the Church. The Church is the community who worships in response to the grace and revelation of God as revealed in Christ Jesus. When we speak of worship, we are not speaking of something that we “value,” rather we are speaking about our essence, about what or who we are. Worship comes before value, action, or even spiritual formation (though the impact is often felt in the overflow of all three of these areas). As James K. A. Smith notes, “The point of worship is not formation; rather, formation is an overflow effect of our encounter with the Redeemer in praise and prayer, adoration and communion.”1
When we begin with the question of what the church does, we will inevitably focus on what makes our church different from other churches. Each church, of course, is unique precisely because it is made up of different people with different gifts in communities with different needs. Something different emerges, however, when we start with the question of what the Church is. When we come to the realization that the Church is the worshipping community of God, we begin our thinking from a place of unity whereby we, at All Souls, are reminded weekly that we are gathered not only with each other but with the church across the street and on the other side of the world; with the church from centuries past and the church of the future; with the saints on earth and the saint, angels, and archangels in heaven. We all are united for one purpose: to glorify God. With this unity in mind, we offer the following three words which converge in our worship of God of All Souls. These three things existed together in unity at the Church’s beginning and we desire to see them flow together in our day and in our congregational life of worship.
Scripture
At All Souls we place a high value on the reading and preaching of Scripture. Both reading and preaching Scripture are acts act of worship which inform us, but more importantly, form us as the people of God as Jesus, the Divine Word – the Word made flesh (John 1:14) – speaks to us through the very Scripture which testifies about him (John 5:46-47). Scripture is unlike any other book. It is a living book through which the living God speaks to us as we read and precisely for this reason is authoritative. When we read scripture, we read about Jesus. In ways often not at first, or perhaps even usually obvious to us, all of Scriptures testifies about Jesus. In reading the Bible, we read of Jesus’ birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and healing ministry, for example, but we also read about how Jesus reads. Jesus was an interpreter of Scripture. He would often say, “you have heard it said…but I tell you” (See Matthew 5, for several examples of this). Here Jesus is interpreting Scripture in a particular way. We value study in general, and study of Scripture in particular. This too, is an act of worship. As Evagrius Ponticus writes, “one who prays truly will be a theologian, and one who is a theologian will pray truly.” As we come together around the Scripture, we read about Jesus, and aim to read like Jesus, but we also read with Jesus in our midst. This is not always obvious to us, but our eyes are often opened to this reality in the breaking of the bread (Luke 24). For this reason, we respond to Scripture at the Lord’s Table.
Sacrament
The book of common prayer defines sacraments as “outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual grace, given by Christ as sure and certain means by which we receive that grace” (BCP 1979, 857). At All Souls we, along with the Church through the millennia, believe that the Jesus is at work in ways we cannot see through ordinary things like bread, wine, and water. Our church is Table-Centered, meaning that the Eucharist is the height of our service and all that we do centers around and points to the Lord’s Table. Another way of thinking about this is that Jesus is the center of all that we do because, in some wonderful and mysterious way, we meet Jesus at the Table. When we come to the Table, we, like the children of Israel who ate mana (Hebrew for “what is it?”) in the desert (Ex. 16), ingest mystery. Somehow, through this act of ingesting bread and wine, we come in contact with the real presence of Jesus. The Table also reminds us that we have been healed through Jesus’ brokenness and self-giving. As we encounter Jesus at his Table, we are fed and nourished to be the Body of Christ for the sake of the world.
Spirit
At All Souls we want to welcome the life-giving and unpredictable Breath of the Holy Spirit in our midst as we worship. We want to be interruptible. We believe that the Spirit gives gifts to God’s people for the building up of the Church (1 Corinthians 12) and speaks through all members of the Body of Christ in worship (Acts 2:16-21). We want to foster an environment where, as God is speaking to people within our church, we give space to both listen and respond to what the Spirit is saying. We welcome the gifts and life of the Spirit whenever we gather. We also see, both biblically and historically, that the fire of the Spirit is a boundary burning fire which both dignifies our differences while simultaneously removing the boundaries of divisions we create, such as the boundaries of race, gender, and age. Central to our worship is the act of praying and waiting in anticipation for the Spirit to move within and among the worshipping community.
1 James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom; Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Cultural Liturgies Volume 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2009), 150.