The following long-form paper was written for a class with David Fitch on “The Mission-Shaped Church.” This project was the beginning of having my eyes opened to the blind spots in my own worship tradition, the central place of historic liturgy in the life of the church, the possibility of blending of Eucharistic and charismatic worship. We’ve been working this out in practice over the last year at my local church, and if you’re interested in specifics, head on over here.

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How was worship this week? Was it good for you? Was it inspiring? Such questions are a familiar rubric for many Christians in the modern western world. Clergy may lament the consumerist nature of these evaluations (particularly when coming from dissatisfied congregants), but the same pastors are all too guilty of imposing customer-satisfaction evaluations on worship leaders, Sunday services, even themselves. Which begs the question: is worship supposed to be ‘good?’ And if so, how might we measure it? These are settled questions for many, not least in the worship recording industry, a phenomenon which my own worship tradition helped foment, and yet it was this very question that gave rise to my worship tradition, the Vineyard Church.