· We share the scriptural experience through testimony.
· We spread out the scriptural story through the church's calendar and we focus on particular stages of the story in particular seasons.
· We enact the salvation of which scripture speaks through the actions and sacraments that Jesus gave to us.
· We see the scriptural faith in the scripturally given symbols of the faith.
This is my dream for evangelical worship: that we will take all these gifts that God has given us to tell the scriptural story so that people will begin to live in that story (inhabit it), and tell that story to others.
B. Evangelical worship is called to tell and show the gospel in and through the life of the church.
This gospel is the 'faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints' (Jude 3). I'd like to make three points in this connection.
(1) Continuity
For few years now I have had a flirtation with the Syrian Orthodox Church. This began when I visited Damascus and joined with the Syrian Church on Palm Sunday. It was a powerful experience being where Ananias and Paul worshipped and hearing the Lord's Prayer sung in Syrian, a dialect of Aramaic, Jesus' own tongue.
Christians now worship all over the world, of course, and in many languages, but this faith once entrusted to the saints is passed on in part by texts that were once for all entrusted to the saints: the Lord's Prayer, the Grace, Songs in Revelation; and it goes back further, into the faith inherited by the apostles - the psalms, the Holy, Holy, Holy, the Aaronic blessing and so on.
My dream for evangelical worship is that our wonderfully gifted song writers will provide contemporary expressions and settings of these Spirit-given texts in charismatic voice.
(2) Commonality
One of the most moving experiences of the Lambeth Conference for me was attending a Eucharist each day prepared by a different Province. There were common shapes to the liturgy, and common meaning to the words, even if in many cases the actual language - Korean, Swahili, Portuguese etc - was beyond me, and there were common actions. It was wide and deep experience of catholicity - of being with other members of the one body of Christ.
My dream for evangelical worship is that our song writers will write more songs that can be used in the common shapes of worship, and that planners of worship will use songs of worship in the ebb and flow of a service rather than just as a block.
