ST NICOLAS, NEWBURY

HOME GROUP QUESTIONS

PURPOSE-DRIVEN CHURCH - SESSION 2

INTRODUCTION

From God's point of view, the job of the church is to transform people so that they reflect the life of Jesus. I've found it helpful to think about this in five areas:

These five areas of church life reflect the priorities set out in Rick Warren's 'The Purpose-Driven Church', a book which has proved very effective in helping churches all over the world. One of Rick's key points in all this is that a healthy church includes each of these five features held in balance: "Church growth is the natural result of church health. But church health can only occur when our message is biblical and our mission is balanced. Each of the five New Testament purposes of the church must be in equilibrium with the others for health to occur".

2: HELPING PEOPLE TO WORSHIP

This is the second in a series of five studies designed to help us look at each of these purposes of the church in turn.

1. What comes into your mind when you hear the word 'worship'? If you had to sum up what it is in a single sentence, what would you say?

2. Former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple put it like this in his book on John's Gospel: "Worship is the submission of all our nature to God." He then went on to explain that "It is the quickening of conscience by his holiness, the nourishment of the mind with his truth, the purifying of imaginations with his beauty, the opening of the heart to his love, the surrender of the will to his purpose, and all of this gathered up into adoration, the most selfless emotion of which our nature is capable and therefore the chief remedy for that self-centredness which is our original sin." What do you make of this?

3. Rick Warren defines worship as "expressing our love for God for who he is, what he's said, and what he's doing". Going with this, what would you say are the ingredients that need to be in place for worship to happen?

4. Have a look at Romans 12:1-2. What do we discover about worship here? In the light of this, how do you think Paul would gauge the value and effectiveness of a service or 'time of worship'?

5. Turn to John 4:23-24. What do you think it means to worship 'in spirit and in truth'? How does what Jesus says about worshippers follow from his statement that 'God is Spirit'?

6. Turn now to Acts 17:24-25. Given what Paul says here, what do you think are the advantages and disadvantages of worshipping in church buildings?

7. How about our buildings - the church and church hall - at St Nicolas? What helps and what hinders 'the kind of worship the Father seeks'? (As an aside, you might like to reflect on the extent to which the plans for reordering the interior of the church will deal with what you think about this.)

8. Coming back to Rick Warren, here's something else he says about worship: "More people are won to Christ by feeling God's presence than by all of our apologetics arguments combined". How do you respond to this statement?

9. What has been your most profound and life-changing experience of worship so far? Can you identify the ingredients that made it so? How might such experiences happen more regularly at St Nicolas?

10. Have a look at 1 Corinthians 14:18-25. Setting to one side the particular issue about the gift of tongues, what can we learn from what Paul says about how we should behave for the sake of 'unbelievers' here?

11. If you had to pick just a couple of things for us to start doing or seek to do better in the area of helping people to worship, what would they be? Please make a note of your suggestions so that they can be passed to the SPEAR team.

12. Spend some time praying for this aspect of our life at St Nicolas and for the decisions we need to take about the future.

David Stone
20 May 2008