BY DWIGHT NELSON

avid James Randolph in his book, God's Party, tells of a festive circus parade that wound gaily through the streets of Milan, Italy. The crowds cheered, the clowns laughed, the animals roared. Suddenly, without warning, one of the giant circus attractions—a huge lumbering elephant—veered out of the parade and plodded straight for the cathedral. Before his handlers could react, the elephant loped through the open church doors, wandered up the center aisle, blew his trunk-trumpet a few salty blasts, then swung his wrinkled head around and meandered back to the parade.

Randolph wonders: When it comes to worship, are we like pious pachyderms—elephants in church? Do we lurch through the open doors on Sabbath morning, make a few noises, swing our heads around in the pew to observe the congregation, and when the hour is up plod back out to resume our place in life's noisy parade? Elephants in church—are we?

Certainly not, if God has His way!

In a midnight dream to King Solomon, God painted a compelling word picture of people gathered in worship: "If My people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land" (2 Chron. 7:14, NKJV).*

While we've often used these words as an appeal to corporate prayer and confession, it is just as true that God here describes corporate worship as well—that collective communal experience where people gather in His presence to humble themselves before Him, seeking His face in praise and prayer and penitence.

Did you catch how God describes the community that gathers to worship Him? He declares them to be "My people who are called by My name." And if people are called by the same name, the world over, they're known as "family." So when God looks down upon a community of people gathered together in His name to worship Him, He calls us His family.

Elephants in church? Hardly! Worship is the gathering of the family of God. What an exalted status! When the doors to our churches are thrown wide every seventh-day Sabbath, they are opened to the children of the same Father, called by His name.

No wonder Paul is so unequivocal in declaring: "For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, from whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named" (Eph. 3:14,15, emphasis supplied). Sharing the same Father, we bear the same name—His.

Growing up with my younger brother and sister, I remember the brave counsel of my mother—God bless her!—who never gave up hoping that some word of advice would stem any outlandish behavior. Before we raced out of the door to a playmate's house or a neighborhood party, she'd place her hands on our shoulders and look into our eyes. "Remember who you are, children," she'd say. "Remember you're a Nelson." And loving our father and mother dearly, wanting to bear their name proudly, we were truly at our best behavior—for a while. Until we forgot whose name we shared and to whose family we belonged. Then it was pretty much down hill from there.

"If My people who are called by My name" is God's gentle way of placing His hand upon our shoulders and looking into our hearts with the reminder—before we fly out the door to life's parade—"Remember who you are, children, remember you are Mine." Corporate worship is the powerful and perennial reminder that indeed we are all family—His family, bearing His name.

That it comes every seventh day of the week is a testimony to our childlike need to be reminded. Choosing to live without that weekly corporate family time is one reason so many grown-up children have ended up living their lives with nary a thought for their Father and for His name they once chose to bear. They no longer remember—because they no longer gather with the family in worship. And sadly, it really is pretty much down hill from there.

We Don't Do Well Alone
Over the years of pastoring, I've met men and women and young adults who tried to live apart from their childhood community of faith, who sought to go their personal and professional way without their once-upon-a-time family on their minds anymore. I've witnessed their valiant efforts to carve out a private, solitary existence in an often cold and heartless world. Some have markedly succeeded professionally and financially—but between the lines of their confessions I've read the ache and loneliness of their hearts.

To those same people comes a tender appeal from the Father whose name they once bore, an invitation contained in a single promise: "God sets the solitary in families"( Ps. 68:6). The deepest thirst of our postmodern third millennial world is the longing for community. A new generation no longer seeks propositional truth or theological argument first. Because, most of all, this is a world consumed with its thirst for community, for belonging.

"God sets the solitary in families." Now more than ever He is seeking to slake the heart thirst of this postmodern generation. Now more than ever the worshiping community must throw wide its doors to the solitary who seek to belong, and who in following after that longing are but obeying the guiding impulses of God's Spirit toward God's family.

Whether we've wandered away like the prodigal son or remained at home like the older brother, we all desperately need our Father and His family. "God sets the solitary in families." And there—whether within a small circle of eight, an active congregation of 100, or a mighty celebration of 3,000—in shared corporate worship we can experience the community with our Father and His family for which we were created, and for which our hearts long.

But corporate worship is more than the joy of finding community and not being alone once a week. The writer of Hebrews admonished: "Let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching" (Heb. 10:24,25). When I gather with you in worship, something real and deep is conveyed to my heart and life from simply being with you and God in that hour of shared worship—clearly something I desperately need and will dangerously neglect, if I decide to go it alone. What is it?

Dwight L. Moody, the great American evangelist, was visiting one evening in the home of a businessman who asked: "Isn't it enough that I worship God on my own each day? Why then would I need to interrupt my life and attend a church week after week?" Moody listened without comment. Finally he leaned over, picked up the fireplace tongs, reached into the roaring flames and pulled out a single burning coal onto the stone hearth. While the two men watched in silence, that red hot coal separated from the other fiery embers slowly began to dim its glow and lose its fire—until finally in a last wisp of smoke nothing was left but the cold, charred remains. The question was answered.

"Let us consider one another in order to stir up [as in a fire] love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together [and removing ourselves from the other embers], as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching."

Quiet nature walks and private prayer retreats—as beneficial as they are for soul care—were never meant to replace the fiery contagion of "assembling ourselves together" from Sabbath to Sabbath in corporate family worship before our Father.

Why? Because it is in community with other God-seekers that doubting faith is strengthened, lagging zeal is reignited, private hopes are publicly inspired, dwindling confidence made bold again. God's Edenic pronouncement is still true: "It is not good that man [and woman] should be alone" (Gen. 2:18). As Paul Tournier observed, "There are two things we cannot do alone—one is to be married, and the other is to be a Christian." We were made for each other, created to pursue Him together, created for the very worshiping community He still calls family, "My people who are called by My name."

And towering at the fiery heart of this community of worship stands the cross of Christ. "You who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ" (Eph. 2:13). "Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. . . . For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you. . . . By his wounds you have been healed" (1 Pet. 2:10, 21, 23, NRSV).

Through His crimson wounds at Calvary God has healed a menagerie of unlikely candidates for His family—red and yellow, black and white, male and female, poor and rich, educated and illiterate, young and aged. When we gather in all our disparity each Sabbath, isn't that very act of community worship a compelling testimony to our broken and fragmented world? For if God through Christ can create community out of sinners like you and me, then surely His grace can do the same for "every nation, tribe, tongue, and people" (Rev. 14:6).

No wonder God calls His worshiping community to be a witnessing community, too!

What God is After
Philip Yancey tells how "the composer Igor Stravinsky once wrote a new piece that contained a difficult violin passage. After several weeks of rehearsal the solo violinist came to Stravinsky and said that he could not play it. He had given it his best effort but found the passage too difficult, even unplayable. Stravinsky replied, ‘I understand that. What I am after is the sound of someone trying to play it.'"

Perhaps that's what God is after, too—a community and family on earth humbly and faithfully "trying" to play the composition of His grace—in their worship and in their witness. "Enfeebled and defective as it may appear, the church is the one object upon which God bestows in a special sense His supreme regard. It is the theater of His grace, in which He delights to reveal His power to transform hearts."

"The theater of His grace"—what a stirring portrayal of what God calls His church to be. It isn't perfect solos or flawless accompaniments for which the Father waits. Surely His deeper passion is that His people who are called by His name will not only share their Father's heart in worship, but will also live out their Father's love in witness.

And what shall be our daily witness, we who worship weekly in God's family? Two words may suffice—two words that are the universal language of family, especially families who, like God, have runaway children. Two simple words, one single invitation: "Come home."

No wonder our Bibles end with them (see Rev. 22:17.)

But then, what would you expect of a waiting Father and a worshiping family who don't want to go home alone?

*Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are from the New King James Version.

QUESTIONS FOR SHARING:
1. In respect to worship, how is our behavior sometimes like that of the elephant in the story?
2. Why is corporate worship important? How do we take this message to those who want to go it alone?
3. What does the Stravinsky illustration mean to you, personally? What should it mean to us as a church?

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¹ Quoted in Philip Yancey, Church: Why Bother? (Zondervan, 1998), p 37.

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Dwight Nelson is senior pastor of the Pioneer Memorial Church at Andrews University in Berrien Springs, Michigan.