The debate has resurfaced again about the propriety of the use of the word "worship" to describe things the church does when it gathers. This time it was triggered because some
Sydney Anglican Evangelical types invited a
Sovereign Grace Ministries type to speak at a TWIST conference. The trail began when my wife saw something in a
friend's blog, and you can see some of the resurfacing
here and
here. Part of the argument is around the use (or lack thereof) of the Greek word
proskynein which is often translated in English as
worship. The argument basically says that because we don't see
proskynein used in association with the assemblies of the church, therefore we shouldn't use the English word
worship to describe singing or other activities in the assemblies, or to describe the assemblies in general. Pardon my disrespectfulness in all this, but it just seems like a no-brainer. Apart from the issues of semantic range of overlap between words in different languages, how odd it seems that someone can argue from silence that Christians don't worship God when they gather, even though the Bible does give examples of and exhortations to worship by individuals and assemblies in the OT, Jesus is worshipped in the Gospels, Paul as an apostle can still worship in Jerusalem (
Acts 24:11), Jesus is to be worshipped by angels (
Hebrews 1:6), and there are the great assemblies of worship in the book of Revelation (eg
4:10,
5:14,
7:11, etc). And on top of that, in the midst of one of the few sections which specifically talk about what happens when Christians gather in their Lord's Day assemblies,
1 Corinthians 14:24-25 talks about an unbeliever coming amongst them, being convinced by the believers, and then responding in worship, presumably a very fitting response amongst those other believers. And yet it is as if some want to say that unbeliever would be the only one worshipping because all the believers certainly wouldn't be worshipping during one of their assemblies??? Anyhow, for some reason this inspired me to sketch a cartoon about this passage and here it is :P
