At the Evangelical Ministry Assembly in 1994, Mark Ashton and David Peterson put a mental grenade in my head which has been going off ever since. This article is my attempt to gather up some of the pieces.
The word 'worship' has taken on a new meaning. 20 years ago, if the guy up front said: 'Now we're going to have a time of worship,' no one would have known what to expect. No one ever 'had a time of worship' back then.
Now we all know the drill. We are going to stand up for quite a long time and sing contemporary Christian songs, perhaps interspersed with brief prayers or short readings from the Bible, often with hands in the air. That's a 'worship time'. Now, I quite like a lot of the new music and I have no objection to raising hands. But I do want to examine the idea that this is what 'worship' means.
