Moving beyond the worship service

This article has been on my mind for a few weeks now.

For centuries, the worship service has been the primary gathering of the Christian church ñ from Catholic mass, to Reformation protestant worship services, to the traditional 1950s-style worship service, to the seeker-sensitive productions of the last two decades, to the more trendy gatherings we see today in emergent churches. I find it remarkable that the worship service has survived the two largest worldview shifts to impact the Western churchóthe protestant Reformation, and the present transition to postmodernism and the emergent church. Our epistemologies have changed, our ecclesiology has changed, our spirituality has changed, our approach to scripture and spiritual authority has changed, but the worship service remains fundamentally the same. We have revamped almost every aspect of how we do church, but not the central gathering, which has remained essentially unchallenged since Constantine…