There continues to this day to be a debate over worship and church pertaining to the idea of seeker-friendly services. But I wonder what all the fuss is about. The Apostle Paul wrote to many churches in his letters almost two thousand years ago, and he was clearly in favor of seeker services! So, if we are going to be biblical, we must affirm the necessity of seeker services as an essential element to church.
But…if we are going to be biblical, we must understand what Paul means by seekers.
You see, Paul tells us in Romans 3:11 that “no one seeks after God.” So, if we are going to be biblical, a “seeker,” biblically defined, is a believer! The unregenerate do not seek after God in Paul’s sense of the word.
Therefore, we should promote seeker services, but rightly defining the term: not as a worship service to entertain the goats, but a God-centered time of worship for true seekers, viz., those who truly seek after God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.
And let’s not forget that a God-centered worship service need not be indiscernible to the unbeliever who finds himself among worshipping believers (1 Corinthians 14:23-24).
I love it.
Bravo! Great post Danny.
Yes, although the context is referring to the church speaking in tongues, not about the contemporary shifts to gear the service toward the unregenerate.
Yes. The context of 1 Corinthians 14 is about speaking in tongues when the covenant community meets, but the principle behind the encouragement Paul is speaking into that context is that our worship services should be understood by those who come whether believer or not.
There are those who believe a worship service must be “geared toward the unregenerate” in such a way that functionally it is no longer a “worship” service. These folks do this in part because of the “understandability” factor.
What we see in 1 Corinthians 14 is Paul holding an “understandability” principle, but in such a way that the focus on worship remains intact.
The principle that everything should be done for the edification of the body is neither out of accord with the idea that worship of God is our main focus when we gather together nor with the idea that unbelievers can be welcomed into our worship services.
So the point I was trying to make with my terse comment could basically be summarized as this . . . those “contemporary shifts to gear the service toward the unregenerate” may be a misunderstanding of how God works because it certainly seems Paul believed all an unbeliever needed when he attended a worship service was the work of the Spirit and to hear the truth in a language he understood.
Agreed.