Participatory Worship
All-Persons’ Gifts Leading Worship and Service
Participatory Worship
Ancient churches met mainly around dinner tables in homes and common spaces. All members—not just trained, paid professionals—contributed gifts revealed by the Holy Spirit for the benefit of the community. All members regardless of status participated in shaping their community’s life of worship and service. Their gatherings realized to a remarkable degree the scriptural testimony to the “priesthood of all believers” including shared ministry without gender specificity.
BACKGROUND: The New Testament “ekklesia” met in home-based congregations where God’s love and reconciliation were to be made visible to the world. There were, and were to be, radically different from existing ancient religious or cultic institutions.
According to the teaching recorded in the New Testament, God’s new creation had the potential and the intention to impact every person within an ekklesia-community with a rich endowment of mutually dependent and complementary spiritual gifts. Accordingly, all people’s gifts were to shape and lead the life and service of the congregation.
The New Testament practice of participatory worship utilizes every-person in the “body” with gifts empowered by the Holy Spirit. The Apostle Paul protested when richer, more socially prominent members of the Corinthian Church began to take their meals first and separately, depriving the rest of the Body of Christ from full participation. This violated New Testament practices highlighted during table fellowship of participatory worship in the context of radical (neo-familial) kinship, while causing internal resentments that would fester and undermine the unity of the body in love.
For today, full gifts-utilization of all members can provide liberation from the economic division-of-labor whereby professionalized and hierarchical “cleargy-laity” distinction tacitly relegates most “church” members to beneficiary participant-donor positions. According to this mind-set, many congregation members consider themselves analogously to customers of a commercial business, rather than full members of a new family in Christ.