Imagine you’re at a friend’s party one night, where you’re introduced to a man in his late 20s. Let’s call him Rico. You ask him what he does, and he says, “I’m a quarterback.”
As a football fan, you’re immediately interested and begin to ask him questions. “Really,” you say. “Who do you play for?”
“Oh, I’m not on a team,” he responds.
“Well, who did you play for in college?”
Again, Rico answers, “I didn’t play on my college team.”
“How about high school?”
“No, I didn’t play on my high school team.”
At this point, you’re a little puzzled and ask, “So, what team do you or did you play quarterback for?”
“I’ve played quarterback my whole life, but I’ve never been on a football team. Teams are full of hypocrites. I don’t need a team to play.”
“Help me understand. If you’re not on a team, how do you play quarterback, Rico?” you ask.
“While they’re at the stadium playing games, I usually go out in the woods by myself and throw the football through a tire swing. It clears my mind. I feel like I’m connecting to the essence of football. It’s more authentic than those quarterbacks who play on teams.”
The quarterback in this story sounds delusional, doesn’t he? After all, a self-proclaimed quarterback who never joins a team and only plays alone isn’t really a quarterback at all, is he? The lone woodsman claiming to be a quarterback makes about as much sense as a Christian who never attends a church service but only worships alone.
Now, you may be thinking, “Worship is much broader than gathering with God’s people on Sunday.” In one sense, that’s true. All of life should be lived in worshipful response to God’s goodness and grace. The Apostle Paul urges believers to offer their whole life to God as spiritual worship and to do everything including eating and drinking for God’s glory. However, Scripture holds forth a clear expectation for all Christians: God expects His people to worship with His people.
When we say that “every member is a worshipper,” we mean that every Christian should be committed to attending the weekly gathering in order to listen to the Word of Christ with one another, sing with gratitude together, and then walk in wisdom alongside their fellow church members. This is the pattern of the first Christians, who gathered regularly for worship.
A holistic life of Christian worship is only possible within a local church because the church is not “simply a bunch of individual worshippers who happen to be in the same place and time. Individual worship is a subset that flows out of corporate worship,” as David A. Currie writes in “The Big Idea of Biblical Worship.” You can’t offer all of your life to God as worship if you refuse to offer Him Sunday morning to worship with the church.