I. Howard Mrshall on Worship

David Couchman has a blog posting: Worship isn’t what you thought it was. His post is a quotation from Howard Marshall, Professor of NT at Aberdeen. If we took what he says on board, it would be revolutionary for our churches:

Although the whole activity of Christians can be described as the service of God and they are engaged throughout their lives in worshipping him, yet this vocabulary is not applied in any specific way to Christian meetings. It is true that Christian meetings can be described from the outside as occasions for worshipping God and also that elements of service to God took place in them, but the remarkable fact is that Christian meetings are not said to take place specifically in order to worship God and the language of worship is not used as a means of referring to them or describing them. To sum up what goes on in a Christian meeting as being specifically for the purpose of ‘worship’ is without New Testament precedent. ‘Worship’ is not an umbrella-term for what goes on when Christians gather together.