Putting the “Co” in Corporate
This past weekend I co-led an hour-long ‘affinity group’ for college student worship leaders. Basically, it was a bunch of student leaders from different Baptist Campus Ministries who were put in a room together to discuss worship, their responsibility on their respective leadership teams. The discussion was especially focused on corporate worship versus personal worship, a distinction that I’ve been dwelling on since and the subject of this blog post.
One student rightly observed that worship should be everything that we do, in that everything that we do should be a response to God. From this, I tried to get them to differientiate that from ‘corporate worship’ which is what we do together, and what they are responsible for leading/planning. In the course of the discussion of what ‘corporate worship’ is and why it is important (even though ‘worship should be everything’) it hit me that much of what the students, and sometimes myself, viewed as corporate was highly ‘personal’ and ‘individual’ and not corporate at all. We were focused on leading/planning an event that allowed a group of individuals to worship as individuals. [And perhaps we were equating a certain 'feeling' with 'worship', but I'll save that discussion for another post.]
This line of thinking has caused me to question the model we view as ‘worship’ and its value in facilitating ‘corporate worship.’ Is it corporate just because we are all in the same room? Should corporate worship somehow be something that we do together rather than something we all do at the same time? What would that look like?
