Evangelistic worship

I'm going to briefly comment on this:

http://www.upper-register.com/papers/evangelistic-worship.pdf

At a very generic level I guess I agree with Lee. Worship is primarily for worshipers. And I also think there's something to be said for giving unbelievers a window into the life of believers. That gives them an idea of what they're missing. Allows them to contrast the outsider experience with the insider experience.

That said, I have a number of specific disagreements with Lee’s position:

1. I don't think a worship service should be a priori directed at one group rather than another. Instead, I think it should take its cue from the sermon text(s). Whatever the sermon text happens to address will, in turn, address the audience on those terms. And that varies from one sermon text to another. That's what ought to give direction to the service.

And if the music and the prayers are coordinated with the sermon text, then it's all of a piece.

2. The NT church was a missionary church. That's in contrast to the old-covenant community.

3. You can't have "covenantal worship" until you have a church, until you have members, until you have Christians. What happens when you're starting from scratch?

4. We need to distinguish between Biblical jargon and liturgical "in-house" jargon. Liturgical "in-house" jargon is often a traditional reflection of a particular time and place, culture, ethnicity, nationality, &c. Making the liturgical language less provincial isn't making it less Biblical, for, in many cases, it wasn't specifically Biblical in the first place.

5. Lee uses Exodus as a template, but that's generally dealing with ritual purity or cultic holiness, not circumcision of the heart.

6. Apropos (5), he talks about the "people of God," but many (most?) Israelites were nominal believers at best. Worship was more a matter of doing rather than believing. You were born into the old covenant community. You had to obey the ceremonial law. That had nothing to do with being genuinely devout. Of heartfelt worship. Rather, it was formal. External observances.

"Circumcision of the heart" was the ideal, but that wasn't prerequisite for participating in the public worship of God.

7. Lee's position sounds more classically Baptist than Presbyterian. Congregations are generally composed of families. They attend church as a family unit. This often means that one or more family members are pious, while the remaining family members attend church because the pious family members attend, and they do things as a family. Nominally religious or irreligious family members go out of deference to their devout family members. So it's not a cut-n-dried contrast between believing insiders and unbelieving outsiders. Unbelievers are normally present given the familial structure of human nature. God works within the social bonds that God created.

8. And that's reinforced by infant baptism. Apparently, Lee is still Presbyterian. But babies aren't baptized because babies are believers. And baptism doesn't make them believers. Rather, that assumes a familial model of the church. It distinguishes the visible church from the invisible church. Church membership is partly structured according to the natural family unit. And, at a practical level, that dynamic is also operative in Baptist and Anabaptist settings. To a great extent the ecclesial framework parallels the familial framework.

9. Some family members grow into the faith while others outgrow the faith. But until they exclude themselves, they are usually included at some level.

10. I also don't think we "enter God's presence" in some qualitatively distinct way when we go to church. Christians are always in God's presence. It's just that we set aside time and space to screen out some of the distractions so that we can focus on communing with God.

The notion of "entering into God's presence" makes sense in the context of cultic holiness, where there's a ritual contrast between the sacred and the profane, but there's not much of that in NT piety.