Journal

Richard Foster on Corporate Worship

Posted on March 21st, 2006, in the small hours

The staff and interns at Kings have been reading Richard Foster's Celebration of Discipline together this term. For the most part it has been challenging, as in "hmmm, I have a long way to go"; but there have also been occasional moments of clarity about things of which, though less articulately, I am already convinced. One of those moments came in reading the chapter on The Discipline of Worship:

When we are truly gathered into worship, things occur that could never occur alone. There is a psychology of the group and yet it is much more, it is divine interpenetration. There is what the biblical writers called koinonia, deep inward felloship in the power of the Spirit.

Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline

The interplay during worship meetings between group psychology and something ineffably more than that is a subject that I have thought a lot about this last year or so; I've been gathering ideas towards a essay on it for a few months. I'm still some way off completion, but I'll put this quote up as a marker in the sand to stimulate me onwards.

Do get in touch if you have any thoughts or other sources on the subject...