in the Spirit-life of Christ’s followers is the need to be connected to other Christ-followers. We are incomplete without one another; our common faith is collectively more than our personal devotion. The service of the body is a greater witness than the efforts of any one part by itself.
It finds fulfillment as it extends itself beyond communal gatherings to permeate every dimension of life. In its broadest sense of meaning, we are reminded that even the most simple day-in-day-out events and activities can be invested with kingdom significance. An even more profound expression is derived from the teachings of Eastern Orthodoxy, wherein this work of the people of God in worship becomes the liturgy after the liturgy—as work on behalf of the world. This lies at the heart of this grand liturgy of the kingdom of God: service to the world co-inheres with service to God in worship. The church is ultimately “a leitourgia, a ministry, a calling to act in this world after the fashion of Christ, to bear testimony to Him and His kingdom.”23
There is, then, an incarnational liturgical vibrancy for followers of Christ as agents of God’s kingdom in the world. Without this liturgical agency on behalf of the world, liturgical expression in communal gathering for worship is incomplete. The two do not diverge one from the other; the liturgy lived in the world for the sake of Christ is a fulfillment of the liturgical celebration of God’s supreme worth and eternal redemptive activity.
Practicing the Reign
The fullness of the concept of liturgy must be reclaimed for the sake of wholeness of the gospel. If allowed to regain its fullness, this term can create space within which Christ’s followers can encounter, respond to, and participate in Christ’s claims upon all realms of life and creation. Liturgy can encompass a wide range of practices in which Christ’s followers participate. From its earliest days to the present, the church has nurtured a rich heritage of various practices intended to enliven the faith.
Practices can be taken to mean “things Christian people do together over time to address fundamental human needs in response to and in the light of God’s active presence for the life of the world in Jesus Christ.”24 A partial catalog of such things includes prayer, reading Scripture, silence and mediation, confession, singing and making music, and fasting. Also, the keeping of Sabbath, a simple water bath to signal repentance, and deliverance remembered around bread and cup are biblically robust practices that lay at the heart of the faith. In the manner of Jesus’ prophetic practice, bringing good news to the poor and announcing release to captives and revealing sight to the blind and freeing those who are oppressed sum up the proclamation of God’s lavish kingdom grace.25
Why not list worship in the above litany of practices? Simply this: while worship may appear in many sources as a single practice among others, it would be more accurate for God’s people to understand worship as the sum total of all practices engaged in faithfully. For the purposes of this book, faithful worship among Christ’s followers is defined as an ongoing and recurring response to the person and work of the triune God, expressed as a discipline of coming to agreement with God about who and what is holy and true and right, with the result being the church enacting and embodying the gospel of God’s kingdom for the glory of God and for the sake of the world.26
For Christians, then, practicing the reign of God is living in the reality of the kingdom of God—expressed in Jesus Christ, empowered by Holy Spirit—present now in but not of the world, in full anticipation of fullness of God’s kingdom to come. Worship faithful to this practice of God’s reign is by necessity specific, exclusive, Christologic, cosmic, and eschatological.27
This worship is specific because it is focused on the one true holy triune God identified in God’s Word in the story of ancient Israel and revealed in Jesus Christ as the Word enfleshed. It is exclusive because it gives no quarter to any other gods regardless of their claims of god-hood; idolatry is unequivocally repudiated. It is Christologic because there is no encounter with God apart from Christ; all that is necessary for worship and life comes through him and him alone. It is cosmic because it acknowledges God’s magnificent sovereignty over all creation, to be made whole under the fullness of God’s reign in Christ upon the appearance of the new heaven and new earth.28 It is eschatological because by participating in the reality of God’s kingdom in the present moment in Christ, the church tells the world the story of its ultimate transformation when the return of Christ signals the end of human-formed history and the commencement of the fullness of God’s glorious eternal reign in Christ.
These kingdom-focused worship practices are interwoven into the pages that follow The purpose is to clearly sound the urgency of the demanding yet necessary endeavor of faithfulness in all things—and in particular to the church’s witness through its allegiance, affections, and actions.
1. Col 1:15–16.
2. Col 2:9b, 10b, 15.
3. Eph 1:19–20, 22–23.
4. Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 51.
5. Mark 11:10.
6. The New Testament uses the Greek βασιλεία, βασιλείαν and βασιλείας.
7. Matt 3:2 and 10:7 respectively. In these instances the Greek verb ἤγγικεν is from ἐγγίζω and is rendered to make near or to come near, or most properly has drawn close.
8. In order, Matt 5:10, Luke 17:21b, and John 18.36a. In these examples, the word is is translated from the Greek ἐστί and rendered as are, belong, call, come, or consist; it is in the third person singular present indicative of εἰμί, the verb meaning I am, or exist.
9. Matt 21:43.
10. Matt 26:29, Luke 22:18, and Mark 14:25. In Matt and Mark, the phrase ἕως τῆς ἡμέρας—until the day is the operative qualifier.
11. Origen, Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew.
12. Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth, 49.
13. Isa 53:3a, 7a.
14. John 1:11.
15. Mark 12:28–34 (also Matt 22:15–22).
16. Deut 6:4–9 contains the opening portion of the Shema, a prayer traditionally used in Jewish worship and personal devotion; it is an affirmation
