‘Keep us from just singing’: Worship and justice belong together

by Tim Baker.

The title for this comes from Tim Hughes’ worship song, God of justice, which ends with an invitation to ‘keep us from just singing, move us into action, we must go, we must go’. A lot of my work involves inviting churches to think about how they can engage with justice meaningfully, and doing so in the context of leading worship (typically on a Sunday morning). I work for a charity called All We Can — a Christian international development agency with a passion for partnership.

I wonder what the word ‘partnership’ means for you? For many of us it conjures positive images of togetherness and community and trust, but I expect most of us also have a negative story to tell.

It’s a word that covers all manner of sins, greed and power-politics. However, it’s a word we are committed to at All We Can (at least until we can think of a better one!) because it is what enables us to move from leading-from-the-front when it comes to tackling poverty around the world, and focus more on enabling people, communities and whole nations to be in charge of their own transformation and development.

So I’d encourage us to think about committing to partnership in our worship, in our justice-seeking, and in our own lives.

In our worship, we are seeing this change happening already in many churches — as we move away from an assumption that worship is done for us, or delivered to us, by experts, to a recognition (or re-recognition) that we all have a part to play. Worship isn’t produced and consumed, it’s shared. As we have been reminded, liturgy literally means: ‘the work of the people’. That’s about all of us.

In our justice-seeking, we can most effectively see this as an extension of our worship if we commit to the same principle of partnership — not that we ‘fix’ the people in our communities or ‘export’ our ideas into the world. But we enable local people with lived experience to be in the driving seat of change.

Not the gift of a shoebox, or the sponsorship of a child, but the support for a community to set its own agenda, to lead its own transformation. As Victor, the leader All We Can’s partner in Malawi would say: ‘everything local is sustainable’, and local people have a PhD in their community, so we should probably listen to him.

When we route our action in worship, it changes the way we ‘do justice’ at all. We listen more, we wait for the movement of the spirit, we learn. We are prepared to put the communities we serve in the driving seat of change.

So yes, Lord, we pray: keep us from just singing, move us into action, we must go — but not as heroes, rather as partners, as listeners, as enablers. Not as messiahs, but as a people joining in with the work of The Messiah, who is still at work through The Spirit in our worship, in the places where we live, and around the world.

You can find out more about All We Can’s work here: allwecan.org.uk

To Consider:

• Should worship always be led by the ‘person up front’?
• Think of ways in which group preparation may be effective.
• Would participation in this way help churches to grow?
• Read: Isaiah 58:6-12

We are pleased to continue our partnership with Spectrum, a community of Christians of all denominations which encourages groups and individuals to explore the Christian faith in depth. This year the study papers are on the theme of ‘Heartfelt Worship’ by Rev’d Jan Berry (author and former principal of Luther King House, Manchester) and Tim Baker (Local Preacher, All We Can’s Churches and Volunteer’s Manager and contributor to the Twelve Baskets Worship Resources Group). This is the second of six coming through the year.