The Aims of Adventist Worship
“Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi.”
(“What regulates worship, regulates belief, regulates life.”)
–An aphorism derived from the teaching of Prosper of Aquitaine in the fifth century
A recent Religion News Service story reported on research finding that the most popular contemporary worship songs come from just four Charismatic megachurches.[1] According to one of the researchers, all four teach that “God becomes present in a ‘meaningful and powerful way’ when the congregation sings a particular style of worship song.” And it seems that these songs dominate worship sets in churches because they dominate music streaming playlists in homes.
Seventh-day Adventists have historically drawn on and profited from the worship songs of Christians with whom we have certain disagreements. Take, for example, “Faith of Our Fathers,” a Roman Catholic hymn, and “Spirit of the Living God,” Pentecostal. But beyond checking lyrics for doctrinal alignment, we have struggled to grasp what is spiritually at stake in diverse worship music practices.
At one extreme, some Adventists think that, as long as the lyrics are consistent with our beliefs, we can adopt whatever worship songs the people happen to feel best help them connect with God. Yet this approach effectively privileges the human mind (the words) over the human body (the music and associated practices) in our spiritual intuition. Those at the other extreme make the same implicit move by teaching that there is one true music theory that worship must embody lest activity in a specific region of the brain, which they construe as the physical location of our mental connection with God, be disrupted. These misunderstandings result in practices that tacitly undermine the biblical wholistic understanding of human nature by treating the embodied experience of worship as, at best, only significant in terms of its impact on the mental state the worshipper.
The two major Christian worship traditions—the Catholic and the Charismatic—treat the bodily experience of the worshipper as deeply spiritual. Charismatic doctrine has it that we connect to God when he is present in our bodily expressions of worship, which they feel when time seems to stop as the worship music gets especially intense. Pentecostals, Charismatics, and many non-denominational churches plan enthusiastic worship services to afford the worshippers that experience. On the other hand, high church sacramentalism has it that we encounter God's presence via embodied means of grace, which convey God's timeless essence within space and time. Catholic, Orthodox, and certain hierarchical Protestant churches organize their masses accordingly, with the Eucharist as the experiential climax.
In a contrasting view of God and time, Biblical sanctuary doctrine has it that God is present to us where he locates his dwelling at particular places during progressive periods of salvation history (Exod 25:8). Accordingly, we might expect that Adventist worship would be organized with the intent to have us embody in the story of God’s presence with his people and thus direct our minds toward the place where God currently dwells. That place—the place where we are to experience the presence of God—is the Most Holy Place of the Heavenly Sanctuary (Eph 1:18–20).
In this regard, Ellen White often encouraged people to “look upward.” By this she meant that “the eye of faith is to penetrate the hellish shadow that Satan casts athwart our pathway, and reach into the sanctuary above, within the holy of holies, where Christ our advocate is pleading in our behalf” (Letters and Manuscripts 9, Letter 89, 1894). This practice of Christ’s presence, she taught, will connect us with “principles that are as high as heaven, and that compass eternity” so that we come to “understand in their bearing upon our daily life” (The Ministry of Healing, p. 453).
But I have never experienced an Adventist worship service aimed at inspiring me to ascend spiritually to the Heavenly Most Holy Place. And, I suspect, neither have you. Is it any wonder, then, that in the general absence of intent to organize Adventist worship to experience what we espouse, we too often find Christ’s end-time cleansing of the sanctuary either contested or treated as practically irrelevant? Catholics and Charismatics intentionally inculcate their views on the essential non-temporality of the divine-human relationship via accumulated experiences that shape the spiritual intuitions of their worshippers.[2] Adventists take the temporality of the divine-human relationship utterly seriously when it comes to the day on which we gather for worship, but we are haphazard at best when it comes to our experience of God and time during corporate worship. (As one Adventist preacher put it, “Sometimes, we can get so afraid of the counterfeit that we don’t want to get near the real thing.”)
How can Adventist worship leaders organize worship services that sustain what we believe? By becoming less preoccupied with which songs, instruments, and genres we use in worship and instead organizing worship as an offering of our creative gifts to tell the story of God such that at the climax we imagine ourselves joining the worship around God's throne in Heaven by the Spirit sent to us from the true tabernacle where Jesus connects us to the Father (Heb 4:16; 8:2).[3]
The order of the songs in Revelation 4:11; 5:9–10, 12—not to mention all of sanctuary typology—indicates that the ideal structure of worship tells the story of redemption. When we regularly immerse ourselves in that story through embodied rhythms of worship, we accumulate a wealth of experience in God’s place and time from which to interpret our circumstances relative to God’s purposes in salvation history. In this way, Adventist worship can help us make sense of how Christ is preparing both Heaven and us for his return (Romans 12:1).
How can we get closer to a biblical experience of worship? To start, we could ask what story, if any, fills our minds through the songs we sing and the order we sing them, and adjust our music to match our beliefs. We could ask where, if anywhere, the music and its associated worship practices invite us to direct our attention to experience the presence of God and adjust them accordingly. (This will likely require looking beyond four Charismatic megachurches when populating our worship playlists.)
Beyond that, we could get radically biblical and organize all the elements—including bodily expressions—of worship to progress through the redemption story. For example, acknowledge God as creator at the call to worship, next, thank Jesus for his sacrifice in song, then, join God at his throne by faith through the Spirit during prayer, and, in conclusion, rejoice in the blessed hope of the second coming. Nothing prevents us from worshipping this way for our private devotions or family worship.
I submit, then, three broad aims of Adventist worship, or, better put, at least three things that God enjoys when we worship: for us to (1) become engrossed in the story of God and us, (2) present ourselves with Jesus before God in the Heavenly Sanctuary by the Spirit sent to be with us on earth, and (3) offer our lives in service to God and his world, renew our allegiance to Jesus and his kingdom, and surrender to the love of the Holy Spirit in preparation for the soon Second Coming. As we regularly experience the story of salvation in worship, we will “look upward with intense sincerity” and receive “constant draughts of the refreshing air of heaven” so that we can “live in constant communion with our heavenly Father.” For “we are preparing for a city whose builder and maker is God, and it becomes us to do our work in this world in accordance with God’s will” (Letters and Manuscripts 21, Letter 406, 1906).
1. Bob Smietana, “There’s a Reason Every Hit Worship Song Sounds the Same,” RNS, April 11, 2023.
2. Lest I leave a false impression, I enjoy worshipping with fellow Christians from time to time, including Catholics and Charismatics, and my critique of their worship practices should not be interpreted as an attempt to construe them or their communions as other than Christian. When I worship with them, there are, of course, practices that I do not participate in due to my Seventh-day Adventist convictions, but I believe that Adventists have positive things that we can learn about worship from them as well.
3. On the use of instruments, see my article in the Alberta Adventist News, “Drummed Out of Church: Evaluating Music for Adventist Worship,” October 13, 2020, 16–19.