Sandra Maria Van Opstal - The Next Worship: Glorifying God in a Diverse World

GLORIFYING GOD

IN A DIVERSE WORLD

Sandra Maria Van Opstal

foreword by MARK LABBERTON

InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
ivpress.com

2016 by Sandra Maria Van Opstal

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, visit intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION , NIV Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

While any stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information may have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple

Images:501room/iStockphoto

ISBN 978-0-8308-9948-7 (digital)
ISBN 978-0-8308-4129-5 (print)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Van Opstal, Sandra, 1974
Title: The next worship : glorifying God in a diverse world / Sandra Maria Van Opstal ; foreword by Mark Labberton.
Description: Downers Grove : InterVarsity Press, 2015. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Description based on print version record and CIP data provided by publisher; resource not viewed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015036030 (print) | LCCN 2015037644 (ebook) | ISBN 9780830899487 (eBook) | ISBN 9780830841295 (pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Public worship. | Cultural fusion.
Classification: LCC BV15 (print) | LCC BV15 .V353 2015 (ebook) | DDC 264--dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015036030

E verything turns on worship. Living in the light of the love of the triune God is supposed to be our human vocation. Our very life is made for this purpose, and all our energies are best discovered and unleashed when we see them in this context and for this purpose. A full vision of worship encompasses every dimension of life: our family, our jobs, our friendships, our questions, our suffering, our sin, our recreation, our imagination, our play, and our dying and death.

Worship actively places us before the true and living God and calls us to respond with every dimension of who we are. Faithful worship unlocks and opens, calls and guides us in our life as faithful exiles. As we live lives of worship, we bear witness to the grace of God that enlarges our hearts and minds and extends our capacities to love and serve. We are a people called to a peculiar life.

All of this means worship should be fundamentally disruptive. If our experiences of worship, particularly corporate worship, are doing their work, they will draw us toward our God of forgiving, transforming love, even as they draw us away from lives of absorbing self-interest and preoccupation. As those who know we are to seek first the kingdom of God, we gradually abandon the kingdom of self. The evidence of this transformative process is that our neighborno mere mortal, as C. S. Lewis saysbecomes ever more vividly and consequentially present and urgent in our lives. So it would be impossible to say we love God and not love our neighbor. Faithful worship inevitably leads us to this and makes this dual reality plain.

What Sandra Van Opstal does so importantly here is to help make the arc of this worship transformation clear and practicable. Out of her life experience and rich ministry background, Sandra does for us here what she has done over the years for many of those she has led as worship teams and as worshipers. This book is a vital gift for a changing church that needs to reflect the God of all the nations.

As our neighbors change, our worship needs to change. If our worship does not include or embody our love for our real neighbors, then it does not adequately reflect the God we worship. Now, and in the coming decades, the worship we offer will be done amidst a world of teeming variation of people and places. This multicultural worship is not about politically correct decorative variation, but about profound incarnational faith.

To this end, Sandra has written as a wise, experienced and nuanced practitioner. She knows what she is writing about and she is convincedas am Ithat multicultural worship is critical for our theology, and for our mission. Sandra is pointing to what is compelling and urgent because it is worship that draws us toward God and toward our neighbor. This is not easy. It has always been, however, the call of the church that is to be a reflection of the heart of God who so loved the world that he gave us his only begotten son.

O ur thoughts and practices are developed in community! This work is as much a work of the dozens of teams of musicians, pastors and students that I have collaborated with as it is mine. Thank you, InterVarsity staff and students, for allowing me to spend almost two decades experimenting. I especially appreciate the partnership of the Urbana 03, 09 and 12 teams. Thank you, Melissa Vallejo, Andy Kim, Ryan Cook and Erna Hackett, for the stimulating conversations about worship, culture, leadership and food. Thanks to mentors who have championed me: Brenda Salter McNeil, Rick Richardson, Peter Cha, Mark Labberton, Steve Roy and Orlando Crespo. Thanks to John Witvliet of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and Robin Harris of the International Council of Ethnodoxologists for allowing me to test my ideas and for the invaluable resources and feedback.

Special thanks to my family. To my parents, Miguel and Olga, and my siblings, Erica, Sofia, Omar, Libby, Alan and Beth, for supporting me and helping me to keep it real. To my church, Grace and Peace, for giving me space, encouragement and prayer to finally finish. To my husband, Karl, for participating at just about every worship session, transcribing the many caf conversations I had with leaders and pastors, and editing every version of this book that existed. You forced me to finish this book, reminding me along the way that I can always blog new material and thoughts by chanting We must have closure!

I dedicate this book to my son, Justo Alejandro Ostroski, who embodies in his name the reality of the future of the church and the call for us to live justly!

W hat does worship look like for a college student movement seeking to reach out to the campus in all of its ethnic diversity? What might it look like on their campuses, at their leadership training camps or when they gather thousands of students to mobilize them for global mission? To get an idea, lets first take a look back.