What is the most important part of worship for you?
What engages you most? Where do you most lose yourself and your pre-occupations, stress, worries?
What fills you with Joy? Where do you experience a sense of God’s close presence?
Where are you most able to focus on God, to be “lost in wonder, love and praise”? (from the beloved hymn Love Divine, all Loves Excelling by Charles Wesley)
One of our Diocesan values which we named at Synod 2023 was “whole-hearted worship”! This year, 2026, we will highlight this value in the life of Kootenay Diocese. I love this phrase “whole-hearted worship” because it describes the worship in every community across the Diocese. As your bishop I have had the privilege of preaching and presiding in each worshipping community, parish, house church, or ecumenical shared ministry, across the glorious mountain ranges, lakes, farmland and vineyards that grace Kootenay. Each community has unique worship, faithful to our common tradition yet locally adapted to the context, space, time, gifts and preferences of that particular gathering of people. The beauty of the word “whole-hearted” is that it encompasses both a full choral Christmas eucharist in the Cathedral and a lay-lead morning prayer with five people gathered in a circle of chairs in a tiny chapel. And everything in between. A choir or pre-recorded music, unaccompanied simple voices, solos, pipe organ, guitar, flute, recorder, accordion. In a living room, on a farm, on a mountain top, in a historic wood-framed church, in a contemporary sanctuary.
What makes it “whole-hearted”? Authenticity is crucial; worship that comes from this particular group of people offering their gifts to create what fits for them. Not trying to copy what used to work, or what fits for someone else’s expectations. That means there has to be honest conversation within each worshipping community, experimentation and adapting, accommodation to what is available, courageous leadership, generous offering of skill and ability and time and preparation. Genuine good humour, laughter, perspective. Realistic expectations and appreciation of the offerings of others. Love, in other words! The spiritual grace to see Christ in each offering of worship.
Because people have different “tastes” about worship, “Whole-hearted worship “ means each community has to have careful listening to the needs of each member. The conversation needs to be about shared values of worship to discover common ground. For example, “variety of music” is a value which allows people to accommodate different tastes and to balance beloved old hymns with new offerings. Values we share Include: reverence and mystery, participation of the whole people of God, community building, taking scripture seriously, beauty and simplicity, silence, good order balanced with space for spontaneity, familiar words balanced with creativity and fresh language, joyful but allowing a grieving person space for tears and lament, physical movement, use of our bodies, multi-sensory, intellectually satisfying but not all in our heads, satisfying to our emotions but not sentimental, prayerful, focused on God not ourselves.
I am writing this imagining that everyone has been offended by something in this list! What would you add? How would your community have a conversation about these values?
Even if we agreed on all these values, we might express them in different ways.
I have been to worship that was not at all to my “tastes” yet I still sensed the presence of God. I have been to worship rich in the things I valued and yet felt it was stilted or inauthentic, or that I wasn’t in an inner space to enter into worship. “Whole-hearted worship” asks me to leave my critic at home and enter in and focus on God, to allow praise of God to yield my whole Self to God.
One of my liturgy professors said a key question to ask of worship is “Does it tell the truth about our lives?”
I look forward to hearing from you about how “Whole-hearted worship” is expressed and experienced in your community.
“Worship the Lord in the Beauty of Holiness” Ps. 29
