The Corporate Gathering And The Sum Of Its Parts

What a great morning this past Sunday! It is truly a blessing to be able to worship our God together as the local body of Christ at Crossroads Community Church!

The following is an excerpt from a book I've been reading entitled "Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives On Worship And The Arts" by Harold Best. It talks about the unique environment that is created when individual believers, who are all fully indwelt by the Spirit of God, meet together with other individual believers, who also are fully indwelt by the Spirit of God:

In a synergy, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and in a particular way, the coporate gathering is this kind of synergy...Even though Christ is the same in a single believer as he is in a million believers, a corporate gathering is somehow more than the sum of its individually indwelt parts, especially in this sense: no one has the same story. Everyone is diversely working out his and her salvation, and the Holy Spirit is at work making a sum of this diversity. Christ is at work with him, presenting this combined story, Sunday after Sunday, synergy after synergy, to the Father. This will not show itself visibly or measurably but authoritatively, powerfully and spiritually. The power does not lie in sheer numbers, for where two or three are gathered, the synergy is just as real. The power and the glory of this is inward, in the heart of each worshiper. If the Holy Spirit chooses to make this outwardly manifest, and should the entire assembly break into unpredicted ecstasy (whether in charged silence or Pentecostal polyphony), so be it. Our task is to be so spiritually alive that readiness for anything is as normal as lighting the candles or singing a chorus.

Sunday mornings are a melting pot of the goodness and faithfulness of God in each of our lives, and when we come together to lift up and glorify his name as one, it is, as Best puts it, a "synergy."
The main argument of Best's book is that God is a being of continuous "outpouring" (outpouring of himself), and since we are created in God's image, we were neither created TO worship, nor FOR worship, but that we were created worship-ING, and that our worship is indeed "Unceasing." The issue then is whether the object of our continual worship is God or something else. I highly recommend this book to you; it will challenge your thought process, and how you view worship.