“Without Christian worship, there would be no Bible. The Bible is the product of the early church’s common prayer. The earliest Christian communities circulated among themselves and read in common worship stories of the life and ministry of Jesus and the early apostles. They wanted to hear these stories and respond to them.”[1]
This quote gets straight to the heart of an important matter
with regard to Christian worship – the place of Scripture within worship. The
point is well made. The texts that make up the Scriptures have a history behind
them. Each of the ‘books’ that make up the Bible was considered sacred because
through them God spoke to his people. It may come as a surprise to some but the
Bible did not, as N.T. Wright has so eloquently put it, fall “from the sky in
King James Authorised Version, bound in black leather and complete with maps”.[2]
That’s a much later development. In reality, these texts were written for a
specific audience to be read out loud and
heard. As such, many of them (such as
James, Hebrews, and 1 John) can be considered some of our earliest Christian
sermons. They
“were intended to be rhetorical discourses delivered orally to congregations during worship, which explains why so many of these documents begin with a prayer… and end with a benediction or doxology”[3].
