What is Charis Worship?
Charis Worship is a worship service of a
style which most likely fits with the category “Emerging
Worship”. Emerging Worship is hard to
define but we use scripture, ancient prayers,
the sacrament of Holy Communion, guitar and drum
driven music, secular songs, secular film clips,
and cultural and religious images evoking the
divine.
We also have some type of hands-on prayer
station each week. For instance, when discussing
images of God, we invited people to look through
magazines at a table and cut out and paste on a
mural pictures that resonated with them as
aspects of God.
Our tag line, “A Post Modern Faith
Community”, really deals with the idea of
postmodernism that authority comes from many
sources. We believe that our chief revelation of
God is Jesus Christ and he is most clearly
defined by scripture.
John Wesley, an important 18th
century pastor in the Church of England really
popularized the theology of prevenient
grace. This is the idea that God’s grace
precedes us in all that we do. If God’s grace
really does precede us, then we don’t take God
to one who is not active in a formal faith. We
seek to open their eyes and ears to the wider
understanding of reality that God is already at
work in their world.
So as post-moderns, we would say that they
might find God in a mainstream song like
Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” or Nickelback’s
“If Everyone Cared” which you also might hear
played during worship.
Most of the time, I tell people that you have
to experience it and then define it for
yourself!
