The Beauty of Worship

Jonathan Wilson writes,

"The reason we can casually assert and agree that Israel's worship is word centered and image (beauty) rejecting is because these are the portions of the Old Testament we skip over because we find them boring.

The care, precision, and standards of excellence recorded in those passages make it clear that God cares about the beauty of our worship. Indeed, beauty here really represents a call to excellence in our worship of God.

But this excellence must be crefully developed from an understanding of worship as a practice that embodies the aim, goal of the church, constitutes a community, seeks internal goods, and extends our conception of what beauty means for the church.

In a world obsessed with distorted notions of beauty and a church whose members are often wounded by those notions, the church must not deny the importance of beauty but must transform the meaning of beauty by the practice of it's worship."