Worship and Service (Kathleen Norris)

Church is other people, a worshiping community. The worship, or praise of God does not take place only when people gather on Sunday morning, but when they gather to paint the house of an elderly shut-in, when they visit someone in the hospital or console the bereaved, when the Sunday School kids sing Christmas carols at the nursing home. If a church has life, its 'programs' are not just activity, but worship. And this is helpful, because if the Sunday-morning service falls flat, it is the other forms of worship that sustain this life. When formal worship seems less than worshipful -- and it often does -- if I am bored by the sheer weight of verbiage in worship -- and I often am -- I have only to look around at the other people in the pews to remind myself that we are engaged in something important, something that transcends our feeble attempts at worship, let alone my crankiness.

~Kathleen Norris (Amazing Grace), quoted by Philip Wise

in the Newsletter of FBC, Dothan AL 5/24/2000