Lives of continued worship cannot but be lives of continued prayer, since continuing worship is itself a continued and continuously varied conversation with the One who lives within us. It should be an unbroken continuum, a breathing in and out, a full articulation of all that we are in Christ throughout all our days. Living in Spirit and truth, walking the course of my days in the beauty of holiness, undertaking every action as a living sacrifice is, in its way, conversation with the Almighty. So this question comes to me: As I think of the mix of things that comprise my day, can I truthfully and unabashedly say that any one of them is in itself a prayer, another way of saying, "My Lord and my God"?

~ Harold Best, Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts (2003, Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL), p. 99.

Harold Best on Participating in Culture

Serving Christ while participating in culture in an elegant and reforming way can mean a thousand things in as many places. It can mean shoveling muck and bringing clean water to a barrio. It can mean writing a new praise chorus for a storefront congregation. It can mean translating the Scripture one more time for one more faraway tribe. It can mean taking old hymns and old ways and breathing new life into them. It can mean preaching simply yet eloquently, fearinly yet sweetly. It can mean praise songs cavorting with hymns, and drums conversing with organ sounds. It can mean complete freedom in the Lord and stupendous discipline finding common ground. It can mean Bach, blues, Monet, street art, child dance and ballet, homiletics and storytelling, barn raisings and homeless shelters, all found within the normal conversation of the believing church. Elegance, for the Christian, is simply a thousand actions washed in the blood and carrying the sweet savor of Jesus' love. It is, above all, the seamless garment of worship and witness.

~ Harold Best, Unceasing Worship: Biblical Perspectives on Worship and the Arts (2003, Intervarsity Press, Downers Grove, IL), pp. 92-93.