Andrew Baldwin is pastor at Petone Baptist Church and in 2025 completed a MAppTheo from Carey Baptist College that looked into how some big ideas about what the church is can shape how people in it treat one another.[1]
This is part one of a new regular column called Worship in community that considers the influence worship has on church relationships and the influence those relationships have on the church’s worship.
What does it mean for us to worship in community? Is there something distinct about the worship we express when we gather together as a church community, or is this an optional extra to our personal devotion to God?
From the very first pages of the Bible we gain an understanding of humans as relational beings. We are not isolated individuals but rather exist in relationship with both God, our creator, and other humans, our fellow creatures. We are beings-in-relation. This is the foundational basis of what it means to be human.
In this understanding, to sin is to move away from this relational way of being and to seek to live as autonomous, separate individuals. Martin Luther described sin as the incurvutus in se – to be turned in on oneself. To sin is to cease to see ourselves as beings in relation and to become consumed with and within ourselves.
Salvation as horizontal as well as vertical
The experience of salvation then, is to recover our relatedness. In salvation the Spirit moves us towards God through Christ, while simultaneously moving us towards others and the world, the ones whom God loves. God’s love is not turned in on itself but rather has an outward momentum, a momentum that leads God to create space for that which is not God, to create humanity and the diversity of life we see in the world around us. As we are joined to God, through Christ, by the Spirit, we join this outward momentum of love as we are turned away from ourselves towards God and others.
This means that when the church worships together we do not worship as a collection of individuals who happen to be in the same space, but rather we worship as a community, a collective that approaches God together. The other people that I worship alongside are not a distraction from my focus on God, but rather necessary for an authentic expression of worship – for to move toward God is to move towards the other. To love God is to love those whom God loves.
Community Worship
Over the following months in this column, I’ll explore how this community dimension of our worship is found in different aspects of what we do when we gather as churches. Topics will include the forming of covenants, baptism, communion, corporate discernment, singing, and prayer. I hope to show that our worship does not require an exclusive focus on God, but rather our worship is enriched and our sense of community strengthened when we intentionally recognise in our worship services this interaction between worship and community.
Notes
[1] Andrew’s thesis – God’s own community: a Baptist reading of Tom Greggs’ Dogmatic Ecclesiology and its application to the interpersonal relationships within the church (2025)
Photo credit: Supplied by Andrew Baldwin
