Audio Transcript
Good Monday morning. Yesterday, most of us were at church. But not all of us at church were in church, because some were busy serving yesterday and not able to be in the main gathering. That’s one of the realities of church, and it’s the topic today. Of course, we’ve talked a lot about finding a good church and leaving not-so-good churches, but I don’t think we have talked about missing gathered worship in order to serve elsewhere in the church on Sunday mornings.
That ends today, with Trevor’s question to you. “Dear Pastor John, I’ve been greatly blessed by listening to every single APJ episode since 2017!” That would be 1,200 episodes, by my count. That’s a lot, Trevor. Thank you! “I have a question regarding serving during the Sunday morning worship service. Is it appropriate to miss the service if you’re serving in another area of the church, such as the nursery? I’ve heard one of my pastors suggest alternating weeks between attending the worship service and volunteering. While I understand that serving can be an act of worship, according to Romans 12:1, I am struggling to make peace with the idea of missing the service. Is attending the worship service and sitting under the teaching of the pastor, say, fifty percent of the time truly enough? Thank you for any guidance you can offer.”
Let me start with making a case for how beautiful it can be to serve some real need in the church, like caring for the infants in the nursery, at the cost of missing some worship services. And then I’ll make the case for why this is not ideal and how you might move toward minimizing the absences.
Beauty of Serving
Trevor mentioned one of the key passages about all of our lives being worship: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Romans 12:1). Making sacrifices for the good of others in the name of Jesus really does manifest his worth, and that’s why we call it worship. That’s true. But we must be careful not to equate the worship of daily life with the gathering of God’s people in corporate worship. They’re not the same. One cannot simply take the place of the other.
So, I’m not justifying the absence from corporate worship by saying that practical service is the same in God’s eyes. That’s not my argument. It’s not the same. Both are beautiful. Both are worthy. God is pleased with both. But they’re not the same. And doing one does not accomplish all that the other does.
Let’s take nursery work, for example: caring for the infants. It’s hard to exaggerate the value God puts upon receiving children in his name. Here’s the breathtaking thing that Jesus said about working in the nursery (I used to quote this to recruit for nursery work on Sunday morning): “Whoever receives one such child in my name receives me, and whoever receives me, receives not me but him who sent me” (Mark 9:37). That is simply staggering if you believe it. Receiving a child in the nursery in the name of Jesus is to receive God Almighty into the nursery. That’s what it says. This is not rocket science; that’s what it says. So, I have zero doubt that God is smiling upon Trevor if he works in the nursery during corporate worship and receives children in the name of Jesus.
Working on the Lord’s Day
Few things, it seems, made Jesus angrier than the gnat-straining, camel-swallowing Pharisees who pulled their sheep out of the ditch on the Sabbath and yet got mad at Jesus for healing a disabled man on the Sabbath. Oh, did he get angry! Jesus summarized the whole point when he said in Matthew 12:12, “So it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.”
“I owe my ministry and marriage and soul to the way God has met me in corporate worship for the last sixty years.”
Indeed, when Luke tells this story about the healing of the crippled man on the Sabbath in chapter 6, Jesus asks, “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do harm, to save life or to destroy it?” (Luke 6:9). Now, why in the world would he say that? Is it lawful to harm? Is it lawful to destroy life? What’s he saying that for? Nobody was suggesting that anybody destroy life. Or, were they? I think Jesus was saying, “If you really do have a heart that opposes my healing this man right now on the Sabbath, you have a heart that destroys — destroys life. That’s what your heart is: It’s a destroyer, whether you know it or not.”
The upshot is that Jesus loves to see his people doing good in the name of Jesus on the Lord’s Day.
Gathering on the Lord’s Day
And he loves to see them gathered and, with all their hearts, singing and praying and preaching and listening to preaching in the name of Jesus and for the glory of God. In fact, he commands us in Hebrews 10:25, “[Don’t neglect] to meet together . . . and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” And Ephesians 5:18–19: “Do not get drunk with wine . . . but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart.”
This is corporate worship. They are singing to each other, and they are singing to the Lord, and it’s coming from the heart. This is corporate affection expressed in outward forms of worship. And the reason I stress “corporate affection” is because that’s what makes all the outward things — like singing and praying and confessing and preaching — worship. It turns them into worship rather than hypocrisy. There is real affection for God.
And two of the reasons for being part of this gathering, instead of just expressing your affection at home alone, are (1) affection in unified expression is a greater glory to God than affection in isolation, and (2) affection begets affection. Something happens to us in the midst of corporate affection. God does something for his sake and for our souls when we stand in the midst of a people pouring out their admiration and trust and reverence and gladness to God. I have said many times (and I’m sure you’ve heard it more than once, Tony; I’ve said it many times) that I believe I owe my ministry and my marriage and my very soul to the way God has met me in corporate worship for the last sixty years.
Striking a Balance
So, I hope you can see that I think working in the nursery during corporate worship is a glorious and God-pleasing thing. And I think you, Trevor, and everybody else, need to be in that gathering of corporate affection for God as often as possible.
What does that mean for you? It means that you will work together with the leaders of your church to see to it that the infants are cared for in the name of Jesus, and that this is done in creative ways that maximize the possibility of people being in corporate worship as often as possible.
Here’s one practical idea, Trevor. Suppose that you are working in the nursery every other week for eleven weeks. That means you will serve six times. What if you found one other person who agrees to take your place every other time? So, three Sundays in eleven weeks. That means, in those eleven weeks, that person and you would only miss three of the eleven worship services instead of six.
Now, I know that all the nursery overseers listening to this are saying (as they roll their eyes), “Piper, if it were only that easy.” I understand. I’ve done this for forty years; I understand how difficult that is. But with this understanding of how utterly wonderful both of these ministries are, it just may be that more and more people would be willing to share the load.
