Orderly Worship as a Witness to the World

Here’s an excerpt from Orderly Worship as a Witness to the World, David P. Barry’s contribution to the July issue of Tabletalk:

Walking into an unsupervised toddler nursery is enough to overwhelm most people. It’s chaos. The children might be screaming, fighting, throwing toys, holding their hands over their ears, or doing any number of other things all at once. Children need unstructured play time or “free play” for their development, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Still, an adult observer might reasonably conclude from the disorder that these children haven’t agreed on what they’re doing. We can tolerate a loud nursery, but in other contexts, such a free-for-all is objectionable. A disordered graduation or wedding ceremony would be inappropriate because it would distract from the unified focus of the gathering. The same principle applies when we worship.

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