backwards

I don't know how it goes at your church, but I think we do church backwards. We start off with a "worship" song that I call a "throwaway" song because the only role of that song is to get people inside. Then we have the joke hour, err, announcements to let everyone know what they should remember at the end of the service just before they go.

"Ha! That guy was FUNNY!" we're saying to ourselves as the lead worshiper begins to call the body to worship. Worship is a response, right? And what are we responding to? The announcements?

After the music we have the preacher come up and give us a message from the Word. And any good preacher will try to illicit some sort of response. But upon "Amen" most of the conversations we hear are not believers sharing with each other about how we're going to take this message that the Lord has spoken through this man and live it out. No, we talk about announcement-material.
"Did you sign up for the retreat?"
"How do we get to so and so's house for Care Group?"
"Are you coming to the Mother-Daughter Roller Derby?"

It's funny, because it seems like it is exactly opposite of a much more logical order:

Hearing from God's Word
leads to
worshipful response
leads to
how can I involve myself in what God is doing?

You see it over and over again in both the Old and New Testaments. God reveals Himself or does something and the response is worship. Worship, at its very core, is a response. Yet the order in which we do things at many churches would suggest that worship is just a preamble to the meaty part of the service.

I wonder if part of why some of our churches have a low view of worship is because it's just that thing we do before the message. Worship is the thing we do before the important part, which is the preaching. It's like the previews at the beginning of a movie. We settle in, get our popcorn ready, take a few sips of the soda and make some comments to our date (or friend or whatever). Then the REAL movie starts.

Worship is not a preamble nor a preview. It's really not pre-anything. Worship should be our response to God's revelation. Changing the order won't necessarily lead to everyone understanding the responsive nature of worship, but it certainly would help put worship in its proper place.