When people come together for worship, the result is a congregation. Dave, the driver, Tracey, the teacher, Jim the joiner, Hilary the hair-dresser, join Patrick the professor, in confessing their shortcomings, praising their Maker and recognising their neighbours’ needs. This is not to say that all present are equally aware of the various aspects of proceedings.
Human beings are a mixed lot and they remain a mixed lot when they take up a new interest, like weekend walking, railway modelling, plant propagation and patio construction. Difference makes us all more interesting. It also tends to bring special interest groups together – mums being an obvious example – on the basis that a trouble shared is a trouble halved.
This is one of the benefits of a Sunday get-together. We get to know other people and get a better understanding of our common lot. If we are a mixed lot, we are uncommonly like a great many mixed lots. Our troubles are other people’s troubles as well. Our responsibilities are remarkably similar to other people’s responsibilities.
So much for the effects of corporate worship. Whether in a village, a suburb, a town-centre, or any other collection of dwelling-houses, we are more settled, more aware of our own role, more outward-looking in some respects than if we were living a reclusive life as a commuter or a peripatetic professional.
Worship on a Sunday morning is one incentive to form a get-together. But there is such a thing as an aggregation rather than a congregation. A congregation has a heart, a set of beliefs, a shape to its membership. It meets not only other members but also the Maker of us all. At the end of the day an aggregation has something missing. As members of a congregation we have something distinctive that unites us, whatever our place in a mixed lot. The opening words of two letters by Peter in the New Testament enlarges on this.
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