What is Christian Worship?

Worship: At the Heart of Our Relationship with God

The Westminster Shorter Catechism begins as follows:
1. What is the chief end [i.e. goal] of man?
A. Man's chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.
This reflects a common Christian perspective that all of Christian life is focused on God and on our fellowship with him and other people. Our care for others is in this context. That doesn't mean that others are only side-issues: loving others means that we genuinely care about them. However Christian experience is that our relationships with other people must be put into the context of a relationship with God, or those relationships will start to become unbalanced.
For many Christians, worship is at the heart of our relationship with God, both as individuals and a community. In worship we focus on God: on hearing a message based on the Bible, on prayer, and on the sacraments. Of course individual Christians can do many of these things in private. However in worship we ground our life as a community in a corporate experience of God.