Does worship make a difference?

What do a Welsh coal mine, the Berlin Wall, and a prayer meeting have in common?

In each of them, something remarkable happened that began with nothing more than people worshipping God. This Sunday we’re asking a question that sounds simple until you sit with it for a moment: Does worship actually make a difference?

In our Rediscovering Worship series we’ve been looking again at things we thought we already understood. We’ve thought about worship as something that meets us in every season of our lives. This week we widen the lens as far as it will go, and we do it in two directions at once.

Our two readings pull worship out to its furthest horizons. In John 4, Jesus tells a Samaritan woman at a well that a time has come when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, no longer bound to this mountain or that temple. Worship breaks out of the building and into the whole of ordinary life, the eternal meeting the everyday. And in Revelation 7, John is shown a countless crowd from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne in worship that never ends. The small and local gathered up into the global, this present Sunday morning opening onto eternity.

So does it make a difference? This week, we’ll let history answer.

We’ll sing some songs together, and then hear the true stories of what happened when people sang them. A hymn that galvanised a people, strengthened them through bloodshed, and was eventually written into law. Prayers and candles that faced an army without raising a fist, and helped bring down a wall. A revival that ran so deep the local courtrooms ran out of cases to try.

Worship, it turns out, has a way of escaping the building and changing the world outside it.

If we let it.