Dismissal at the end of the worship service does not mean a standard formula while you can put on your jacket or put the books back in the pew. Walters states that the dismissal of the congregation requires thought and be done intentionally.

Something significant happens at the end of each service. This should not become something ordinary or mundane. He provides the following illustration.

“The traditional Catholic mass ends with these words, spoken by the deacon: “Go, you are dismissed,” or, more literally, “Go, you are sent.”

The Latin word for send has the same root as the word for mission. So when we exit the worship service, we are missionaries sent out to be witnesses. We are to go and bear witness to God, whose Word we have encountered in worship.

Where are we to go? To the world. And for most of us, the world is not a mission field in some distant land. It is an ordinary place we inhabit every week: at home, an office, a school. We are ordinary people, sharing what we have received in worship, loving people as we have been loved, forgiving as we have been forgiven. It is as if the worship service never ends.”

(Michael Walters, Can’t wait for Sunday)

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