Dear Sir,
Is true corporate Reformation worship necessarily liturgical? Must it incorporate the reading of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds?
Gibson and Earngey assert that: ‘The modern church needs to ask itself if these elements are present, not just from time to time, but as part of the fabric of our regular worship services.’ (‘Reformation Worship part 2’, en October 2018)
There is a rather large elephant in the room here – the fact that for centuries before the Reformation, all these elements were present in the liturgy of the professing Christian church. In other words, they are equally part of Pre-Reformation worship. Their regular recitation was utterly incapable of producing spiritual life or preventing spiritual degeneration. And it still is.
C.S. Lewis is cited as saying liturgical worship ‘enables us to do these things (repent, adore, etc.) best… when, through long familiarity, we don’t have to think about it.’
So it seems the best thing about regular liturgy is that it enables us to worship without us having to think about it. This is unreformed, ‘high church’ teaching!
I am not against having the Lord’s Prayer or the Apostles’ Creed read in corporate worship. The question is: ‘What is helpful?’.
Christ’s Apostles did not impose a liturgical form of worship on the church. They handed down the essential ingredients of new covenant corporate worship, namely public reading of Scripture (e.g. 1 Timothy 4.13), the preaching of Scripture (e.g. 2 Timothy 4.2), prayer (e.g. Ephesians 6.18) and singing (e.g. Ephesians 5.19).
The waters are muddied by comments like, ‘It’s not whether we will have a liturgy, it’s just which liturgy we will have.’ No. Liturgical corporate worship means having a high degree of set, written wording used in every gathering. What is unavoidable is having an order to our gatherings. Replace the word ‘liturgy’ in that last quote with ‘order’ and it is fair comment. ‘It is not whether we will have an order, it’s just which order we will have.’
Reformation worship is not about returning to pre-Reformation liturgical forms, which so easily slide into the kind of mindless repetition which Jesus warned about in the Jewish worship of his day (Matthew 6.7). It is about discerning and then following the apostolic tradition of ensuring our gatherings for public worship have, as their core, non-negotiable ingredients: Scripture reading, biblical preaching, praying and singing.
Yours sincerely,
