Category: Liturgy

No Christian should come to God’s house thinking anything else but that everything necessary for life and for happiness and for satisfaction and for fruitfulness is given to him or her in this worship service.

Joel Garver writes:

Posture in worship is important. If we don’t permit our teens to slouch, shuffle, and stare at the ground when we are addressing them, how can we say posture is unimportant when we come into the presence of our heavenly Father to be addressed by him?

There is a familiarity, an ease, almost a glibness toward God in this worship that communicates to no one that he is a consuming fire, or that he is angry with the wicked every day, or that his eyes are too pure to behold iniquity, or that he will by no means clear the guilty, or that he dwells in unapproachable light, surrounded by a glory that no man has seen or can see. In this man-centered worship, in this worship that partakes of the atmosphere of a sales convention, the divine grace and love inevitably become mere niceness, almost politeness, not the astonishing stoop down to the unworthy and hell-deserving sinners that the Bible reveals us to be. And in that worship the cross absolutely must become considerably less than the torture and terror and the humiliation and the disgrace and the abasement of the Son of God that was absolutely required to pay the price of our sin and guilt and so satisfy the demands of God’s holiness in order that we might be saved. The cross must be lightened up. You can’t have anything that grim in a meeting whose spirit and atmosphere are so blithe and cheerful, in many ways so secular.–Robert Rayburn

Rev. Robert Rayburn writes:

But, that is true also even in the matter of congregational participation. The new contemporary service of American Protestantism is more a service to be watched by the congregation than even the traditional Protestant service of 30 or 40 years ago. I’ve been in many of those services and there is relatively little that the congregation does except sing some songs. There is music that is sung for the congregation with the singers in the front for us to watch as they perform; there is perhaps a drama sketch for us to watch; there may be a special speaker who gives a report or who is interviewed by the pastor, there will be in some of the more sophisticated services of this kind an elaborate and interesting audio-visual display going on during the music or the message, and there is a sermon. There is little prayer and what there is, is offered by a pastor. There is very little participation by the congregation. They are, by and large, spectators and the fact that more and more of them are sitting in theater style seats only confirms that impression.

At Providence the elders wear white robes. This is a shift from the traditional Calvinist black robes used by pastors for hundreds of years. Why the change to white robes? Paquier summarizes well our sentiments:

The Genevan gown, this anti-liturgical, secular vestment, which appears in the color of the shades of darkness, this clothing which is comparable to the sack cloth and ashes of mourning in the old covenant, is the negation of the right of the church to rejoice and be consoled in the presence of the heavenly Bridegroom. Perhaps for the synagogue, in its tribulation, to wear such a vestment would be the normal thing. But in modern Protestantism it is a depressing sign that we are not more aware of the nuptial joy of the Eucharist and that we do not believe in the victorious struggle Christ led against the world (Dynamics of Worship, p. 138).

Paul writes that the Jerusalem above is our Mother. In our Lord’s Day assembly we are invited to the heavenlies. The Church is indeed our Mother, since heaven becomes our Mt. Zion and our New Jerusalem; our abode. This is why the Church has declared– both Catholic and Protestant– that outside her there is no ordinary possibility of salvation.How could there be? All mysteries are in her, and through her, as Paul writes, the wisdom of God flows to the world.

Modern day evangellifish (as Wilson puts it) is plagued by Romaphobia. If Rome does it, it must be wrong. This was certainly the opposite of how the Reformers viewed it. Rituals, high-Church, read prayers, corporate confessions were a necessary part of the early Reformed services. Calvin’s liturgy in Geneva was strikingly rich in liturgy. Yet, modern Reformed churches have abandoned their heritage– trading the blossoming Reformation for blended forms of accomodationism.