Category: Order of Worship

Evangelicals are allergic to Roman Catholicism for all the wrong reasons. Instead of being concerned with sacerdotal impulses, they are concerned about chanting God’s words. I will never forget a visitor who grew up in an evangelical home and castigated our worship service for singing the Lord’s Prayer. “That is Roman Catholic,” he argued. He then observed that kneeling was not helpful because it kept our eyes looking down instead of up to heaven. I will give him an A for creativity but an F for Bible basics (Ps. 95:6).

There is a general mental paralysis when it comes to the Roman Catholic question. Anything that resembles order becomes catholicized, labeled as “too formal,” or “too-not-what-we-have-always-seen-and-heard-before.” This creates the kinds of problems with modern worship, which produces everything new, and creativity becomes the product of the week.

Roman Catholic dogma has lots of problems. Their current pope is opening the doors to a dismantling of the modern dogma on sexuality, and, likely, something like a Vatican II revolution could disrupt the Roman Catholic order, sending millions to Protestantism.

But their problem is not their kneeling or the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Evangelicals need to realize that biblical practices, no matter how similar they may look to your Roman Catholic experience as a child or something you heard from a third-party, are non-negotiable. You do them because they are at the core of Christian expression.

The Reformation fixed these tendencies by ordering the liturgical loves according to the Scriptures instead of long-held traditional practices. Instead of elite choirs singing on behalf of the congregation, Luther returned it to the people: “So that the word of God may be among the people in the form of music.” Instead of viewing the Church as authoritative by itself, Luther writes: “The Church is your mother who gives birth to you and bears you through the Word.” Luther restored music to the people and placed the Church’s authority as a Word-centered authority.

Our evangelical problem is a captivity problem. We are captive by the wrong things and wrong fears. We need to be captive to Jesus Christ, our righteousness. The Reformation takes us back (ad fontes) and places us in the textual practices that strengthen and call us to an unadulterated faith in the Person of Christ as our central liturgist.

The Church of our Lord Jesus is not a gathering of individual habits and rituals. In fact, the best way to never be a part of the culture of a church is to be stubbornly bound by your individual habits in church.

While everyone should have their own habits and rituals outside of worship, corporate worship ought to have a sense of unified ritualism in the best Protestant sense. Once we begin to add our external peculiarities to worship, we end up endangering the very unity Christ desires.

Corporate worship must be a call for consistent liturgical acts. For this reason, every externalized ritual must meet the standard of corporateness, and it should not appeal to individual tastes in corporate worship. Lord’s Day worship reshapes our individual tastes.

When the people of God raise their hands for the Gloria Patri, everyone raises their hands—young and old. When we kneel to confess our sins, everyone kneels to confess our sins (unless they are not able physically). When we sing a hymn or a psalm, we don’t stand there imagining we were singing something else; we sing what the body sings, whether that is on your Providence greatest hits or not.

We cannot complain about liturgical incoherence in the evangelical world–where praise bands and people are doing two separate things, or where the spontaneity of service subtracts from liturgical continuity–while offering our own version of incoherence regarding our own liturgy.

We are not individualists. We don’t atomize our participation. When we eat and drink, we are participating in Christ, joining our voices to Christ and to one another.

So, let us prepare ourselves to join one another in Covenant Renewal. The best worship is the imitative part. This is not the place to bring your eccentricities, this is the place to imitate one another in adoration and acts of renewal.

Prayer: O Lord of glory and might: be for us an ever-binding healer who takes our corporate expression and brings them as sacred offerings into the throne room of grace. Hear our voices as we sing unto the Lord of Song, through Jesus Christ our Lord, Amen.