What about liturgy?

Question 11031.

The question of church liturgy divides evangelicals almost as neatly as music does, and usually for the same reason: we mistake our own habits for the biblical position.

Baptists in particular tend to say we have no liturgy, which is never true. We have an order of service, a set of expected elements, and a congregation that would notice immediately if you changed the sequence. That is a liturgy. The only real question is whether it is a considered one.

What church liturgy actually means

The word comes from the Greek leitourgia, which meant public service or public work, and in the Septuagint it describes the service of the priests. The New Testament uses it of Zechariah’s temple duty, of the ministry of the church at Antioch, and even of the financial gift the Corinthians sent to Jerusalem.

So the word does not mean printed responses or robes. It means the ordered public service of God’s people. Every church that gathers at an agreed time and does agreed things in an agreed order has a church liturgy, whether it is written on card or carried in the collective memory.

That reframing matters, because the real debate is not liturgy or no liturgy. It is whether our liturgy is shaped by Scripture and understood by the people, or simply inherited and unexamined.

What Scripture prescribes and what it leaves free

The New Testament names the elements clearly enough. Public reading of Scripture, preaching, prayer, singing, giving, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. Paul tells Timothy to devote himself to reading, exhortation and teaching. Acts 2:42 describes devotion to the apostles’ teaching, fellowship, the breaking of bread and prayers.

What Scripture does not give is an order, a script or a calendar. There is no apostolic service sheet. That silence is not accidental, and I take it as genuine liberty rather than as a gap to be filled by tradition.

This is where the wider discussion of the regulative principle of worship comes in. My own position is that Scripture governs the elements of worship while leaving the arrangement of them to the wisdom of the local church.

The case for a considered church liturgy

A thoughtful order of service protects a congregation from the personality of whoever is leading. If the shape of the gathering is settled, a nervous leader cannot shrink it and a confident one cannot hijack it. Structure is a kindness to everyone involved.

It also teaches. A service that moves from God’s call, to confession, to assurance, to the word, to response, is preaching a gospel shape before anyone opens their mouth. People absorb that pattern over years, and it forms them more deeply than most sermons do.

And it carries people through seasons when they have nothing to bring. There are Sundays when a grieving believer cannot generate anything, and being handed words to say is a mercy rather than a constraint. Written prayers have their place, a point I take up separately when asking whether we should pray written prayers.

The dangers worth naming

The obvious danger is formalism. Any repeated action can be performed with the heart entirely elsewhere, and a beautiful liturgy can become a way of feeling religious without meeting God. Isaiah’s complaint about lips near and hearts far applies with full force.

A second danger is accretion. Church liturgy has a tendency to grow. Elements get added for good reasons and never removed, until the shape of the service reflects the last two centuries of local decisions rather than any deliberate theology. Periodic pruning is healthy.

A third is the quiet transfer of authority. When a form becomes untouchable, tradition has started functioning as a second rule alongside Scripture, and I have written about the relationship between Scripture and church tradition precisely because that shift usually happens without anyone deciding it.

Spontaneity is not the alternative

Churches that pride themselves on freedom often have the most rigid liturgy of all, because nobody has ever written it down and therefore nobody can question it. The unwritten rule that the pastor prays extempore for exactly four minutes is still a rule.

Paul’s instruction that all things be done decently and in order was written to the most spontaneous church in the New Testament, and it was written because the spontaneity had become chaotic. Order is apostolic, and not a peculiarly Anglican concern.

The genuinely free service is not the unplanned one. It is the one where the plan serves the people rather than the leader’s comfort, and where there is room for God to interrupt without the whole thing collapsing.

Church liturgy in the early centuries

The New Testament gives us elements without an order, and it did not take long for churches to develop orders of their own. By the middle of the second century Justin Martyr could describe a Sunday gathering in terms any of us would recognise: readings from the apostles and prophets, an address by the president, prayer, bread and wine, and a collection for those in need.

That description is useful precisely because it is so early and so plain. There is nothing elaborate in it. The shape follows the elements Scripture names, which suggests the earliest church liturgy grew out of apostolic practice rather than out of imported ceremony.

The elaboration came later, and with it the problems the Reformers eventually confronted. That history is worth knowing, because it shows both that structure is ancient and that structure accumulates. Neither the person who thinks all liturgy is medieval nor the person who thinks it is apostolic in its developed form has read the sources.

Church liturgy and the gospel shape

The most persuasive argument for a considered order is that a service can preach before anyone speaks. A gathering that moves from God’s call to worship, through confession of sin, to the assurance of pardon, then to the word, then to response and sending, has walked a congregation through the gospel every single week.

Do that for twenty years and people know the shape of salvation in their bones, whatever they could articulate. That is formation of a kind that no single sermon achieves. A church liturgy that has no shape teaches something too, usually that church is a collection of items with a talk in the middle.

The elements themselves are not in doubt. Acts 2:42 names teaching, fellowship, breaking of bread and prayers, and 1 Timothy 4:13 names public reading, exhortation and teaching. Arranging those with intention is not adding to Scripture; it is taking seriously what Scripture has already given us.

Freedom within the form

A well-designed church liturgy should have room in it. A settled shape does not mean a fixed script, and the best orders I know leave genuine space for extempore prayer, for testimony, for a hymn chosen on the morning because of what has happened in the church that week.

Paul’s vision in 1 Corinthians 14 has each one bringing something, and he regulates it rather than suppressing it. The regulation exists so that everyone can contribute intelligibly, which is the opposite of a service in which only the platform speaks. The Greek taxis, order, describes an army in formation rather than a museum.

So the test of any form is whether people can meet God through it. If the shape is helping ordinary believers pray, understand and respond, it is doing its work. If it has become a performance to be executed correctly, it needs pruning, whoever designed it and however long it has been there.

A last practical note. If your church has never examined its order of service, do it with the whole leadership rather than alone, and take a year over it. A church liturgy that has been talked through by the people who lead it will be owned by the congregation in a way that a quietly redesigned one never is.

It is worth saying finally that church liturgy is a servant. The elements Scripture gives us are not negotiable; the order in which we arrange them is. Any congregation that keeps that distinction clear will avoid both the rigidity that treats an order of service as inspired and the carelessness that treats it as unimportant.

So, now what?

If you lead, write your order of service down and ask why each element is there. Anything you cannot justify from Scripture or from clear pastoral wisdom is a candidate for removal, and you will usually find at least one thing that survives purely because it always has.

If you sit in the pews, resist judging another church’s church liturgy by yours. The congregation with responses and the congregation with none are both trying to help ordinary people meet God, and neither has a monopoly on reverence.

And whatever the shape, come ready to mean it. The form is a riverbed. It gives direction to water it cannot supply. What are you bringing on Sunday for the shape to carry?

“But all things should be done decently and in order.”

1 Corinthians 14:40 (ESV)