Recovery and Reverence

Many of my posts have focused on how valuable the study of history is for Christians. There are a host of reasons for this, but I want to focus more closely on one very important issue related to worship in this post.

Most would agree that biblical literacy is on the decline in evangelical churches. It also seems self evident that on the rise in evangelical churches is the preference for worship services that basically follow the structure of 30 minutes of music followed by a sermon. In many instances, the move towards this type of worship is based on the assumption that more structured liturgies are too formal for some of God’s people, or often, Protestant churches with structured liturgies are closer to Roman Catholic services than churches that follow the music and a sermon model.

What is striking is that although it seems a basic assumption is that a move towards a structured liturgy is a move away from basic unencumbered biblical worship, in reality a move away from a structured liturgy as a general cultural preference is accompanied by a decline in biblical literacy. I am not saying that churches without traditional liturgies promote biblical illiteracy nor am I saying that they are not committed to the Bible nor that they do not want biblical worship. The point here is simply to mark a correlation in trajectories.

How does all this relate to the study of church history?

The area of history on which my research focuses is the seventeenth century, specifically the ongoing Reformation in the British Isles. MANY of the debates during this time related precisely to the issue of what we should do in worship. What is striking about the discussions of the reformers, speaking mainly of those who debated with/within the Anglican communion under Archbishop William Laud, is that these debates centered on what types of things belonged in worship. Some of the main issues at stake were often whether the Word of God, and its being preached, or the sacrament was most central. (The Laudians were saw sacramental centrality than the reformers. This does not mean the sacraments were not valuable to the reformers, but they did not see the sacraments as operating without the efficacy of the Word, which separated them from the Laudians)

What does not seem to figure in the arguments is a strong advocacy of having less structured worship. In other words, the argument to have a solidly biblical worship service did not mean doing fewer things in worship, it simply meant doing biblical things in worship. Does Scripture call us to sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs? Yes, and we sing a lot in contemporary worship, though we like to forget the psalms feature first on this list. Does the Scripture call for preaching the Word of God? Yes, and most churches have not abandoned having a sermon.

But the Scripture also calls us to confess our sins. Many worship services no longer include a time to confess our sins during the service. Traditionally this time of confession was preceded by a reading of Scripture and a brief exhortation to confession based on the passage read. This introduces a second passage of Scripture into a worship service besides the sermon text. Services used to begin by reading a passage of Scripture that calls the people of God to worship Him, as many of the Psalms are perfectly crafted to do. This would be a third passage of Scripture.

I recently heard it said that too many churches think that Scripture reading is a great transition between songs. They need to be thinking that songs make great transitions between passages of Scripture. I would add to this that if we sang more passages of Scripture, such as the Psalms of the New Testament hymns (e.g. Colossians 1:15-20; Philippians 2:5-11), then we would simply have services filled with the Word of God being proclaimed by everyone.

The Reformation was very concerned about what we do in worship. Their concern was to fill the service with the Word of God. This art of reverence is something we need to recover. We lament the lack of biblical knowledge in our churches, but so often it seems like we move the opposite direction of the very thing that would help: more Bible in the worship service. Perhaps instead of looking down on the past for being too formal, too tightly wound, or too high church, we should consider that they had their sights fixed on correcting the very problem we also face. We seem to think if we keep doing what we're doing it will make things better. Maybe it's time we try something new…that is try something old: structured biblical liturgies for our worship services.