“Every denomination is liturgical”

The church I’m a part of meets only on Sunday mornings. So, for about the past year, I’ve also been attending another church that meets on Sunday evenings. And one of the main reasons I keep going back is because their services are centered around a liturgy – a Call to Worship, recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, Scripture Reading, Corporate and Silent Confession and Repentance, Assurance of Pardon, the Lord’s Table, etc. I was never exposed to that type of service in the churches I grew up in, and I appreciate a service format with thought and history behind it, instead of a faux spontaneity, an insistence that “we are right because we follow where God leads us and don’t follow tradition,” when in actuality the tradition they’re following is just from the much more recent past. And so, when I heard another criticism of liturgy from a conservative church recently, I thought of this excerpt from Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy.

Every denomination is liturgical. Some just don’t know it because their liturgies aren’t written down. For example, a seemingly free-form Pentecostal revival actually has a certain expected rhythm to which some deviations are perhaps allowed, but others are not. If you’ve been to a lot of Protestant meetings that claim to be non-liturgical, eschewing written prayers for “heartfelt” (i.e., spontaneous) ones, you soon begin to realize that (pardon my cynicism) the Lord, Father-God, is just so good, Father-God, and it’s just so great just to praise his mighty and wonderful name, Father-God, glory, hallelujah, just rejoicing in his holy presence, hallelujah, and if I just hear the word just one more time, and if I just hear one more religious cliché pasted to others in a long cliché train, I’m going to ruin this whole so-called spontaneous, heartfelt experience by screaming!

To have some gifted people (like the Anglicans’ Thomas Cranmer or the many gifted Catholic liturgists) save us from our habitual “justs” and “sponaneous” clichés with well-chosen words, well-crafted sentences, and well-thought-out paragraphs is a great gift of liturgy.

True, liturgy led by an anemic leader with a monotone voice and a corresponding heart is a sad thing, probably no better (perhaps worse) than “just-fied” impromptu prayers. But have you experienced well-written, prayerfully planned liturgy led by gifted, enthusiastic, passionate leaders? You’ll find yourself saying, “Thanks be to God!”