Prayer and worship
Liturgy
The shape of Christian public worship, where it came from, and why it is not an optional style preference.
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Liturgy comes from the Greek leitourgia, a public work undertaken on behalf of the people. It is not a synonym for formal or old-fashioned. It means the Church's public worship as a corporate act with a received shape.
Every church has a liturgy. A congregation with three songs, announcements, a forty-minute sermon and a closing prayer has a liturgy - it is simply an unexamined one, set by the leadership's taste, and usually less than a generation old. The question is never whether to have one, but whose it is and how long it has been tested.
The Christian liturgy has two movements, and the shape is visible in Justin Martyr around 155 and in every one of the four traditions today:
The liturgy of the word - Scripture read, the psalms sung, the gospel proclaimed, the sermon preached, the Creed confessed, prayers offered for the Church and the world.
The liturgy of the sacrament - the gifts brought, thanksgiving offered over bread and wine in the great prayer, the Lord's Prayer said, and communion given.
Around this sits the church year: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, Easter, Pentecost and the long green season - so that the whole story is walked through annually rather than left to the preacher's interests.
The liturgy catechises. People believe what they sing and say weekly, not what they are taught occasionally. The ancient tag is lex orandi, lex credendi: the rule of prayer is the rule of belief, and change the one and you will change the other.
Where the shape came from
Christian worship did not begin from nothing. It inherited the synagogue service - Scripture read in a set cycle, psalms, prayers, a homily - and fused it with the upper room, the meal Christ commanded on the night before He died.
That fusion is visible before the end of the New Testament. Acts 2:42 lists four things the first believers continued in: the apostles' teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread, and the prayers - with the definite article, suggesting fixed prayers rather than prayer in general. Acts 20:7 has them gathering on the first day of the week to break bread, with Paul preaching at length.
Justin Martyr, writing to the Emperor Antoninus Pius around 155, describes it in detail because he is explaining to a hostile authority that Christians are not doing anything sinister:
On the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together in one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and... bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen.
Scripture, sermon, prayers, thanksgiving, communion, and - Justin adds - a collection for orphans, widows, the sick and prisoners. Nothing essential has changed in any of the four traditions since.
Pause and thinkPause: what is the strongest practical argument for a received liturgy over one each congregation designs? Not the historical argument - the practical one.
That a received liturgy is the only part of the service that is not somebody's taste.
Everything else in a congregation reflects choices made by the people in charge: the music, the length of the sermon, the topics, the style. Those choices are shaped by the leadership's preferences, by what the congregation responds to, and by what is currently working elsewhere. That is not a criticism of anyone's motives; it is simply what happens when a small group decides.
The liturgy is the one element nobody in the room chose. It was handed over. It contains things the minister would rather skip, and prayers for situations nobody present is in, and confessions the congregation does not currently feel. It cannot be adjusted to keep people coming, because it was not designed to.
That is also the answer to the charge that liturgy is a clerical imposition. In practice it is the main constraint on clerical power, because it is the one thing the clergy cannot change to suit themselves.
What the liturgy does
It proclaims the gospel in its structure, not only in the sermon. Gather, confess, be absolved, hear the word, respond, be fed, be sent. That is the Christian life in ninety minutes, enacted rather than described.
It puts God's action first. The congregation does not begin by offering; it begins by being addressed. The word is read to them; forgiveness is pronounced over them; the bread is put into their hands. Praise is the response.
It teaches. The Creed weekly, the psalms in cycle, the whole of Scripture on a lectionary rather than the preacher's favourites. A person who attends faithfully for three years will have heard most of the Bible read aloud whether or not anyone preached on it.
It carries you. On the day you arrive bereaved, furious, or numb, the liturgy asks nothing of your mood. You can stand in it and let it say what you cannot.
It makes the Church one across time. The words a congregation says on Sunday are in large part the words Christians said in the fourth century and will say in the twenty-fifth.
It disciplines the preacher. A lectionary forces him to preach texts he would avoid. A fixed shape means the service is not about him.
The church year
The calendar is a teaching device of great power, and it is one of the things non-liturgical Christians most often come to miss.
- Advent - four weeks of waiting, penitential in tone, preparing for both comings.
- Christmas - twelve days, the incarnation.
- Epiphany - the manifestation to the nations; in the East, the baptism of Christ.
- Lent - forty days of fasting, almsgiving and prayer, ending in Holy Week.
- The Triduum - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday: the three days.
- Easter - fifty days, beginning at the Vigil or the midnight service.
- Ascension and Pentecost.
- Ordinary time - the long green weeks for working through the gospel steadily.
The effect is that a Christian who keeps the year does not choose what to think about. He is made to sit in the dark in Advent and to fast in Lent whether or not it suits his mood, and the discipline is precisely the value.
Where the four traditions stand
Catholic
The Roman Rite is the dominant Western form, revised after the Second Vatican Council in the Missal of Paul VI (1969), with the older form of 1962 also in use under varying permissions. Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Council's first document, called for full, conscious and active participation by all the people, for wider use of Scripture and of the vernacular, and for the rites to be simplified while retaining substance. The Mass has the two movements - Word and Eucharist - with a three-year Sunday lectionary covering far more Scripture than the previous one-year cycle. The Church also has numerous other rites in full standing, including the Eastern Catholic liturgies and the Ambrosian and Mozarabic uses. The Liturgy of the Hours is the Church's daily prayer, obligatory for clergy and religious. The Catechism calls the liturgy the summit towards which the Church's activity is directed and the font from which all her power flows.
Orthodox
The Divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is used on most days, with the longer Liturgy of St Basil the Great on ten occasions a year, and the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts on Lenten weekdays. The rite has been substantially unchanged since the Byzantine period, and Orthodoxy regards that stability as a virtue rather than an inertia. Almost everything is sung; instruments are not used in the Greek and Slavic traditions, on the principle that the human voice is the instrument God made. The faithful traditionally stand throughout. The iconostasis separates the sanctuary and is understood not as a barrier but as a window - the icons are the heavenly Church made visible. The whole rite is constructed to convey that the worshippers have entered heaven's worship: the Cherubic Hymn says that the faithful mystically represent the Cherubim. The liturgical year is unusually thorough, with the Octoechos cycling through eight tones and the Triodion and Pentecostarion governing the great fast and the paschal season, and the fasts - Great Lent, the Apostles' Fast, the Dormition Fast, the Nativity Fast - are kept far more rigorously than in the West.
Lutheran
Lutheranism retained the Western Mass, purged of what the Reformers judged incompatible with the gospel. Luther's Formula Missae (1523) kept the Latin Mass with the canon replaced; his Deutsche Messe (1526) gave a German form for ordinary parishes. Article 24 of the Augsburg Confession states plainly that the Mass is retained among the Lutherans and celebrated with the greatest reverence, and that nearly all the usual ceremonies are preserved - a sentence that surprises people who assume the Reformation abolished liturgy. What was removed was the canon's language of the Church offering a propitiatory sacrifice, private Masses, and communion in one kind. The hymn became a primary vehicle of teaching; Lutheranism is the tradition that put doctrine into the congregation's mouth in verse, and the chorale tradition running to Bach is its monument. The Divine Service is understood emphatically as Gottesdienst, God's service to us - a word Lutherans point at deliberately, since it can be read both ways and the primary reading is God serving the congregation. Modern Lutheran practice ranges from high liturgical use to considerably plainer forms.
Anglican
The Book of Common Prayer is Anglicanism's defining achievement, and Cranmer's 1549 and 1552 books, settled substantially in 1662, shaped English devotion and the English language itself. Its principles: one use for the whole realm rather than the tangle of local rites; the vernacular; the entire psalter each month and nearly all of Scripture annually; the monastic hours compressed into Morning and Evening Prayer that an ordinary household could keep. The collects are models of compressed prayer. The Communion service is the Western shape rendered in English of extraordinary rhythmic quality, and much of its phrasing - we have left undone those things which we ought to have done, the peace of God, which passeth all understanding - has entered common speech. Modern provinces use revised books such as Common Worship (2000) in England and the various American, Australian and African books, with 1662 retained as a doctrinal standard. Anglican practice ranges from near-Roman ceremonial to plain Prayer Book services with no vestments beyond a surplice, and both are Anglican.
Work with it
Check yourself
What does the word liturgy actually mean?
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Correct. It is not a synonym for formal or old-fashioned. It names the Church's public worship as a corporate act.
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A missal or prayer book contains the liturgy; it is not what the word means.
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Language is incidental; Cranmer's whole project was liturgy in the vernacular.
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The liturgy is the whole action, in two movements: word and sacrament.
Check yourself
What does lex orandi, lex credendi mean, and why does it matter?
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Yes, and it runs both ways, which is why liturgical change is never merely cosmetic. A church that stops confessing sin weekly will have a different doctrine of sin within a generation.
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The phrase concerns the relation between worship and doctrine, not civil or canon law.
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Prosper's argument runs the other direction: the Church's established practice of prayer is evidence of what she believes.
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The phrase is Latin; its content has nothing to do with liturgical language.
Check yourself
What are the two movements of the historic Christian liturgy?
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Correct - Scripture, sermon, creed and prayers; then thanksgiving over bread and wine, and communion. Justin Martyr describes both around 155.
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This describes a common modern non-liturgical order, not the historic shape.
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Important elements, but they sit within the first movement rather than constituting the structure.
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Both belong to the liturgy of the word.
Objection drill
Liturgy is dead ritual. The New Testament never prescribes an order of service. We worship in spirit and in truth, led by the Spirit, not by a book written by a committee in the sixteenth century. Your services are formal, cold and impossible for an outsider to follow.
A model answer
Take the last charge first, because it is the one with real evidence behind it.
Liturgical churches can be cold. A congregation can go through a rite with no attention, no warmth and no welcome, and a visitor can be left standing while everyone else knows what to do. That happens, and where it does it is a failure, not a feature. No defence of liturgy should pretend otherwise.
But notice that the diagnosis does not follow from the form. The coldest churches in the world include plenty with no liturgy at all, and a congregation can sing choruses for forty minutes without anyone speaking to a newcomer. Warmth is a separate variable.
On "the New Testament prescribes no order of service": it prescribes less than liturgical churches practise and more than the objection admits. Acts 2:42 names four things the first believers continued in - the apostles' teaching, the fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers, with a definite article that most commentators read as fixed prayers rather than prayer in general. 1 Corinthians 11 and 14 give detailed instruction on how the assembly is to eat and to speak, ending with let all things be done decently and in order. Paul quotes what appear to be existing hymns and creeds. And the Didache, written within living memory of the apostles, contains eucharistic prayers to be said.
On "led by the Spirit, not by a book": consider what the Spirit has actually inspired. The psalms are liturgical poetry with musical directions attached, and Christ prayed them, including from the cross. Israel's worship was given in detail on a mountain, with a pattern shown to Moses. And Revelation, the most Spirit-filled book in the canon, describes heaven's worship as antiphonal, ceremonial, repetitive and highly structured - elders, thrones, incense, prostration, and a holy, holy, holy that never stops. If spontaneity were the mark of Spirit-led worship, the one glimpse we are given of the real thing is a strange way to depict it.
On "worship in spirit and in truth": read John 4 in context. The Samaritan woman asks a question about location - this mountain or Jerusalem - and Jesus answers that the hour is coming when neither place will be the point. The contrast is between rival holy sites, not between structured and unstructured worship. The verse has been made to carry an argument it was not addressing.
On "written by a committee in the sixteenth century": the shape is not sixteenth-century. Justin Martyr describes it around 155 to a pagan emperor: Scripture read at length, the president preaching, common prayers, thanksgiving over bread and wine, communion, and a collection for the poor. Cranmer and the reformers were translating and pruning an inheritance, not inventing one, and its components come from the synagogue Christ attended and the meal He instituted.
And now the argument that actually persuades people, which is not historical at all. Ask what happens on the worst Sunday of a person's life.
A service that depends on the congregation generating feeling asks something of you that, on that particular morning, you do not have. You arrive after a death, or a diagnosis, or a marriage ending, and you are asked to sing about how good God is. Some people can. Many cannot, and they stop coming, because the service has no place for them.
The liturgy asks nothing. You can stand in it and say almost nothing. The psalm appointed for that day will very likely be a lament, because the psalter contains more lament than praise and the lectionary does not consult your circumstances. The confession will say what you cannot. And the words will be true whether or not you feel them, which is the whole point - the form is carrying you precisely because you cannot carry yourself.
A great many people who have moved from non-liturgical to liturgical worship report that this was the moment they understood it. Not an argument about history. A bad week in which the ritual they had been told was dead turned out to be the only thing standing.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.