Foundations of Liturgy

This is a more appropriate place anyway, as that is the blog of a PCUSA worship minister, and the author of the piece is Roman Catholic.

 

Thanks for posting here as well.

 

That was a great article, and I would agree with most, if not all of it.

I know that Protestants can freak out over anything they perceive as "Catholic", but creeds, confessions, liturgy, and all things that anchor us. Without them, we see the result. American Evangelicalism is adrift and aimless. It looks foolish when it makes attempts at being relevant. It's "contemporary" music isn't good or contemporary.

All churches have a liturgy, but most aren't thought through.

Highlights of the article for me:

our churches have been lured into a commercialized parody of the pop-culture entertainment liturgy, complete with the latest high-tech media, pop star ‘worship leaders’ and a never-ending barrage of FOMO Christian top-forty hits.

Every church has a liturgy; yours, mine, Chris Tomlin’s. The question isn’t “do we have a liturgy”, but “which liturgy are we going to use?”

There are no quick and easy Bible references. It requires a comprehensive cover-to-cover examination of the Bible, from creation to the culmination of history.

The situation today is dire. For the sake of “relevance” the church has abandoned the historic practices of the church and turned the worship of the God, the Almighty Creator and Sustainer of the Universe, into a worship of emotion and sensation. The only object and subject of our worship is supposed to be God. We have turned worship into the worship of our psychological selves. We have sacrificed the great Creeds and Confessions of the church for the sake of “meeting the needs” of the congregants. We have sacrificed depth and beauty to the gods of relevance and sensuality.

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There is a kind of liturgy for Baptism and Last Supper - where we say certain things and then baptize - full water immersion, or where we quote from 1 Cor 11:23-26 separating out partaking of the bread and then the grape juice.

But even that is missing from the Gospel accounts of it.

So while we all have liturgy it is hard to make the case that a specific formula is used in the Bible in all cases. It may be that Paul is arguing for one to be used in 1Cor 11 - or maybe not.