Return to Ritual

We keep hearing of churches “returning to ritual.” Such churches often share common elements: weekly Communion, written prayers, creeds, corporate confession, and other things that for some stalwarts may feel awfully Catholic.

Are liturgical elements a worship fad, like amateur drama and pop-star singers of the 1990s? Or is there lasting interest in expressions of the faith older than ourselves?

“Dimming the lights doesn’t make you liturgical,” said one pastor when asked about the advantages of weekly Communion. “We can create worship services with the candles and creeds, and people would have a great experience, but that’s not a good reason to do it. We shouldn’t reclaim liturgy because it ‘works’ in a postmodern age or because other churches are successful at it. We should do it because it reconnects us with historic Christianity and moves us from my spirituality to our spirituality, dating back 2,000 years.”

Perhaps that’s why we’re hearing of more such churches popping up. For these congregations, the new worship means going old school.

Creedal Revival

Ours is an independent church. With Plymouth Brethren roots and strong influence from Dallas Theological Seminary, our congregation has a deep appreciation for expositional preaching and weekly celebration of the Lord’s Table. Faced with the practical issues caused by growth (how do you include so many people in participatory worship in multiple services?) and the theological issues of a postmodern context (a more biblically illiterate culture, for one), we began wrestling with the issue of how we stay connected to each other and should our congregation be connected to any other body of believers? Our quest led in a direction none of us predicted.

Studying church history at Dallas Theological Seminary, I began to expose the youth to the events of the Christian calendar. Then the pastoral staff began including historic worship elements. At first, we added the emphasis of Advent. We then expanded from a Good Friday Tennebrae service to the Triduum–a three-day service from Maundy Thursday across Good Friday to Easter Morning.

At the same time, we began designing a sanctuary. The idea of moving from our multi-purpose building into a dedicated space for worship caused the elders to ask serious questions about the priority of worship for the church’s identity. We started reading: Creed by Luke Timothy Johnson, Nicene Christianity by Christian Seitz, and Creed or Chaos by Dorothy Sayers, plus a host of books on worship by Marva Dawn, D. H. Williams, and others.

We asked the basic question: What do we believe?

We can’t assume today that people know what they believe and why. We needed to give people something positive to hang onto and say, “This is what we believe to be true,” which becomes the foundation for what we do in worship.

As the discussion developed, we asked, “How do we create a doctrinal statement that doesn’t need to delineate fifty points about our faith?” We also asked, “How can we connect with the historic church?”

The answer to both was the Nicene Creed.

Eventually the elders unanimously adopted the Nicene Creed as our doctrinal statement, but the decision was not without some controversy. We invited several professors to talk with us about the historical value of the Nicene Creed as the most widely accepted statement of the Christian faith. That answered some concerns of those wary of creeds in general.

We also agreed that we support the National Association of Evangelicals statement. We say, in effect, that we are Christian, as stated by the Nicene Creed, and we are evangelical, so don’t be upset if we teach the Bible.

When we moved into our new sanctuary, which was designed kind of cross-shaped inside with pews facing the table from three sides and three stained-glass windows for the Trinity, we began adding to the worship service. Building on the Word and Table model, we followed the four-movement worship of the Reformers: Gathering, Ministry of Word, Table, Benediction.

To the call to worship we added Scripture readings, prayers of confession, and assurance of forgiveness. We added a variety of prayers: free prayers and written prayers, pastor-guided prayer, people coming up to pray with the elders. We created a corporate response to the sermon, using prayer, that prepares the way for us, in unity, to come to the table, every week.

And we recite the Nicene Creed every other week.

That was a lot of change in just two years. Not long after our first Ash Wednesday services, the elders asked that we hold off on any more major changes for a year, until people got accustomed to what we were doing. Familiarity, after all, is important. That’s one reason we repeat some of the prayers and the Nicene Creed so often. There is value in repetition and in tradition. That’s also why we kept our baptism tradition: twice a year, outside, in a horse trough, with a picnic.

This is Texas, you know.

In an age of rapid change, people need something worth sinking their roots in, something deeper than what we can create in a week. Liturgy provides connection to believers throughout history. In that is a sense of security, something unchanging and lasting.

More Confession

Church people are routinely criticized for being hypocrites. But what if you enter a service where virtually the first thing everyone recites is: “God, how can I be in front of you when I am the biggest hypocrite of them all? We are all hypocrites, because we have a standard that we hold other people to that we don’t keep ourselves.”

If we do that and get honest with God, then we can be honest with each other. That’s why in our church, confession is an important part of worship each week. It is the piece that keeps us connected—to God and to each other.

In a postmodern world, people struggle to find meaning, and many give up on finding it. So in our worship, we try to connect the worshippers with the people across time who search for meaning—and find it in Christ.

In today’s culture, we frequently hear: “You’re doing nothing wrong. You shouldn’t feel bad at all about anything you do. Follow your heart.” But that doesn’t jive with our hearts. Maybe something actually is wrong.

At Redeemer Presbyterian, we regularly remind each other that we are broken people who have need of a Savior, and that outside of him, we have no hope. By public confession, we counter this idea that church people have it together, or that the person next to you has it together, and that you are all alone, the only person who has problems amid of all these other people. With congregational confession, we admit the boredom of our lives and our attempt to alleviate that boredom by living for things.

Following the pattern of Isaiah, we start with a call to worship, then a doxological hymn about the greatness of God, then confession. When Isaiah is confronted with the glory of God, he immediately responds, “I am undone … and I come from people of unclean lips.”

We take the approach that when you see God, you also see yourself: “Without Christ, without the angel touching my lips with the coal, I am undone.”

When someone who can’t find meaning anywhere hears a prayer, and it feels like they could have written it, it is life-changing. In our services, we pray Scriptures, such as David’s confession in Psalm 51, and we pray from the prophets, the early church fathers, the Reformers, and prayer books, and some prayers that the pastor and I write ourselves.

When people look at the credits and see a prayer written in A.D. 500 or just last week, they realize, “This is just a part of being human.”

Confession restores us to relationship with Christ. And confession allows for community, which is huge for our time, because we’re so disconnected from each other. Confession draws us out of that isolated world and brings us into community.

Rediscovering the Christian Calendar

Our church was about three years old when we bought the 100-year-old building that once housed a Lutheran congregation. We moved from a modern middle school auditorium into a Gothic sanctuary with dark wood and stained glass windows, and something about our worship changed.

Until that time, ours was typical Vineyard-style worship, opening with an upbeat contemporary song set of a half-hour or more, straight from our hearts to God. Then after the sermon, people stayed for “ministry,” energetic prayer for special needs.

Now in that old building, we became aware that even though our congregation was very young, we are part of a long line of Christians. And that awareness seemed to awaken a hunger in us.

I was reared as a Roman Catholic. As a kid I didn’t pay much attention to what happened in the mass, but as an adult in another Vineyard church, I found the weekly observance of communion familiar and comforting. In that part of Chicago, which was heavily Catholic, weekly communion was what the people felt church “ought to be like.”

So in our new congregation, we began sharing the Lord’s Supper every week prior to the message. Several leaders hold the bread and the cups at the front, and the people come up the center aisle to receive communion. We were concerned that the frequent observance would get stale, but it hasn’t. Former Catholics tell me that our practice of communion, while it reminds them of their church experiences in the past, has helped them become acclimated to Spirit-led worship in the present.

For those who want a more liturgical experience, we draw from the Christian calendar during Lent and Advent, and we plan what are for us highly liturgical services. I choose my sermon texts from the lectionary during those seasons, although I don’t announce that’s where they come from.

Our people may not notice the small touches—that the colors in the sanctuary change with the church seasons or the lighting of the Advent candles—but they do listen closely to the dramatic readings. The first year we planned the special Easter services, a theater professor in our congregation at the time adapted the Scripture texts for dramatic reading. It was electric. The Scriptures were suddenly alive, and everyone was invigorated by them. Now we look forward to them every year.

In our new Saturday evening service, we are experimenting with silence. For two minutes after the sermon, we sit quietly and pray and think about what we have heard. People may not have thought of Vineyard worship as quiet or contemplative, but this brings the best of both worlds together.

Before John Wimber died in 1997, he told Vineyard pastors to “take the best and go.” He didn’t want us to keep doing church as we always have, lest we get stuck in time like so many denominations. I think that’s what we are doing in our congregation, taking the best of historic Christian worship and Vineyard ministry, and going into the future.

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