Despite my yearning to lay down roots, over the past two decades I’ve lived in a handful of American cities. One consequence is perspective—and if I’m being truthful, strong opinions—about things some places do better (and worse) than others.
For example, you can buy tacos in Dallas and Los Angeles alike, but you’re better off getting a burrito in Los Angeles and a taco in Dallas. My wife and I have learned the hard way that pizza outside our native New Jersey is usually a disappointment. And infrastructure quality varies much more than you might expect: Reliable snow removal and coherent traffic patterns are not a given.
Without that kind of comparative perspective, it’s easy to assume local advantages and problems are more unique than they really are. In their excellent book How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner argue that this “uniqueness bias” is a recurring obstacle to our plans. We fail to see that our thing is also a member of some larger category or “reference class.” It may have unique features, but it’s still one iteration of many. This bias leaves us shortsighted, and as a result, many people are unknowingly stuck with poor snow removal, and Midwesterners persist in believing they’ve had pizza.
Christians are not exempt from this problem. We are isolated from one another by the grievous divisions of the church, so theological movements, denominations, regional church bodies, and individual congregations are highly susceptible to uniqueness bias. We are at risk of neglecting lessons we might learn from our reference class—that is, other church communities with similar experiences.
I think about this nearly every time I hear my evangelical friends talk about liturgy, which they do with increasing regularity and in the breathless tones of people who think they’ve found some kind of spiritual panacea. And I get it. Liturgy, done well, is beautiful and powerful, and what takes place in Christian worship is of highest importance. And yet.
When I have gently suggested to my friends that they might be overvaluing liturgy, they have typically responded by saying that the evangelical tradition of worship is impoverished and that I’m simply speaking as someone from a historically rooted tradition who takes liturgy for granted.
And I don’t press the matter. But there it is: uniqueness bias and lack of interest in their reference class. Because, whatever the significant differences between an evangelical and a mainline Protestant—and I speak as one with historic-orthodox views on the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and matters of gender and sexuality—we nevertheless belong to the same reference class. In theological terms, we’re afflicted by the same sinful nature, baptized into the same Christ, called into the same life of faith. And perhaps one of the roundabout ways we can practice ecumenism is to notice one another’s mistakes.
The first thing someone like me notices about the growing evangelical interest in liturgy is that there’s some confusion about what liturgy actually is. In love, may I clarify: Not every written prayer is a liturgy. Liturgy isn’t something you do by yourself at home, and it’s even a stretch to say it’s something you can do at home with your friends and family. That’s called prayer—even if it’s recited rather than extemporaneous.
Properly speaking, liturgy is the prayer of the whole church. It is our communal joining of ourselves to Jesus in his once-for-all act of offering himself to the Father in the Spirit. In most historic Christian traditions, that act is embodied in the Lord’s Supper, in which the Lord graces us with himself and we return ourselves to him in thanks and praise. That is liturgy.
For that reason, I find it somewhere between amusing and cringe when evangelical writers or leaders describe themselves as “liturgists,” by which they mean they are writers of prayers that other people may recite. This is a lovely ministry—which should be called something else.
But let’s get to the heart of the matter: Liturgy enthusiasts tend to be enamored with the power of liturgy for Christian faith formation. After all, they say, liturgy forms people in habits that are politically, culturally, and economically countercultural. Rich or poor, ugly or beautiful, we all eat together. People of every race and nationality come to the same table. We recite the historic creeds in one voice.
Certainly, these observations of what happens in liturgy are factually correct (and good and right). But they misunderstand worship as a means in the spiritual life. It is not a means. It is an end in itself.
The purpose of our lives is to worship God. Yet I see newly minted liturgy enthusiasts wanting to take that end and wield it as a means, a way to form better, cooler, more politically with-it Christians.
But the worship of God isn’t for that—or for anything. We worship God because that is why we exist. We care about the poor and about racial reconciliation and justice as acts of worship on our way to the greatest act of worship with all God’s people. That our communion with God in worship should result in bearing fruit of good works is God’s doing alone (Eph. 2:10; Phil. 2:13), not a result of our clever liturgical scheming.
And there’s another, somewhat alarming problem with the liturgy-as-formation assumption: Throughout church history, liturgical Christian communities have not been better than others. They have not been more pious, more socially just, more culturally diverse.
Five centuries ago, my tradition produced the first Book of Common Prayer—and to this day, the prayer book contains, I believe, the best English-language liturgies in the world, with its perfect cadences and turns of phrase and its relentless use of biblical language. This liturgical heritage has not made the Episcopal Church a community of biblical literacy, distinctive Christian identity in the world, theological seriousness, or economic and racial diversity.
We recite the Nicene Creed each Sunday, and yet the denomination is still afflicted with creeping Unitarianism. Outside the Lent and Easter seasons, the liturgy begins, “Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and yet still too much of what’s said in too many Episcopal pulpits amounts to encouraging us to direct our prayers “to whom it may concern.”
I say all this as someone nevertheless quite passionate about liturgy. I believe that words matter, that beauty matters, that the church ought to pray this way. And yet.
The structure of liturgy is, in the end, little more than the regulation of the “traffic pattern” of the church’s life: It is the lines on the road, the yield signs, the traffic lights, the guardrails when we’re going around the bend, all of which we need. I don’t blame evangelicals for wanting these things. But if you come to the next town over, you’ll see that people still run red lights and roll through stop signs. Liturgy is intended to ensure that the church’s worship is deliberate and faithful, but by itself it doesn’t guarantee vibrant Christian faith and practice any more than decent road infrastructure guarantees good drivers.
For that, you’ll need something more. Conveniently, I think evangelicals already have what it takes.
Matthew Burdette is a religion scholar, writer, and editor. You can read his work online at Theology of Culture with Matt Burdette.
