What to Expect in Reformed Worship, Second Edition

A Visitor's Guide

Hyde

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621895558
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Worship the Lord.Too many churches assume that those in their pews and those who pass through their doors know what worship is and why the Lord commands it. The purpose of this booklet, then, is to educate and acquaint members of Reformed churches but most of all those who inquire within their walls, with a basic knowledge of what Reformed churches mean when they say, Worship the Lord. In knowing what to expect, the worshippers' response of praise and thanksgiving will be more active, joyful, and meaningful.

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The Big Picture

As we begin, let me first give you “the big picture” of our services. When you step into worship with us, there may seem to be a lot of pieces to what is happening that you are unable to put together. Just like you need the picture of a completed puzzle while putting the pieces together, so too I want to give you the big principles behind what we do when we assemble, and why we do them. This means this chapter is self-consciously theological in orientation. The reason for this is that liturgy reflects theology in every church regardless of how “liturgical” it is or how “free” it is. How we worship is a reflection of what we believe about God. In a word, our worship is our theology in practice. It is only after this that we will look at the specific things within the service of our Triune God of grace in our next two chapters.

A Meeting With God

When you gather with us, you can expect to meet with the Triune God who is “Holy, Holy, Holy” (Isa 6:3; Rev 4:8). Like Moses met with the Lord “face to face, as a man speaks to his friend” in the tent of meeting (Exod 33:7–11), so now all of God’s people enter that presence “by the new and living way that [Jesus] opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh” (Heb 10:20), to meet with God. This is the wonder of worship. The God of the universe has condescended (“stooped down”) to us in his Son, Jesus Christ, and become our redeemer to draw into his presence by the power of the Holy Spirit. Because we meet with this great God, our services are joyful, reverent, and purposeful.

We believe the Bible is clear in teaching that our God is a sovereign, covenant-making God. He first created Adam and Eve in a covenant relationship with himself (Hos 6:7). He then came to the rescue after Adam severed that relationship by his sin. When the Lord God came to the rescue we call that “the covenant of grace.” In Genesis 3:15 we hear of its beginning, as the Lord God promised that a seed would come from the woman to crush the head of the serpent’s seed. This covenant of grace continued as the Lord gathered his people to meet with him in worship through history to the climax of redemption in Jesus Christ, the seed of the woman (Gal 4:4) who crushed Satan (John 12:31; Rev 12). Therefore, because of our sin and depravity, God always initiates worship because we never would apart from his Spirit calling us to do so. Our worship reflects these scriptural teachings of God’s sovereignty and holiness, our horrible blindness in sin, and God’s condescending to us in grace and mercy in his meeting with us.

A Dialogue

Since all biblical covenants have two sides, one, which speaks, and another, which responds, the meeting of worship is a dialog between our great God who speaks to us in grace while we respond to him in gratitude. This means that the structure and “feel” of Reformed worship is different than the typical worship of a modern evangelical church. So many modern churches reverse this order of God’s call and then our response—grace then gratitude—and put the lengthy time of our singing first and then the message from the Word second. In fact, this contemporary pattern of an extended period of “worship,” when the people sing, and the “message,” when the pastor speaks, oftentimes leading to the “altar call” (a substitute for the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper), comes from nineteenth century American frontier revival meetings, and not Scripture. The theology behind this contemporary pattern of worship is to place the people’s work in worship before God’s work. The inevitable result is ads a works-oriented theology and piety, in which free will and obedience-based blessing is central.

Since our worship expresses our theology, the grace of God is in the primary place and our gratitude is in the secondary place. Therefore our services follow the biblical pattern in having a “call-response” structure, in which God speaks to us and we respond to him: “we assemble and meet together to render thanks for the great benefits that we have received at his hands, to set forth his most worthy praise, to hear his most holy Word, and to ask those things which are requisite and necessary, as well for the body as the soul” (BCP). In John’s words, “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). Let me give an illustration of this in the chart below.

Reverence and Transcendence

The Scriptures teach us that God seeks a people to worship him in Spirit and in truth (John 4:24) and those who enter his presence, enter holy ground (Exod 3:5). This is why the people of God in Scripture are called to “offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire” (Heb 12:29; Deut 4:24) and to “rejoice with trembling” (Ps 2:11). The Bible teaches that the service of the Lord (remember, we call our meeting as a church a “service” because it is the Lord’s service to us, and our service to him) is not about being entertained, having an emotional experience, or experimenting with the latest fads. It is about our Triune God who sits upon the heavenly throne, who gives his gifts to his people and who receives glory from them in return (Rev 4–5). Reformed worship lifts our hearts and minds from ourselves and onto the glory of God in Christ; off this world and onto the hope of “the life of the world to come” (Nicene Creed).

Since we worship in reverence our service is done “decently and in order” (1 Cor 14:40), as we utilize an order of service in historical continuity with ages of Christians past. Not only is this reformed according to Scripture, it is also informed according to the history of the Church. Reformed services follow the basic pattern of worship in early church descriptions such writings as The Didache (A.D. 120), Justin Martyr’s First Apology (A.D. 155), and Tertullian’s Apology (A.D. 197). These glimpses into the ancient church were the basis for the historic liturgies of the Protestant Reformation, such as the Strasbourg Liturgy (1539), from the influential city where Martin Bucer ministered; the Genevan Liturgy (1545), of John Calvin; the Book of Common Prayer (1552), written by Thomas Cranmer and revised by Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and John Hooper for the English Reformation; and the Heidelberg Liturgy (1563), from the center of German Reformed theology. The Protestant Reformation, then, was just that: a reformation of what existed, not a restoration of what was lost. Our forefathers did not see themselves as “throwing the baby out with the bath water,” but took what existed from medieval worship and went “back to the sources” (Latin, ad fontes) of Scripture and the ancient church as a testimony of the truth of Scripture. The Reformers stripped the Medieval Mass of its idolatry and extra-scriptural content down to its biblical and ancient core; they did not re-invent the wheel.1

Therefore, what you experience as you gather with us is a fully biblical service in the same vein as the historic liturgies of the ancient Church, which the Protestant Reformers revived during the sixteenth century. Our hope is to communicate these eternal principles of God’s Word, as passed down through the centuries, in a meaningful way to a twenty-first century world. It is not our desire to simply reproduce old tradition for the sake of being traditional, but we seek to be biblical and always reforming in the light of Scripture.

A Common Service

When you join us, you can also expect to be a participant. Historic Christian and Protestant worship is “common worship.” This means that the congregation is active, not passive. We express the love, praise, and adoration we each have in our hearts for God the Holy Trinity in a corporate way as we enter together into his presence to join in a dialog. Our service is a conversation between God and his people, in which he speaks and we respond. Therefore, we do not sit back and let a priest, “worship leader,” or “praise band” do the work since the “liturgy” literally is “the work of the people.”

Therefore, upon entering the place of worship, you will receive a bulletin that contains the order of service, or, “liturgy.” Because the church in heaven worships with set forms and patterns, so do we (Rev 4–5). This allows us to sing corporately: “Come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord our God our Maker” (Ps 95:6). This allows us to pray corporately: “Our Father” (Matt 6:9). This allows us to confess corporately our faith in the Nicene Creed: “We believe in one God.” Our response of worship, then, is with one voice and one heart.

You will notice that Scripture and scriptural language fills the entire service in every aspect, from our responses and songs, to our prayers and the reading of Scripture itself. The benefit of this is that we will learn “the word of Christ” and it will “dwell in [us] richly,” whether we are young or old, a baptized child, a new convert, or an old saint. This enables us to respond with “thankfulness in [our] hearts” (Col 3:16).

Children in the Service

Reformed services are not only common and corporate; they are also covenantal. Remember, worship reflects theology. As a Reformed church we believe that the Scriptures teach that the Church is a community of all in covenant with God, which means infants “as well as their parents, belong to the covenant and people of God” (HC, Q&A 74). It is on the basis of at least one parent that professes faith in Christ and obedience to him that their children “are in that respect within the covenant” (WLC, Q&A 166).2 Corporate worship, then, is the place where we communally instruct our children in “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). This means children are in our services. This is consistent with Israel’s practice so many generations ago, as the psalmist records:

We will not hide them [the works of the Lord]

from their children,

but tell to the coming generation

the glorious deeds of the Lord, and his might,

and the wonders that he has done (Ps 78:4).

This means young and old, and all in between in the church, belong to the body of believers. This is one of the hardest things for new visitors and new members of our churches to adapt to as many are used to some form of “children’s church.” Yet, the Bible calls all God’s people, young and old, to “make a joyful noise...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Big Picture
• Chapter 2: The Center-Points of Our Service
• Chapter 3: A Walk through a Sample Morning & Evening Service
• Chapter 4: When Do We Meet for Service?
• Conclusion
• Appendix
• Bibliography