Worthily Magnify

My wife makes the most delicious chocolate chip cookies.

But she hasn’t always.

At one point in her life, I’m sure when she was first starting out (before I ever met her), she made some mistakes. She put too much flour in. Not enough sugar. She didn’t bake them long enough. They came out too hard. They came out too soft.

But now, they’re always perfect. Really. I wish you could taste them.

One other thing I’ve noticed is that she no longer looks at the recipe. She’s made them for me enough times that she knows the recipe by heart. In other words, she “owns” the recipe. It’s hers. It not just written down somewhere, but she knows it well and has made her own adjustments to it to make the cookies taste just right.

No one likes eating a bad cookie. When you look at it and pick it up it has such promise. Your mouth begins watering. Then you bite into it and are filled with disappointment.

It’s not the cookie’s fault that it tastes bad. It could be the person who wrote the recipe, or the person who didn’t read the recipe correctly, or the person who left them in the oven too long. But you can’t blame the cookie itself.

A good cookie is a work of art. It’s a thing of beauty. It’s something that satisfies whoever eats it. It’s the fruit of a good baker who knows his or her way around a kitchen and who owned the recipe to the point of deliciousness.

The same principle applies to liturgy.

You’ve got to own it for it to be really good.

You’ve got to get enough experience and familiarity with the different recipes and ingredients that you can put it all together and make it delicious. A worship leader is like a baker: you want to feed people something good, something Gospel-filled, something long-lasting, and you have different ingredients to work with.

Depending on your denomination/culinary style, you’ll have some ingredients that are required and some that are optional.

In my setting, in a communion service, we must follow a certain order, have a certain number of readings (one of which is the gospel reading), a sermon, prayers, offering, communion liturgy (four prayers to choose from), and closing prayer (two prayers to choose from). Our prayer book makes clear what isn’t negotiable. If we are to tinker with any of those things, it’s our pastor’s call. He’s the head chef.

But there are other things that are optional. We can sing one opening song or four. We can have songs in between the readings or no songs at all. We can have the Nicene creed directly after the sermon, or go directly into a time of prayer. The offertory song can be congregational or an anthem. We can sing many different songs as a Doxology. I can have us say or sing a Psalm or other portion of scripture during the songs. We can sing special music during communion or hymns or newer songs.

Whatever kind of church you’re serving, you’ll be more effective the more comfortable you are with the recipes. Until you are, odds are that your liturgy isn’t going to be as satisfying as it could be. There is some bad liturgy and bad theology in every prayer book, but the more comfortable you are with it, the more you’ll be able to throw in other ingredients to offset the bad and make the final product more edifying.

Become well versed in whatever liturgy source from which your church draws. Look at the different types of services (i.e. morning prayer, evening prayer, Baptism, Holy Communion, Confirmation, etc.) and look through old church bulletins to see what adaptions to the recipe have crept in. Maybe the adaptations are good. Maybe they’re not so good and you should revert back to the original!

You’ll usually find that the older versions of prayer books are more doctrinally sound than the newer. The newer the prayer book, the more watered-down and politically correct its theology, the less hard-hitting view of our sinful nature, the less central role Jesus holds, and the more wimpy its prayers. Look for versions of your church’s prayer books from 30, 50, 100 years ago, and in most cases you’ll find better ingredients and more trustworthy contributing chefs.

Last tip: pay special attention to the “mays”. As in, “a song may be sung” or “the Nicene creed may be omitted” or “the officiant may say”. It’s in these “mays” where you’ll find some wiggle room for “owning” the liturgy, making some adjustments, and keeping things from getting bland. No one likes eating a bad cookie. They deserve better.

Some people love liturgy. They can’t get enough of the stuff. The more prayers, creeds, incense, call-and-response stuff, vestments, and pageantry the better.

I am not one of those people. I like a lot of it, but I also don’t like a lot of it. I’ve lived with it all my life so it’s lost its novelty with me. I see a lot of the good, but I also see a lot of the bad. 

Some things I like (in no particular order of importance).

• The church year. I love how it tells the story of Jesus.
• The liturgy for the burial of the dead (i.e. a funeral). I love how it starts off with the proclamation from the back of the room: “I am the resurrection and I am Life says the Lord…”
• The Maundy Thursday service ending with the reading in darkness of Jesus’ arrest and betrayal while all of the adornments in the church are stripped away.
• The Easter Vigil service where the service begins in darkness with songs and readings and prayers telling the story of redemption all the way from Genesis, culminating in the great Easter acclamation and a celebration of Jesus’ resurrection.
• The Easter acclamation: “Alleluia! Christ is risen!” to which we reply “The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!”
• The prayer for purity.
• The prayer of humble access.
• The Gospel truth that is soaked through so much of the liturgy and prayers, to help protect the church from doctrinal error.

Some things I don’t like.

• The robotic, monotonous, heartless repetition that it can instill in so many congregations. Amazing truths can be spoken and sung with so much familiarity that they don’t affect the heart.
• “We can’t do ____ because the prayer book says we have to do ____.”
• The elevation of tradition to a place of inerrancy that only Scripture should hold.
• The pomposity that can accompany it.
• The impression it gives that prayers should always (a) be fancifully worded and (b) professionally offered.

But if I had a choice to lead worship either at a totally non-liturgical church or a liturgical church for the rest of my life, I have to say I’d pick the latter. In spite of all the things about the liturgy that frustrate me, I think I would find myself longing for its structure after a while.

I’m in a bit of a dilemma with liturgy. I like it when it works. I don’t like it all the time. But in my church, it’s used nearly all the time, whether I happen to think it works or not!

Maybe you’re like me and you’re a liturgy-lite person. Maybe you’re the person I described who can’t get enough or it. Or maybe you can’t stand liturgy at all and just have to tolerate it.

Whatever your personal feelings for liturgy, there is a temptation that lurks: it becomes empty words, empty acts, empty rituals, empty movements, and empty prayers.

You might love liturgy or you might hate it. Or, like me, you might be confused about what you think about it. Regardless, if you’re not careful, and if your church’s leadership isn’t careful, it loses its power.

Good drivers know the dangers of driving. Good doctors know the danger of bad medicine. Good builders know the danger of their tools. Same principle applies for worship leaders. Good worship leaders know the danger of familiarity, i.e. liturgy.

So the first step towards “thinking surgically when leading liturgically” is to recognize its danger. Only then can you see its potential.

It’s not all wonderful (for those of you can’t get enough) and it’s not all terrible (for those of you who can’t stand it).

Liturgy is like a box of chocolates. Some bits of it are filled with tasty filling. Some bits are terrible. Too much of it will leave you in a coma.

The danger is that it all becomes empty. And that’s where you come in. More later.

Every church has its own liturgy.

Some forms of liturgy are obvious: a book of common prayer, a prescribed order of service, processionals, the creeds, collects (corporate prayers in unison), the church year (i.e. Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, Ordinary time), etc.

Some forms of liturgy are less obvious: the worship leader always starts the service by inviting people to stand, the sermon is at the end, the announcements are before the sermon, we sing upbeat songs then sing slower songs, etc.

So here’s fact number one: There is no such thing as a non-liturgical church. Some are more so than others, but every church has its own customs, its own traditions, and its own normal pattern for corporate worship.

But there is a big difference between what a non-denominational service looks like when compared to a Presbyterian service. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that some services are fairly loose and informal, while other services are more structured and formal.

And in those churches that employ a more liturgical form of corporate worship are worship leaders who are struggling with how to work within those constraints. It’s a struggle. There isn’t as much wiggle room and freedom in a highly liturgical church as there is in a “non-liturgical” church (although even those churches do have liturgy).

Here’s fact number two: it’s more difficult to lead worship in the context of a formal liturgy.

That’s a bold statement, I know. But I believe it’s true. Every church presents its own challenges, and every worship leader faces different circumstances. But speaking specifically to the exercise of leading people in corporate worship in song: it’s harder to do within the confines of formal liturgy.

I was born and raised in the Episcopal Church. Every Sunday of my life, from birth through my sophomore year of college, the service format was a by-the-book (Book of Common Prayer, that is) Holy Communion service. I know the book. I know the liturgy. And I’ve learned to love the liturgy, and see its structure not as being a constraint on my worship leading, but as providing scaffolding on which I can stand.

These next several posts are geared entirely toward people who lead worship in a church that utilizes a more formal liturgy. If you’re in a more informal church, you might not find a lot that applies to you. But if you serve in a church where the pastors are called priests, the lobby is called a narthex, your board of elders is called a Vestry, your green room is called a sacristy, your stage is called the chancel, your opening song is called a processional, you have hard-covered books of common prayer/common worship in the pews (not seats), and you know what a Sanctus is, then I hope you find some of what I have to say helpful.

So while I do believe that it’s more difficult to lead worship in the context of a formal liturgy, I want to encourage those of you who do, and help you thrive within the confines (and know when they can be broken out of).

I’ve titled this series: “thinking surgically when leading liturgically”. It’s a clever name and it rhymes, but I hope it makes a point. And that’s fact number three: you can work with the liturgy to make a service come alive.

It takes careful and prayerful planning. It takes getting familiar with the liturgy. It takes some boldness. And it takes knowing when to tinker and when not to tinker. But it can work. Liturgy doesn’t have to be a force of lethargy and robotic deadness in your services.

Your congregation can experience vibrant, Christ-centered worship in a liturgical setting. It’s more difficult, but it’s possible. Trust me. Tomorrow we’ll start looking at how.