Worship that is “according to the appointment of his word” means that only that which is explicitly commanded in the Bible may be included as an element of worship (the so called regulative principle). The temptation in designing a service of worship is to conform to a degree to the spirit of the age so as to please people, when what is required is to please the Lord, and for that we need the Scripture as our guide, and to be mindful of how former generations read the Bible.

I am not sure the extent to which our ministers, let alone congregational members, get to experience Sunday morning worship outside their own congregation. My experience of serving two years as a State moderator, visiting half the churches in Victoria, as well as some interstate travel, has taught me several things.

Everywhere we have good people sincere in their confession of Christian faith, who enjoy meeting together for the purpose of worship and fellowship with the sermon, the highlight of the worship service. By and large we have good preachers who also pray well and want to be the conduit for bringing the Word of God into the lives of their people for the purposes of edification, encouragement and godly living, hopefully not themselves getting in the way!

However, I wish to make observations, especially from my Moderatorial years, about where we could and should do better. In doing so, I draw upon our Reformed heritage, without apology.

So, from those visits to maybe sixty plus congregations, this is what I found regarding the elements constituting morning worship:

1. In less than half the services attended did the congregation recite the Lord’s Prayer.
2. The Law was notably absent as to its first use which naturally flows into the prayer of confession (where the law convicts us of sin) or its third use in delineating how to live the godly life (though this aspect is usually picked up in the sermon).
3. I only heard the Apostles’ Creed recited once and the Nicene Creed not at all.
4. In a more recent trip north, visiting three Presbyterian churches and one Baptist, confession of sin was only offered in one church, where it was misplaced toward the end of the service.
5. Because there was no confession of sin, no assurance of pardon was offered.

I would say we have come to emphasise the horizontal aspects to the detriment of the vertical aspect of worship, and this is no more evident than in the almost exclusive naming of the second person of the Trinity as ‘Jesus’.

I can understand variability in the arrangement of the elements within the worship service. However this pattern of shunning or perhaps just neglecting these fixed forms of Lord’s Prayer, Creed and the Law is contrary to the teaching and practice of our Reformation forefathers who in fact gave close attention to the liturgy or elements in worship.

My concern is pastoral as much as anything else.

Observing the patterns of law, confession of sin, assurance of salvation (gospel), confession of faith (recitation of the Creed), prayers including the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer as well as the preaching with close application and the celebration of the sacraments, remembering both aspects of remembrance and communion, is pastorally sound and immensely helpful to the spiritual wellbeing of the members of the congregation.

My proposition is that our times of worship should demonstrate the full diet of elements that worship in the Reformed tradition, at its best, has contained, and I do not think this concern should be affected whether an old, established congregation is in view or a new church plant.

John Calvin has a remarkable statement in his defence of the Reformation offered to the then Emperor Charles V in which he argues that the Christian religion properly exists where just two things exist – under which, he says, the whole substance of Christianity is subsumed:

a knowledge, first, of the mode in which God is duly worshipped; and, secondly, of the source from which salvation is to be obtained[1].

In other words, salvation is a means to an end, with worship as that end. Worship, Calvin says, is the central concern of Christians.

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