For the unbeliever, worship is as foreign as breathing underwater. We cannot expect them to appreciate an act in which they have made no investment even when they superficially understand it. The Church worships because she loves the Lord. She has learned over time how best to worship him and it is for each and every Christian to come alongside our fathers and learn the joy of right worship on our own, in our own time.

I’m always hesitant to wade into the sometimes muddy waters of the still-ongoing “worship wars” but a recent article from Vintage 73 featured on The Aquila Report captured my attention in such a way that I’ve been unable to keep it out of my mind. My immediate reaction upon reading it was, ‘This isn’t right’ but I couldn’t get a handle on why I thought so. Having pondered the subject for a couple of weeks, I now feel I can begin to articulate a response.

First, I’d like to applaud Kevin Rogers for trying to go beyond the usual traditional vs. contemporary debate. It’s always valuable to zoom out from what often seems to be a sectarian muddle and find some common ground or offer new ideas that may be useful for all Christians generally.

Second, I’d like to offer some criticism of the idea that worship should be accessible. Now, I realize in saying this that readers may immediately interpret me to be saying that worship should not be accessible. This is not at all what I’m saying. Rather, I’m approaching the question via Rev. Rogers’ definition of the word.

As presented in the post, the word ‘accessible’ seems to imply that all people in attendance at a worship service should fully understand exactly what’s being done at all times and why because it is being explained to them as they go. The assumption is that this understanding of the process of the liturgy will ensure its benefit then and there, no questions asked.

It should not surprise anyone who knows me personally that I have a distaste for taking time to explain things in worship, preferring rather to do them and let the results speak for themselves. This personal preference, however, is not simply arbitrary. It is based on a conception of liturgy that prefers to allow the Word of God, rightly presented and ordered, to work with as little distraction as possible.

In a sense, inside a worship service it hardly matters why things are being done so long as they make sense from outside the worship service. Allow me to explain: the liturgy is developed first by appealing to Scripture: what elements does God command? These elements are then ordered according to a reasoned tradition—what makes the most sense given the nature of the elements and how has the Church been wont to order her worship through the ages?

That I understand this complex development doesn’t matter a whit when I’m engaged in the act of worship; it’s not part of my conscious mental perspective. When publicly confessing my sins I’m not thinking to myself, “Ah yes, I’m doing this because it makes sense to enter into worship first acknowledging my own sinfulness so that I may rightly understand God’s grace in Christ Jesus.” I’m simply confessing my sins.

It’s a wonderful thing that someone has taken the time to see that confession should come at the beginning of the service but my own understanding of this point has no relation whatsoever to the effectiveness of the act of confessing. So it is with the rest of the liturgy. My own participation stands inside the liturgical world that has been constructed for me through an appeal to Scripture and the reasoned tradition of the universal Church.

Outside a worship service, it is good that I know why I do what I do. In fact, it would be an abuse to impose a liturgy on the people of God without explaining to them the good theological and historical sense behind it. The time for this explanation, however, is not during the liturgy itself.

Instruction should be offered formally to children and adult members in classes, to visitors who come on their own through handouts available in the pews, and casually in conversation to visitors invited by their friends. It is more effective to present the liturgy in its theological and historical complexity in the context of a Sunday school class than to break its natural flow by attempting to explain it while doing it.

Think of what would happen if a sport were treated this way. Since we are not spectators of the liturgy but participants, let’s imagine ourselves, for the sake of this illustration, as a soccer team. Without going into detail, you can see how utterly impossible it would be to play the game and simultaneously be instructed in the rules of the game. Perhaps we’d be able to play a ‘successful’ game but at what cost? The nature of the game, its essence, its hidden rhythms- its shape—would be lost! We might understand the game in a cerebral way but we’d be deprived of the intimate, unexplainable aspects of it. So it is with the liturgy—we must be taught before we worship or we’ll get lost in the process of the act and miss the act itself.

Even if we consider visitors as spectators rather than players, ponder the effect of explaining the game to a spectator as it happens. They’d miss half the game while trying to understand the rules, and even if they succeeded in understanding the game on a purely intellectual level, their experience of the game would be entirely from without rather than intuitively from within. They’d also likely miss the shape of the game, buried under the burden of intellectual apprehension.

Liturgy must be understood by doing. This is no more important than purely cerebral understanding but it cannot happen if we are constantly disrupted by announced instructions and explanations. A full understanding of liturgy is not merely intellectual but experiential and it is this experience of meeting God on his own terms that edifies and upbuilds. Good liturgy is effective not simply because its process is understood but because the heart is molded over time by the shape of the liturgy itself.

Indeed, repetition is the key to any liturgy’s effectiveness. As we come into God’s presence with our fellow believers, our minds and hearts are instructed in the proper order of the universe, the relation of ourselves to God and ourselves to others. Liturgy shapes our worldview.

I do not think it’s exaggeration to say that even when a visitor understands the liturgy in the purely structural sense they cannot really understand it in an edifying fashion until they have inhabited it for some time. A single experience, even one that gives the superficial appearance of understanding, is not adequate to instruct the mind and heart in a new pattern of living towards God. In this sense, even a liturgy that is actively explained bit by bit isn’t truly accessible.

The problem with the idea of accessibility is somewhat alleviated when we remember that worship is for the Church. It is for the believer, not the unbeliever. It speaks to all present, just as God’s word speaks, yet its true effectiveness does not lie in a cold intellectual understanding only, but in an experience born of intellectual understanding, emotional involvement, and enjoyment. We know why we worship this way, we are emotionally engaged (and here I do not intend to suggest that we always feel rightly in worship but that right feelings are the ideal), and we enjoy the shape of the liturgy because it is so structured that each element flows into the next with a sense of balance and repose.

Good liturgy is a coherent and balanced presentation of a coherent and balanced theological system. Over time, its patterns become our patterns and, as we continually offer our prayers in union with the universal Church, we find ourselves transformed in our being. We are directed to God because we have been shaped to do so, not by a guided-tour approach to worship but by an intimate and personal experience of worship- worship that we have been taught to love from without and then grow to love from within.

The role of the minister during the service is not constantly to remind us what we’re doing there but simply to lead us in doing rightly that, as we dwell within the liturgy we may offer ourselves fully to God without distraction. As Christ’s representative he gathers us together and directs our worship, leading gently, ensuring the focus remains on God and not on himself or on the process of worship.

At the end of the day, liturgy is most successful if it is experienced intuitively, naturally, in a way that makes the rhythm of worship seem but the most normal thing in the world for the faithful. To break its spell with constant directions and explications is to mar both its effectiveness and its beauty.

Now, I believe a sort of footnote is necessary at this point because the question of familiarity with the liturgy is indeed a problem today. However, the root of that problem is the divided mind of the universal Church, particularly in the United States, which seems to have little problem with various congregations worshipping as they please and holding to a liturgy that bears no relation to that of the historical Church. While I do not oppose variety in liturgy—after all, Calvin’s liturgies for Geneva and Strasbourg differed in parts—I do oppose ardently the idea that we are free to develop our own local forms without reference to the practice of the universal Church in all times and places.

Liturgy is the preserve of the whole Church not merely one segment thereof, and we must insist on a kind of unity (not perfect uniformity) in which the biblical elements of worship are ordered in a similar fashion in all places. This ordering is what I speak of when I use the phrase ‘shape of the liturgy.’

If all local churches held to the same basic liturgical structure (no hymn-sandwiches please!) anyone coming from another congregation would be able with relative ease to join in the worship of that particular community. The question of visitors’ understanding would likewise be greatly alleviated because their experience in one church’s worship service would likely be repeated in another’s.

You may wonder how I would answer someone if they asked me how I would make the worship of the Church ‘accessible.’ I would reply, “I wouldn’t.” Worship isn’t something we as fallen human beings are predisposed to understand; we believers must be instructed by our ministers and learn to love worship because it is God’s due.

For the unbeliever, worship is as foreign as breathing underwater. We cannot expect them to appreciate an act in which they have made no investment even when they superficially understand it. The Church worships because she loves the Lord. She has learned over time how best to worship him and it is for each and every Christian to come alongside our fathers and learn the joy of right worship on our own, in our own time. Good liturgy is its own justification and our experience of it its own benefit.

Evans McWilliams is a member of Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Lakeland, Fla., is an architectural historian, and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of York in the UK. This article appeared in his blog, Inscrutable Being, and is used with permission.