The gathering of the church must be carried out according to God’s revealed will. We want to worship God in the way He has prescribed as best as we can. We should acknowledge, however, that “The New Testament does not provide us with officially sanctioned public ‘services’ so much as with examples of crucial elements.” Even though the New Testament does not give us a complete manual of what the church gathering should be like, it does give us clear things to do. 

What if church were different? What if we were historically and spiritually rooted instead of following a fad?

What if we didn’t practice empty rituals but appreciated the rich history of the Church, recited her creeds, sang her songs, and told her stories? Os Guinness has said, 

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but our authority and our relevance.[1]

The Church has a long history of timeless relevance. The Church has “the words of life” (Jn. 6:68). What if we tapped into that history and showed people Christianity has unmatched depth and answers to life’s deepest questions? But what if we weren’t stuffy and ritualistic? 

We will worship so we must worship wisely. Intentional liturgy is vital. As the gathered church we purport to worship the Lord, so we must do so in an intentionally biblical and wise way. By my calculations, most Christians spend around half a year of their life participating in the gathered worship of the church. We must make the best use of that time! The gathering of the church is an important way the church is equipped to be the church scattered.

It is of utmost importance that the liturgy of the gathered church be deliberate. Even simple, seemingly insignificant, things in worship communicate doctrine and teach people. This is true, for example, of terminology (“priest” or “pastor”) and architecture (simple or elaborate; God’s people are the temple, or the building is the temple).

Liturgies have been in use in Christian worship from the earliest of times so it’s important that we consider what liturgy means and its place in the life of the church. All churches have a liturgy but some churches seem to be less intentional about their liturgy. It seems some churches operate on a default liturgy. A pastor may inherit a liturgy from the previous pastor and it remain essentially unchanged for generations. That, however, is problematic for a few reasons. As Timothy C.J. Quill has said, “Worship practice reflects and communicates the beliefs of the church. Liturgy articulates doctrine.”[2] Eric L. Johnson has said, “Worship reorders our hearts by putting everything else in perspective.”[3] So, liturgies are formative. The liturgy of the church whether “more liturgical” or “more nonliturgical” is vital to think about because the way one worships shapes the way one believes and lives.

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