The Gospel Coalition talks to Scotty Smith, Mike Cosper, and Bob Kauflin about liturgy of worship. Those are guys worth listening to.
Every church has a liturgy. Open up your worship program/bulletin. Is the order of worship elements the same each week? That's your liturgy.
What story does it tell?
2 comments:
It surprises me how many Christians assume that either their church has "no" liturgy or that if they are in a high church tradition that only their church style has a liturgy and that the other churches don't. This is a field, at the ris of overstatement, that only pastors and church musicians seem to care about! My brother attended a service at my PCA church and said he wasn't used to attending a liturgical service and I thought about how at Mars Hill they actually have most of the same things in terms of substance but that there is no congregational participation in public confession or prayer. There's songs and an opening prayer and the sermon and so on but the only congregational activity is singing and communion ... but that's still a liturgy, too. What I wonder about is why so many Christians want to think they DON'T have a liturgy and what that may tell us about ourselves. My non-Protestant friends and family keep insisting that what this says is that pastors and sermons play too big a role in the service because without that sermon there is no story about Christ in the rest of the liturgy.
You have posed THE critical question -- what story does it tell?
Corollary to that I would ask:
Does your order tell a story at all, (beginning, middle, end and all that) or does it just sort of wander like a punch line without a setup?
Does it tell THE story well and coherently using all the best narrative devices?
Who tells the story?
There are more corollary questions, but these are certainly good to start.
This is a hot button for me.
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