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Enriching Worship according to our Reformed Heritage

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. Whilst by worship we may and should refer to the personal offering of ourselves, in every facet of our lives, as an expression of gratitude to God for the forgiveness we receive in Christ (e.g. Romans 12:1,2), yet it is undeniable that the Reformers understood (public) worship as a meeting with God, a kind of foretaste of the worship that awaits us in heaven.

This sense of the presence of God in worship is captured in this comment by Calvin:

…let us know and be fully persuaded, that wherever the faithful, who worship him purely and in due form, according to the appointment of his word, are assembled together to engage in the solemn acts of religious worship, he is graciously present, and presides in the midst of them[2].

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.

The basic principles of worship found in Calvin’s writings and practice are[3]:

1. The centrality of the Word of God, i.e. the worshipper meets God through the Word, in that the Word is read, preached, sung, summarised in the Creeds and made visible in the sacraments.
2. Simplicity, i.e. the absence (removal) of physical representation and ceremonies not found in the Bible.
3. Spiritual ascent, i.e. worship draws the Christian up by the Spirit to the throne room of God in heaven in communion with the ascended Christ and the whole company of the people of God. Christ descended to earth in his incarnation in order to lift us up to heaven through his resurrection and ascension.
4. Reverence, i.e. faith joined with an earnest fear of God that lends itself to reverence and awe. “Worship the Lord with reverence, and rejoice with trembling (Psalm 2:11).

A good starting point in considering the elements to be included in the worship service is Calvin’s order of worship (La Forme 1545) which contained the following elements:

The point I wish to make is that the reincorporation of these elements, possibly in amended form (hymns and songs as well as Psalms, the shortened form of the ten commandments), would greatly enrich our peoples’ experience of corporate worship.

There should always be confession of sin which can be by way of prayer (including from time to time the opportunity for silent confession) or the singing of an appropriate Psalm, e.g. Rejoice! 396 based on Ps 51 after which our people need to hear the assurance of pardon for which any number of texts exist: Ps 103:8-13; Isaiah 44:22 and 1 John 1:7-9 are good examples. Some years ago, Bob Thomas published a little booklet with many suggestions of texts to make use of. The declaration of the assurance of pardon can be done within the prayer of confession, or a separate prayer delighting in the gospel of forgiveness, or better still as a separate element following the prayer of confession. However, the point is that the people on the basis of their confession of sin, need to be assured of God’s free pardon. This is a pastoral necessity!

A reading of the law can be included either in its first use, i.e. exposing sin, driving us to Christ immediately before the prayer of confession or in its third use as our response of gratitude to God’s pardon and therefore follow the assurance of pardon.

There are good reasons for including the Lord’s Prayer:

a) as a recitation by the congregation in which all the chief parts of Christian doctrine are enunciated

b) in doing so, we follow Jesus’ instruction for prayer (Matthew 6:9a);

c) nor is the pedagogical value of learning this prayer so easily to be dismissed – as matters stand we have young people who will not have this prayer to fall back upon later in life when in difficulty;

d) it provides a model for our own prayers;

e) it is the prayer common to all Christians from various traditions to pray when coming together for some united purpose.

In a follow up article, in addition to saying something about how we name the second person of the holy Trinity, I also want to give reasons for the recitation of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds, since these will raise how we should be naming our Lord.

A final plea to ministers from someone now occupying a pew.

By all means, use qualified persons to assist in the worship service but, whilst there can be on occasion be exceptions for a suitably well qualified person, would you please give the call to worship, lead in the prayers of adoration and confession and give the assurance of pardon? Your people want you to.

– David Palmer

[1] John Calvin, “On the Necessity of Reforming the Church,” Selected Works of John Calvin, ed. by Henry Beveridge, Grand Rapids, Michigan (Baker Book House), 1983, vol. 1, p. 126.

[2] John Calvin, Commentary on the Book of Psalms, Grand Rapids, Michigan (Baker Book House), 1979, vol. 1, p. 122

[3] In this section I’m indebted to a 2007 article by W Robert Godfrey, Calvin and the Worship of God, accessed 22^nd August 2013: http://wscal.edu/resource-center/resource/calvin-and-the-worship-of-god.