Redeeming Liturgy

This is something I was thinking about in January actually.  I went to an Episcopal school from third grade to twelfth grade. While these schools taught me many good things, one of the negative things they did for me was give me a distaste for liturgical forms of worship. What I saw in chapel at my high school every Wednesday was not worship but students who did not want to be there repeating (or maybe just sleeping) similar words each week. This was my main experience with liturgy, and I did not want anything to do with it. I didn’t want to stand around repeating dull, dead words. Well, maybe the words were good. A lot of it was from the Bible. But there was no life to it. I would much rather have a passionate worship service with energizing songs and applicable teaching. Leave the old prayers and (un)responsive readings out of it.

But God has been redeeming liturgy for me since I came to college four years ago. I’m beginning to see the beauty of this form of worship when it is actually being used to worship God and not as a rote thing. The people who wrote the words were certainly on fire for God. A lot of it is directly from Scripture too. Praying these prayers together allows us to worship corporately as a congregation and connects us with the Body of Messiah over the generations and around the world. There are many different styles of liturgy too. Recently I’ve been able to worship in Anglican, Presbyterian and Messianic Jewish traditions. Each brings out something different about who God is. Of course, this shouldn’t take the place of individual prayer and worship. But worship isn’t just singing praise songs. It’s a heart attitude that manifests itself in many different ways. One beautiful manifestation of worship is the Body bowing down together as one.