RESOURCE: Excellent piece at CICW on designing worship space.

NOTE: Someone asked where I got the liturgy bug as a Southern Baptist. Here is Highland Baptist Church, Louisville, where I was on staff for 3 years. From the Chancel. And exterior.

New Covenant worship can take place any place and any time. There is no setting specified in the scriptures, neither is there any arrangement of worship externals that we are told to imitate.

Our Roman Catholic friends have a very intentional- and quite fascinating- approach to worship space that seeks to place every house of worship in a pattern that is continuous with the revelation of God in the old and new covenants. Evangelical worship space design is certainly affected by this, but our approach to worship space is more influenced by the pragmatic concerns of worship, the centrality of the Word and the various traditions that influence a particular congregation.

There is nothing in evangelical worship that demands an abstaining from features that might be considered “Catholic.” However, it is likely that as reformation influenced Christians and evangelicals with particular distinctives there will be some attention to other traditions- some local, some historic- that will influence the arrangement of worship space.

What is important is to know that the evangelical worship space is free to be as simple or as complex as a particular congregation may desire it to be. There should be a new covenant sense of freedom in arranging and rearranging the worship space. Evangelicals should understand the concept of sacred space, but in a way that emphasizes the new covenant fulfillment of old covenant designs.Continue reading “The Evangelical Liturgy 1: The Worship Setting”

I am beginning a series of brief (I hope) posts on the subject of “the evangelical liturgy.” In these posts, I am going to survey the basic elements of a traditional Protestant worship service in a traditional Protestant setting. I will offer abbreviated commentary on each of those elements, with a purpose of explaining and unfolding what I see as the value of a traditional evangelical liturgy.

This will be from the point of view of non-Anglican, non-Lutheran Protestantism, because….we simply never talk about this. (And I am excited about Bryan Chapell’s new book, Christ Centered Worship, that does.)

This series could run as many as 21+ posts. I am not offering an in-depth critique of those who do not use these various elements. I assuming that most evangelicals are aware that few of these elements are being used in the popular worship formats that have developed in post-Protestantism.

I do want to feature the value of these elements, and make it clear that each one can, in widely varying settings, still make a contribution to gathered worship.

This series will assume that corporate worship is an activity of the gathered church, not a seeker event or primarily an event aimed at unbelievers. Much of what I will be describing here comes from 12 years of planning worship in a small Presbyterian Church.

This is a series that affirms my belief that post-evangelicalism- intentionally reaching back to the resources of larger, deeper, more ancient church- is the way forward for evangelicals.Continue reading “A New Series: The Evangelical Liturgy: Introduction”