Life of the Liturgy

Well my little blog will soon be going a year, and before I publish an article looking back over the last few months and the changes on the blog, I thought it might be nice to publish some of my favourite articles from the past year, beginning with "Life of the Liturgy".

 I first wrote "Life of the Liturgy" back on the 24th February 2011, just four days before my 21st birthday. It really explains why I have come to love liturgical worship, and how I have come to view it as a great benefit to the Christian Church. It is also a plea to those in authority, who often like to push liturgy off to the sidelines of or worship, as though it is a relic from a by-gone era, to reconsider and give liturgical worship the respect it so rightly deserves. This is an updated version of the original...

"There are so many different divisions of Christianity – Greek, Russian and Serbian Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Anglican, Reformed, Presbyterian, Baptist and Anabaptist, African Methodist, Episcopal, Pentecostal, non-denominational, Mennonite and Quaker. According to some counts there are more than thirty eight thousand individual Christian denominations. So it is little wonder that many people, especially those with little to no experience of Christianity,often say that the greatest barrier to becoming a Christian is all the division they see within the church.

God of course longs for the church to be united, as one body sharing the same goals and the same beliefs. It is worth noting that Christ while praying His longest prayer asked that the church be “one as God is one.” Stating this better than I ever could was an old preacher at a tent mission in South Londonderry who proclaimed, with the usual straight talking style of the country preacher “We gotta get it together, because Jesus is coming back, and he's coming for a bride, not a harem.”

I truly believe that a divided church is a weak one and I believe that for the Church of Ireland to be strong we need to incorporate the passion of the Pentecostals, the imagination of the Mennonites, the Lutheran's love of Scripture, the Benedictine's discipline and even the wonder of the Orthodox and Roman Catholics. We need to trawl the depths of that great ocean which is the Church's history in order to rediscover the lost treasures and wonders that lay therein, and we need to rediscover the “faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” (Jude 1 v3).

Liturgical prayer is a wonderful way of uniting the church under the leadership of Christ. It was, believe it or not, one of the main reasons I converted to Anglicanism from the more reformed position. I believe that our prayer lives connect us to the rest of the Body of Christ throughout the world; at any hour of any day in some corner of the world we can be assured that there is a countless multitude speaking the same prayers to God that we are. Liturgical prayer is also a way of connecting us to the past. By the past I don't mean just the 90's or the 70's, 60's, 50's but also from the 1800's and the 300's. Many of the prayers and songs we find in our Liturgy are more than a thousand years old.

As I say I’m new to Anglicanism and new to the liturgy but even I can realise what a miracle it truly is. Listening to the lectionary being read and the prayers being said and knowing that at that very same moment thousands and even hundreds of thousands of other Christians are saying the same prayers and hearing the same words preached feels like hearing the church's heart beat.

For me participating in the liturgy of the worldwide Christian community, no matter the day, is far more than simply attending a service or prayer meeting. It is about entering a story. It is about refocusing our lives around what God has been doing throughout history. It is about being sent out into the big bad world to help write the next chapter of that story. When looking for meaning and purpose in our lives we can sometimes fail to realise how important a story is to our lives. But we know we've found something when we find ourselves in God's narrative.

Liturgy is not about becoming indoctrinated. After all doctrines are hard things to love, and we cannot all be theologians.

It's not even really about education. Liturgy at its core isn't about learning facts and memorising phrases.

Liturgy is soul food. 

It nourishes our souls just as breakfast strengthens our bodies. It's sort of like a family dinner. Hopefully you get some good, wholesome and nutritious food, but more than all of that, family dinner is about family, love and community. Liturgy is like the family dinner with God. Aidan Kavanaugh who is a liturgical theologian summed it up well by saying “The liturgy, like the feast, exists not to educate but to seduce people into participating in common activity of the highest order, where on is freed to learn the things which cannot be taught.”

Liturgy is not just about learning. Instead it also allows us not only to observe but also to participate in the work of God- active prayer, active worship. Liturgy is a dialogue, a divine drama in which we are invited to be the actors. We become a part of God's story. We sign God's songs. We discover lost ancestors. And their story becomes our story.

So you see my friends, there is truly is a life of the liturgy!"