The hour or so that we spend gathered for Sunday morning worship is eternally significant and deeply forms (or malforms!) God’s people over time. Yet some pastors have inherited a particular approach to Sunday worship without ever stepping back to consider whether or not it is truly biblical or grounded in historic Christian norms. Even worse, some pastors have tailored the Sunday service to suit their personal preferences, the preferences of their people, or the preferences of the culture, without ever considering the foundational questions of “What is biblical worship?” and “What most glorifies God?”
A Biblical and Historical Baseline
By looking at the example of the New Testament churches planted and instructed by the apostles, whose traditions are binding on the Church (2 Thess. 2:15), we can identify several things that the Sunday service should include. These points are confirmed by early church history and the consensus of the Church across the centuries.
1. Much Scripture reading. In 1 Timothy 4:13, Paul commands Timothy to devote himself to publicly reading Scripture. This continued Jewish practice (e.g., Luke 4:17). Justin Martyr records that in the early church, churches throughout the world read the writings of the prophets and apostles (Old and New Testament) “for as long as time permits” (First Apology, 67). Many churches have an Old Testament passage, a Psalm, a passage from the New Testament letters, and a passage from one of the Gospels every week (this only takes about 5–7 minutes!).
Is your church devoted to publicly reading the Scriptures, or do you just sprinkle in a few verses (e.g., before the sermon)?
2. Preaching that expounds the Scriptures, sets forth the apostles’ doctrine, and exhorts to obedience. The first mark of the Church after Pentecost was a devotion to the apostles’ doctrine (Acts 2:42). In 2 Timothy 4:2, Paul commands Timothy to “preach the word,” and in light of the previous verses, “the word” means “the Scriptures.” Sermons recorded in the New Testament are Scripture-saturated. These sermons included “teaching” and also “exhortation,” especially to obey and walk in the light of God’s truth. Again, Justin Martyr records that in the early church, after the readings, the leader of the assembly (what we might call the “Senior Pastor”) expounds and exhorts from the readings.
Does your church carefully explain and apply the Bible so that people grow deep in the Scriptures over time, or is it filled with personal stories, anecdotes, illustrations, and opinions that often distract from the Bible and overshadow the actual words of God
3. Prayers for all people, including public authorities. The Church after Pentecost was devoted to “the prayers” (Acts 2:42). Paul tells Timothy, “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for all people” (1 Tim. 2:1). The immediate needs of members of the congregation are important, but the Church’s prayer ministry in the world is also broader than this.
Does your church pray for the local and universal Church, the nations of the world, their rulers, Christian ministers, the spread of the gospel, the work of the great commission, and all who are in trouble, sorrow, need, or sickness, or does it just focus on the same narrow set of needs (e.g., people who are sick)?
4. The Lord’s Supper. The facts are undisputed: the churches of the apostles shared the Lord’s Supper at least every Sunday, and the whole Church did so for over fifteen centuries. The Church after Pentecost was devoted to “the breaking of bread” (Acts 2:42), a clear reference to the Lord’s Supper (Lk. 22:19; 1 Cor. 10:16; Mt. 26:26; Mk. 14:22), and Acts 20:7 treats the breaking of bread as a characteristic act of early Christian worship. In 1 Corinthians 11:17–34, Paul repeats five times that the church received the Lord’s Supper when they came together (1 Cor. 11:17, 18, 20, 33, 34), and 1 Corinthians 16:2 says that the church came together “on the first day of every week.” Again, Justin Martyr’s First Apology records that all churches everywhere shared the Lord’s Supper every Sunday. Before sharing bread and wine, the church always had a prayer to consecrate the bread and wine to God for holy purposes, using the words of institution that Jesus gave (“This is my body,” “This is my blood”) and to ask the Holy Spirit to “come down.” Jim Hamilton writes, “It is not clear to me why churches that seek to model themselves by the pattern of church life and structure seen in the NT would not also partake of the Lord’s Supper on the first day of the week.” John Armstrong writes, “There is no real doubt about this simple historical fact—through the centuries this meal has been the central and characteristic action of the church at worship. If the church is a community that remembers Jesus as Lord, then the chief way this has been done in public has been through the Supper.” For more on this, see my article “How Often Should We Receive the Lord’s Supper?”
Is your church “devoted” to the Lord’s Supper, and is it a characteristic act of your weekly worship—a way of constantly proclaiming Christ crucified and partaking of his body and blood (1 Cor. 10:16), or is it something that you only do once in a while or as an “add-on”
5. An offering that is intended for the good of the church and especially for the needs of the poor (1 Cor. 16:2). Justin Martyr emphasized that the church’s weekly offering was especially to help the less fortunate.
Is your church’s weekly offering just building your church’s coffers, or is it being designated for kingdom purposes and generously given away for the good of others?
6. Singing psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs that teach good doctrine and express praise and gratitude to God (Eph. 5:19, Col. 3:16). The two main NT exhortations to congregational singing are found in Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16. First, notice that in both verses, “psalms” comes first. The Book of Psalms was the hymnbook of the Jews and it continued to be the hymnbook of Christians. The Psalter is the only God-inspired hymnbook. Throughout history, the Church has chanted the psalms or sung them in metrical form to familiar tunes (e.g., the most famous Protestant Psalter is the 1650 Scottish Psalter). In the Metrical Psalter produced by Julie and Timothy Tennent, the Tennents write that “the regular, systematic, and congregational singing of the psalms has fallen out of vogue in many Protestant churches. It is our deeply held conviction that by this neglect the church is forfeiting a means of grace that it desperately needs to regain in order to meet the challenges of these days.” They quote Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “Whenever the Psalter is abandoned, an incomparable treasure vanishes from the Christian church. With its recovery will come unsuspected power.” Every church should sing psalms. For more on this, see my article “Singing the Psalms: Recovering the Church’s God-Inspired Hymnbook.” Beyond that, the Church’s music should be theologically truth and robust, since “teaching” is a key purpose of singing. The music should complement the Scripture reading and preaching and draw people deeper into the truth of the Word, not take on a life of its own and distract from the Word.
Does your church sing the psalms and other theologically robust and edifying music that supports the ministry of the Word, or does it neglect the psalms, settle for shallow music, and prioritize music over the Word and Lord’s Supper (e.g., by equating “the worship time” with the singing time)?
Additional Considerations
The six points above provide a biblical baseline for Sunday worship. Several other points should also be seriously considered.
7. The recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. The Lord’s Prayer is a model prayer that should shape all our praying, but it’s also a prayer for recitation (as was common for Jews to use in their worship, and for rabbis to teach their students). In Luke 11:2, Jesus tells his disciples, “When you pray, say [this].” It’s hard to see why the Church being “devoted” to prayer would not include the regular, corporate use of the prayer which Jesus gave us. The Didache instructs Christians to say the Lord’s Prayer three times a day, and saying it every Sunday is a historic Christian norm.
Does your church frequently say the Lord’s Prayer and allow Jesus’s prayer priorities to shape your praying, or does it neglect this prayer and its teaching?
8. A meaningful call to worship. The Bible is filled with passages that call the people of God to corporate worship, so it’s difficult to see why the church would not begin with some of these Scripture passages and/or a meaningful call to worship. A common call to worship in church history is Psalm 95, especially verses 6–7, “Oh come, let us worship and bow down; let us kneel before the Lord, our Maker! For he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand.”
Does your church service begin with a biblically rich, theologically meaningful call to worship that draws people to worship our glorious God and to celebrate his mighty saving acts, or does it begin with an informal “Good morning” and some rambling thoughts?
9. A benediction (blessing). Again, the Bible—Old and New Testament—is filled with benediction formulas, and it was a crucial part of the OT priests’ ministry to bless the people and thereby put God’s name upon them (carefully read Numbers 6:23–27). It’s hard to see why the church would not conclude its services with a meaningful benediction today. A common benediction in church history is the Trinitarian blessing in 2 Corinthians 13:14, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
Does your church conclude with a thoughtful and beautiful benediction, or does it just end with an informal dismissal?
10. Some kind of examination time or confession of sin before the Lord’s Supper. Paul tells the church to examine themselves before receiving communion (2 Cor. 13:5). One could argue that this should happen before coming to church, and that’s true too, but corporate confession of sin was a part of Israel’s worship, and this continued to be the case throughout church history. It’s at least very fitting and a historic norm to have a time of corporate confession before sharing in the covenant meal. John Wesley, for example, instructed every Methodist congregation to have a prayer of corporate confession every week, followed by words of forgiveness and comfort before the Lord’s Supper.
Does your church rush into the Lord’s Supper or does it take time to confess sin and hear words of assurance so that the meal can be shared with joy and not with guilt, shame, and an excessively somber or fearful tone?
As an eleventh point, I would suggest a time of publicly confessing the apostolic faith. Again, the first mark of the Church after Pentecost was a devotion to “the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). The church is a pillar and buttress of the truth in the world (1 Tim. 3:15) and by its very nature a confessional community. The Jews constantly recited their Creed, the Shema (Deut. 6:4), and the New Testament already includes early creedal formulas that expanded on the Shema and were likely well known by the apostolic churches (1 Cor. 8:6; 1 Cor. 15:3; 1 Tim. 3:16). In the early centuries, as core Christian doctrine was challenged, these creedal formulas expanded to include all the essential doctrines of the faith. Especially after the Council of Nicaea, weekly recitation of the Nicene Creed was a way to wave the flag of orthodoxy, catechize the church in the “matters of first importance,” and keep the gospel in front of God’s people, even on those Sundays when the sermon primarily focused on moral exhortation.
Does your church regularly confess the core doctrines of the Christian faith in a succinct way (e.g., by reciting the Apostles’ Creed or Nicene Creed), or are your people unclear about “the matters of importance” and more well-versed in what separates them from other churches (local distinctives) than what separates them from the world (creedal truths)?
Decently and In Order
There are times when the Holy Spirit moves in unusual ways in our Sunday worship. Those are precious times, I try to be sensitive to the Spirit’s leading, and I want our church’s worship to be flexible enough to accommodate the extraordinary. However, Scripture is clear that in Sunday worship, “all things should be done decently and in order” (1 Cor. 14:40). And if we want to honor God, we should seriously plan and prepare for worship—not enter the service carelessly and haphazardly under the pious guise of being “open to the Spirit.”
With that in mind, let’s take the ten (plus one) points of this article and put them into a logical “order of service”:
- Call to worship
- Several Scripture readings
- Singing a few psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs (perhaps in-between the readings as a way to respond to God’s Word)
- Preaching that expounds the readings and exhorts to obedience
- Confession of the Nicene Creed or Apostles’ Creed (generally before or after the sermon as a doctrinal rule and summary of the Word)
- Congregational prayer (after the Word is read and preached, since prayer is a response to God’s Word, and with clear prayer prompts to ensure that all biblically expected topics of prayer are addressed)
- Offering (at this time, the bread and wine are usually also brought forward for communion, since they too are an “offering” for God’s use)
- Transition and invitation to the Lord’s Supper with an opportunity to examine oneself, confess sin, and hear assurance of the gospel promises before sharing the meal
- The Lord’s Prayer (“give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses” is especially fitting as the church prepares to receive the sacramental bread and the cup which is a sign of forgiveness in Christ’s blood)
- Prayer of consecration over the bread and wine about to be used, using the words of institution given by Jesus, and asking the Holy Spirit to work
- Distribution of communion
- Benediction
Believe it or not, this is the heart of a historic Christian “liturgy.” Most classical Christian and Protestant liturgies are very similar to this (for examples, see Reformation Worship: Liturgies from the Past for the Present). Just sprinkle in a few more elements, such as an opening acclamation (e.g., during Easter, “Christ is risen! He is risen indeed!”) or a few treasured sayings that have passed down through the centuries, such as the Mysterion (“Christ had died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again!”) or the Kyrie (“Lord, have mercy; Christ, have mercy; Lord, have mercy”). You’ll also find regular use of a few short Trinitarian hymns, such as the Gloria Patri and, more recently, the Doxology (“Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow”).
To those evangelical churches which look in disdain on “liturgical” churches, I would say this: “First, every church has a liturgy. Write down what you do every week, and that’s your liturgy. Second, are you sure that other churches’ liturgies are the problem, or is it possible that you are falling short—and perhaps drastically short—of biblical, apostolic, and historic Christian norms for worship? Could it be that you have invented your own standards of worship rooted in American revivalism instead of apostolic example as understood by classic Christianity?”
Prayer-Saturated and Spirit-Sensitive
In conclusion, it is always worth reiterating that it’s not just what we do on Sunday morning but why we do it and how we do it that God cares about. I fully acknowledge that some of the criticism of so-called “liturgical” churches is that they are perceived as spiritually dead, and I want nothing to do with lifeless formalism. A structured liturgy without the Spirit is an abomination to God. But as my uncle said, “A simple liturgy without the Spirit is also abominable.”
Any church can be guilty of going through the motions, or of continuing established practices despite having unbelieving hearts and disobedient lives. I have been in very unstructured (“non-liturgical”) services that were shallow, stale, dry, and boring. I have been in highly structured (“liturgical”) services where God’s Spirit was powerfully experienced, people raised their hands, confessed the Creed with gusto, and said “Amen.” And vice versa. Every church has a liturgy, and even in highly structured worship contexts, there is no such thing as dead liturgy; there are just dead people doing the liturgy.
We must strive for a healthy balance of form and freedom, Spirit and sacrament, life and liturgy. These things should never be presented as an “either or.” When we are prayerful and alive to God, the biblical and historic Christian practices described in this article will deeply form the people of God over time, and will do more to promote vital piety than a shallow, haphazard, or truncated worship service.
