Worship: Evangelical or Reformed?

Ne Horizons ^ | 2002 | W. Robert Godfrey

[Gamecock]

One of the challenges of being Reformed in America is to figure out the relationship between what is evangelical and what is Reformed. Protestantism in America is dominated by the mainline Protestants, the evangelicals, and the charismatics. After these dominant groups, other major players would include the confessional Lutherans. But where do the Reformed fit in, particularly in relation to the evangelicals, with whom historically we have been most closely linked?

Some observers argue that the confessional Reformed are a subgroup in the broader evangelical movement. Certainly over the centuries in America, the Reformed have often allied themselves with the evangelicals, have shared much in common with the evangelicals, and have often tried to refrain from criticizing the evangelical movement. But are we Reformed really evangelical?

One area in which the differences between evangelical and Reformed can be examined is the matter of worship. At first glance, we may see more similarities than differences. The orders of worship in Reformed and evangelical churches can be almost identical. Certainly, both kinds of churches sing songs, read Scripture, pray, preach, and administer baptism and the Lord's Supper. But do these similarities reflect only formal agreement, or do they represent a common understanding of the meaning and function of these liturgical acts in worship?

If we look closely, I believe that we will see the substantive differences between evangelicals and Reformed on worship. That difference is clear on two central issues: first, the understanding of the presence of God in the service; and second, the understanding of the ministerial office in worship.

The Presence of God in Worship

The presence of God in worship may seem a strange issue to raise. Do we not both believe that God is present with his people in worship? Indeed we do! But how is God present, and how is he active in our worship?

It seems to me that for evangelicalism, God is present in worship basically to listen. He is not far away; rather, he is intimately and lovingly present to observe and hear the worship of his people. He listens to their praise and their prayers. He sees their obedient observance of the sacraments. He hears their testimonies and sharing. He attends to the teaching of his Word, listening to be sure that the teaching is faithful and accurate.

The effect of this sense of evangelical worship is that the stress is on the horizontal dimension of worship. The sense of warm, personal fellowship, and participation among believers at worship is crucial. Anything that increases a sense of involvement, especially on the level of emotions, is likely to be approved. The service must be inspiring and reviving, and then God will observe and be pleased.

The Reformed faith has a fundamentally different understanding of the presence of God. God is indeed present to hear. He listens to the praise and prayers of his people. But he is also present to speak. God is not only present as an observer; he is an active participant. He speaks in the Word and in the sacraments. As Reformed Christians, we do not believe that he speaks directly and immediately to us in the church. God uses means to speak. But he speaks truly and really to us through the means that he has appointed for his church. In the ministry of the Word—as it is properly preached and ministered in salutation and benediction—it is truly God who speaks. As the Second Helvetic Confession rightly says, "The preaching of the Word of God is the Word of God."

God is also actively present and speaking in the sacraments, according to the Reformed understanding. The sacraments are much more about him than about us. He speaks through them the reality of the presence of Jesus to bless his people as he confirms his gospel truth and promises through them.

The effect of this understanding of Reformed worship is that the stress is on the vertical dimension of worship. The horizontal dimension is not absent, but the focus is not on warm feelings and sharing. Rather, it is on the community as a unit meeting their God. Our primary fellowship with one another is in the unified activities of speaking to God in song and prayer and of listening together as God speaks to us. The vertical orientation of our worship service insures that God is the focus of our worship. The first importance of any act of worship is not its value for the inspiration of the people, but its faithfulness to God's revelation of his will for worship. We must meet with God only in ways that please him. The awe and joy that is ours in coming into the presence of the living God to hear him speak is what shapes and energizes our worship service.

The Ministerial Office in Worship

The difference between the Reformed faith and evangelicalism on the presence of God in worship is closely tied to their differences on the ministerial office in worship. For evangelicalism, the ministers seem to be seen as talented and educated members of the congregation, called by God to leadership in planning and teaching. The ministers use their talents to facilitate the worship of the congregation and instruct the people. The ministers are not seen as speaking distinctively for God or having a special authority from God. Rather, their authority resides only in the reliability of their teaching, which would be true for any member of the congregation.

The effect of this evangelical view of office is to create a very democratic character to worship, in which the participation of many members of the congregation in leading the service is a good thing. The more who can share, the better. The many gifts that God has given to members of the congregation should be used for mutual edification. Again, the horizontal dimension of worship has prevailed.

The Reformed view of ministerial office is quite different. The minister is called by God through the congregation to lead worship by the authority of his office. He is examined and set apart to represent the congregation before God and to represent God before the congregation. In the great dialogue of worship, he speaks the Word of God to the people and he speaks the words of the people to God, except in those instances when the congregation as a whole raises its voice in unison to God. We who are Reformed do not embrace this arrangement because we are antidemocratic or because we believe that the minister is the only gifted member of the congregation. We follow this pattern because we believe that it is biblical and the divinely appointed pattern of worship.

The effect of this view of office is to reinforce the sense of meeting with God in a reverent and official way. It also insures that those who lead public worship have been called and authorized for that work by God. The Reformed are rightly suspicious of untrained and unauthorized members of the congregation giving longer or shorter messages to the congregation. In worship we gather to hear God, not the opinions of members. The vertical dimension of worship remains central.

Conclusion

The contrast that I have drawn between evangelical and Reformed worship no doubt ought to be nuanced in many ways. I have certainly tried to make my points by painting with a very broad brush. Yet the basic analysis, I believe, is correct.

One great difficulty that we Reformed folk have in thinking about worship is that our worship in many places has unwittingly been accommodated to evangelical ways. If we are to appreciate our Reformed heritage in worship and, equally importantly, if we are to communicate its importance, character, and power to others, we must understand the distinctive character of our worship.

Our purpose in making this contrast so pointed is not to demean evangelicals. They are indeed our brethren and our friends. But we do have real differences with them. If Reformed worship is not to become as extinct as the dinosaurs, we as Reformed people must come to a clear understanding of it and an eager commitment to it. In order to do that, we must see not just formal similarities, but more importantly the profound theological differences that distinguish evangelical worship from Reformed worship.

[jude24]

Grow up?

I'm not the one slandering an entire freakin' religion. You grow the hell up. I'll say "hell" and "damn" whenever I damn well please.

[Dr. Eckleburg]

Apparently.

[monkfan]

Then it is an empty and dead evangelism.

Thanks for sharing your opinion, but I'm going to stick with Scripture:

[Matthew 7:16-20] 16 By their fruits you shall know them. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? 17 Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit, and the evil tree bringeth forth evil fruit. 18 A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can an evil tree bring forth good fruit. 19 Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit, shall be cut down, and shall be cast into the fire. 20 Wherefore by their fruits you shall know them.

Even an atheist can be nice.

So much for Total Depravity.

His actions tell you nothing that saves your soul.

Ummm.. right... i guess... maybe... i dunno... what that means... really.

[kosta50]

Some gnostic........Acts 20:24 But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto mysel...

Sorry, pal, +Paul's earlier work has words and phrases that are common to Gnostics. His later work don't but are most probably forgeries; the main suspect here being +Irenaeus. The fact is: the Church needed +Paul. Without him Christianity would be a dead religion.

[dangus]

Nonsense. In 1999, the Boston Globe was in the practice of running on the back page reprints of what the front page loked like in a given year on that day in history. The front page had a headline about how the pope had refused to condemn Nazism. The back page of the very same newspaper was the most astounding rebuttal: Front page, blaring across the reprinted front of the page, in fact, taking up the entire front page, was an enormous headline, "Pope Condemns Twin Evils of Nazism, Communism // Pope urges all Catholics and men of good will to resist global terror" (The subheadline may be somewhat paraphrased, but I remember very clearly the main headline.) But then I notice, your quote is entirely unsourced.

[dangus]

"Funny, I don't thinki that word means what you think it does." -- Inigo Montoya, "Princess Bride."

Paul is referring to the ability of evil practictioners to perform supernatural feats. It does not mean that evil will do good things. Quite the contrary, it flat out states that evil deceives: i.e., states words that it does not mean the truth of. Yet, we are not to judge between good and evil by the words spoken, for "even devils cry out, Lord, Lord," but we are to judge by the fruits produced.

[dangus]

Nice job.

[dangus]

Ha-Ha-Ha-HA!

Now you treat the Washington Post and LA Times Book Critics' opinions as if they constituted scholarly review! BWAHAHAAAHAAA!!!'

Say, nect you're going to tell me that Stalin was a great guy... because the New York Times said he was! O my goodness! you are too funny! Too ridiculous for words!

First, siily fool: these newspapers' book critics are LITERARY critics. They are not scholarly review. The best they can talk to is that the author wrote effective rhetoric. They can speak nothing to the truthfulness of what is written; They are LITERARY critics, not historical experts.

Second, many of these same sources praised what a lovely jonb of running a country Josef Stalin did! Famine, what famine? Gosh, I don't know WHAT happened to all those millions of people in te Soviet Union. Anything which expresses contempt of religion, whether it is Orthodox Jewish, Catholic or Protestantm, is beloved, even Stalin himself. The thing to remember about Durante of the New York Times is not only did he report that Stalin was so qwonderful, and the stories about all thosem millions of people slaughtered or starved by him were just figments of Republicans' imagination, but also that he was given a PULTIZER PRIZE by his peers. Now you're going to listen to these fascists defer blame to the Catholic church?

[dangus]

Mein Kamp?

MEIN KAMP?

You really expect to taken seriously as being knowledgeable about Hitler, when you don't even know the name of the book he wrote?

[kosta50]

+Paul did save the Church. Chrisitanity was dying in Israel -- rapidly.

[kosta50]

And so you champion "silent preaching" and preaching to the "souls" of animals and trees

I practce respect for God's Creation. I do not bible-babble to animals and plants, or humans for that matter.

[dangus]

The entire thesis of his book is easily disproven: There are all sorts of historical records from the time, plainly establishing the Pope's crusade against fascism. The only thing that folks like Cromwell have to complainst Pucelli is that once he was out of Germany, he no longer focused his denunications SOLELY on Germany, but also on the horrors of Josef Stalin.

"Hitler's Pope" was written by John CornWELL. Cornwell is not a Catholic. He committed apostasy in 1965, breaking his vows, and leaving the Catholic Church. As late as the mid-90s, he was a self-professed apostate. He became a "Catholic" once more, strangely, AFTER writing books about how the Catholic was full of hooey. Apparently, he discovered that claiming to be Catholic gave him credibility when he attacked Catholicism. The truth is he is even less Catholic than John Kerry.

Some of Cornwell's other books:

Thief in the Night (1989): A ridiculous conspiracy theory of the "assassination" of Pope John Paul I.

The Hiding Places of God (1991): How miracles don't really happen; they are just the desperate manifestations of fools trying to find a God who, he claims, doesn't exist.

The Power to Harm (1996): How people are't really responsible for their own actions when they massacre other Americans; it's society's fault!

The Pontiff in Winter (2005): How JP2 was an incompetent sap.

[kosta50]

according to you, Jesus has an east-side church and a west-side church

Is that really according to me? The one Church is split in communion because of outstanding theological disagreements (minot compared to those Christians who are outside the Church). There is one Church, of which the eats and the west are particular Churches.

[kosta50]

is your church doing well anywhere?

Is 250 million "doing well?"

[dangus]

>> The other picture, of German priests giving the Nazi salute, is unremarkable. <<

Quite unremarkable. Check out Norman Rockwell's painting of children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance under an American flag: they are also giving the "Nazi" salute. Such salutes were global in those days; only after seeing the creepy war footage reels did people start feeling less patriotic about saluting the American flag like that.

Oh heavens! The Vatican ambassador to German is actually standing face to face with the German head of state!

[kosta50]

Some of our Protestant friends have no respect for anything that does not fit their definition, so rather than ask for a definition or a source, they choose to spill the issue in a vulgar and childish way by ridiculing and demeaning other people's beliefs.

In addition to human and animal, +Gregory Palamas also mentiones plant souls. The Fathers in Philokalia understand the "soul" to simply mean life, but not as one and the same life or existence. Rather they make a very clear distinction as to why the plant life is less than animal life which is less than human life. They do not fail to show why only human soul is immortal.

Preaching Gospel also includes living. Faith is away of life and our faith is from the Gospels.

[xzins]

You ignore the words that Paul wrote.

He said: 1Ti 2:12 -But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

The word "usurp" has a meaning and is part of the sentence. Not to take it into account is to ignore the plain text of scripture.

So far as Eve being deceived....I did deal with it. You probably just missed it.

I have not mentioned Paul's likes or dislikes. I have reported what I see in the scripture.

[rdb3]

Well said, OP.

[rdb3]

Be thankful that the church has surrendered to contemporary trends, or we'd still be singing Gregorian chant.

Not that there's anything wrong with that... </Seinfeld>

Seriously, I rather dig the sound of a Gregorian chant. What can I say. I like Enigma. "Sadeness" is simply awesome.

[HarleyD]

But God also opens the eyes of the unbelievers so they can see the sermons put into action. ...Seems to me that Paul understood that it is just as important to walk the walk as it is to talk the talk. Anybody can talk the walk, but can they walk the talk?

I believe you bring up two very valuable points. We are commanded of God to follow in our Lord Jesus' footsteps and live godly lives. However, that does not mean that we will ever see one soul come to know God. It is God who opens up the eyes. A case in point is Isaiah whose mission it was to harden the hearts of Israel or Noah who preached to the people for 125 years all the while building an ark that would hold seven. No matter how well we "walk the talk" God will drop people in our laps like He did with Cornelius to Peter or the Ethiopian to Phillip if that is His purpose. We should never be discouraged; only faithful.