The Protestant Liturgical Renewal

Liturgical renewal among the ecumenical churches of mainline Protestantism has brought about a widespread consensus in worship style. In the spirit of the Reformation, not only the Scriptures but also the sacraments are being restored to a central position in worship. Protestant congregations are coming to a new appreciation of the importance of symbol and ceremony that allows all members to participate in the act of worship.

To describe the diverse worship practices of the many and varied Reformation churches is almost beyond possibility. Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, Congregationalists, Pentecostals, the Society of Friends, and Baptists are only some of the multiplicity of denominations and sects that were spawned by the Reformation and by various revivals and splits since. An acknowledgment of diversity, then, is perhaps the first thing that has to be said about these churches before proceeding to talk about liturgical reform. The possibility of such diversity appears to have been a fundamental characteristic of the Reformation challenge to the authority of the Roman Catholic church in the sixteenth century.

     A preliminary look at liturgical reform in the twentieth century, however, reveals a movement, not toward greater diversity, but rather toward ecumenical convergence in liturgy. This is seen in such achievements as the World Council of Churches' document on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, with its accompanying consensus eucharistic service, the Lima liturgy. The convergence extends to almost all areas of liturgy, including the Eucharist, Christian initiation, calendar and lectionary, daily prayer, and other services such as ordination, marriage, the funeral and a wide range of pastoral liturgies. A new generation of services has been emerging among the churches in the decades of the 1970s and 1980s that have in common a reform of worship in all these areas.

     This convergence is far from being only a Protestant phenomenon. Much of its impetus has come from the liturgical movement in the Roman Catholic church earlier in this century that bore remarkable fruit in the Second Vatican Council. The reform also reaches out to embrace with new appreciation the worship of the Orthodox churches. And now new sources of challenge and renewal beyond the traditions of the West are emerging globally from newer churches in Asia and Africa. There is also an increasing knowledge and appreciation of worship in other religions which were at one time dismissed as heathen. Furthermore, new voices calling for reform are emerging nearer at hand from the poor, the oppressed and the generally disregarded ones in our midst, including women, native peoples, the physically challenged, and others.

     The picture is exceedingly vast and difficult to comprehend. But we have still been looking only at the movement of ecumenical convergence that is happening primarily among those churches which are usually characterized as being more "liturgical" or "mainstream." Other churches, which have identified themselves as "evangelical," "fundamentalist," or "charismatic," have not participated as yet to any great extent in the ecumenical convergence. They indeed would probably regard their freedom for diversity to be truer to the Protestant ethos than is the movement of convergence.

     The convergence in the mainstream churches, however, is not simply a recovery of a pre-Reformation uniformity. It is rather a movement toward unity that can embrace difference and indeed encourages new and creative responses in liturgy through the charismatic and artistic gifts of the people. This openness is clearly indicated in the rubrics of many of the new service books. They ask their users not merely to follow a prescribed liturgy, but to use the contents of the books—the prayers, responses, symbolic actions—as resources and samples to assist and guide the people's own work and initiatives in liturgy.

     This recovery of the people's participation in the liturgy is profoundly in keeping with the Reformation insistence on the priesthood of all believers. The Reformers sought to render the liturgy accessible to all the people through such means as translation of the liturgical texts into the vernacular and the encouragement of congregational singing of psalms, hymns and canticles. The recovery of the notion of the whole people of God as celebrants in liturgy may indeed be one of the greatest contributions of the Reformation to the modern climate of liturgical renewal. This remains a goal even if history has also shown the Reformation to unleash factions that disrupt the unity of Christ's body.

     Convergence, then, is a primary characteristic of the current movements of liturgical reform among the churches, Reformed, Orthodox, and Catholic alike. We need to consider what is at the root of this convergence and whether there is anything in the legacy of the Reformation, despite the diversity it unleashed, that has contributed to it. The modern liturgical convergence, it can be argued, has its source in a recovery of the biblical basis for Christian prayer and praise. The biblical witness to the saving acts of God in covenant with the people of Israel and culminating in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the source without equal of the Christian enactment of faith in the liturgy. Christians see all the events of their lives in the light of God's illuminating Word, proclaimed and enacted in the liturgy. Our own stories, as is commonly said, belong in the larger context of the biblical story, and, together, these are celebrated week-by-week in the liturgy.

     A unique place was given to the Scriptures as the primary authority for faith and worship in the Reformation principle of sola scriptura. The Scripture principle was enunciated by the Reformers in their conflict with the teaching authority of the Roman church with its claim of equality with the authority of Scripture. Whether that is a correct reading of the Catholic understanding of authority does not need to concern us here. Of continuing importance is the Reformers' efforts to restore the Bible to the people and to reaffirm its authority for all matters of faith and life. But the Scripture principle did not ensure unity among the Reformation churches. Many of the churches differed in how they understood sola scriptura. Some, like the Puritans, maintained that worship ought to consist only of that which is directly authorized by the Scriptures. The consequence of the strict application of this criterion to worship was a drastic reduction of ceremonial practices and a focusing almost exclusively on the Scriptures read and preached and on prayer. Other churches of the Reformation, including those that followed Luther and Calvin most closely, regarded sola scriptura not as eliminating all other sources for liturgy, but rather placing Scripture in the position of being without equal beside all other sources. Both Luther and Calvin appealed often, for example, to the authority of the primitive churches and the church fathers. Their study of both the Scriptures and the early church led them to advocate a weekly celebration of the Eucharist with both bread and wine distributed among the people.

      Whereas the Reformers are noted for their efforts to restore the Scriptures to the people, it is less known that they sought, albeit unsuccessfully, to do the same for the sacraments. Calvin's efforts to establish the Eucharist every Sunday in Geneva, for example, were stymied by a ruling of the city magistrates, who favored the practice of four times a year that was already the rule in Zwingli's church in Zurich. This rule has been, with some exceptions, the practice in most Reformation churches until the recent liturgical reform. Perhaps the failure of the Reformation to fully restore the sacraments has to be understood in relation to their application of the Scripture principle. Whether sola scriptura was applied strictly or more broadly, it served to cleanse the liturgy of what the Reformers regarded as human inventions and accretions. Only baptism and the Lord's Supper, for example, of the seven sacraments designated by the church of the Middle Ages, had the required dominical institution for acceptance as sacraments in the Reformation churches.

      In the Eucharist Luther also almost totally eliminated the Roman canon because of its unbiblical emphasis on sacrifice. According to his understanding, to make the Mass into a sacrifice that could be repeated was a denial of what God had done once-for-all in the sacrifice of Christ. The biblical notion of justification by faith in this once-for-all sacrifice of Christ became a criterion for rejecting any worship that became a pious work rather than a response in thanksgiving to God's work of grace. The Reformers regarded much of the ceremonial practices and private acts of devotion in the Roman church as pious works designed to win God's favor rather than to express joyful thanksgiving for that favor already bestowed. This Reformation insight into the biblical doctrine of grace has had immense significance for the modern understanding of true motivation for prayer and worship.

     The Reformers, however, did not recover, as have modern churches in their eucharistic renewal, the biblical understanding of b