I became a Christian in the mid-70's in an Assembly of God church, and for a few years most of my fellowship was in Pentecostal and Charismatic churches. The Pentecostal churches had been around since the beginning of the 20th century, but the Charismatic movement was relatively new and was often hostile toward older, more traditional, churches. I remember, for awhile, believing that God was doing a new thing among us, that He was sick and tired of the superficiality and lukewarmness of the traditional churches and was raising up a new people for the last days. We would have been comfortable with this promotional blurb from one church’s website: “We’re casual and relaxed. Don’t look for pews, hymns, and stained glass windows - you won’t find them. You will find a dynamic worship band, compelling dramas, and exciting multimedia. We speak in a language and operate in a format that everyday people understand.... Don’t expect church as you have known it!” They’re saying: “We’re not like other churches. We’re the real thing.”
We believed worship should be informal and spontaneous. Eugene Peterson says this about the church he attended when he was growing up: “I was reared in a tradition that scorned written and read prayers. Book prayers. Dead prayers. Reading a prayer would have been like meeting an old friend on the street, quickly leafing through a book to find an appropriate greeting suitable for the meeting and then reading, ‘Hello, old friend; it is good to see you again. How have you been? Remember me to your family. Well, I must be on my way now. Good-bye.’ And then, closing the book and going on down the street without once looking my friend in the eye. Ludicrous. The very nature of prayer required that it be spontaneous and from the heart” (Living the Message, p. 338). Rather than diligent preparation and planning for worship on Sunday morning, we believed pastors and worship leaders should just pray and trust in the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.
I remember being very impressed with this description of C.T. Studd, the founder of the mission, Worldwide Evangelization Crusade: “He never needed more preparation for his meetings than those early hours [in prayer]. He didn’t prepare. He talked with God, and God talked with him, and made His Word live to him. He saw Jesus. He saw men and women going in their millions to hell. And he always said that that is all the preparation a man needs for preaching the Gospel, if it be a dozen times the same day. ‘Don’t go into the study to prepare a sermon,’ he once said. ‘That is all nonsense. Go into your study to go to God and get so fiery that your tongue is like a burning coal and you’ve got to speak” (Norman Grubb, C.T. Studd, pp. 221-22). Pray, seek God, and trust Him to give you the right words to speak. God leads spontaneously and informally. Anything else is evidence that we’ve drifted away from the purity of the faith and are trusting in ourselves; that’s what I thought as a young Christian.
But I began to have doubts. For one thing, I read about other people in the history of the Church, and I learned that many committed, zealous, obviously Spirit-filled Christians did things that I had associated with spiritual deadness and compromise: they used written prayers and liturgy, and they studied diligently in preparation for preaching. And then, as I continued reading Scripture, I noticed these same things in the worship of the Bible: written prayers, liturgy, and an emphasis on diligent preparation.
This passage in Nehemiah is a good example. The walls have been completed, and the nation has gone through a period of spiritual renewal. At the beginning of chapter 11, the leaders attend to the necessity of making sure there are enough people living in Jerusalem, then, in chapter 12, they have a formal ceremony to dedicate the walls and give thanks to God. God has been gracious to them. Not too long ago they were living in disgrace, with the walls in ruin and hostile people all around them. But now, with God’s help, the walls have been completed. Even their enemies see that God is among them. He’s done great things and they want to give thanks. And they do this, not with an informal praise service, but with a highly structured, formal ceremony.
The first thing to notice is that this celebration is rooted in the past. They’re celebrating a new thing that God has done among them, but their forms of worship have been inherited from the past. The genealogies in these two chapters emphasize their continuity with the past. God is renewing His work among them, but what He’s doing is not, strictly speaking, a new thing. He’s fulfilling His promises to His people in the past. The Israelites of Nehemiah’s day are benefitting from God’s promises made to His people many centuries ago.
They’re using musical instruments “prescribed by David” (12:36). And they’re following a structure inherited from the past: “They performed the service of their God and the service of purification, as did also the singers and gatekeepers, according to the commands of David and his son Solomon. For long ago, in the days of David and Asaph, there had been directors for the singers and for the songs of praise and thanksgiving to God.” Their celebration is strongly rooted in the past.
Christian worship, like the worship of Israel, is inherently traditional. We’re worshiping God for things He’s done in the past, using words that we’ve inherited from the Church of the past (even if we’re not fully aware of this). God’s work of redemption didn’t begin last year, and it didn’t begin with us. We’re benefitting from God’s promises to His people in past centuries. We’re benefitting from sacrifices God’s people have made to preserve the purity of God’s Word. We’ve received an immense wealth from those who took the time to write hymns and prayers and books of instruction on various aspects of the Christian life. When we cultivate hostility toward the historic Church, we’re showing our ignorance and ingratitude. To be completely cut off from the past is to depart from Christianity. We’re not obligated to do everything just the way it’s been done in the past; the point is that we need to acknowledge our debt of gratitude to those who’ve gone before us in the Church. We will be worshiping with them in eternity, and even in this life everything we do is built on their efforts.
The second thing is that their celebration has a definite order and structure. They’re not just “winging it,” doing whatever they feel led to do at the moment. They begin with ceremonial purification: “When the priests and Levites had purified themselves ceremonially, they purified the people, the gates and the wall.” This is followed by a large choral procession on the walls, with two choirs leading the worshipers in opposite directions, ending finally in the Temple. The normal practice was for these choirs to sing antiphonally; verse 24 describes this process: one group “stood opposite them to give praise and thanksgiving, one section responding to the other, as prescribed by David the man of God.” The picture here is of a highly structured, planned out ceremony.
Their assumption would have been that God had led David and other leaders in prescribing the order for worship. If someone had said to them, “why don’t you just trust God to help you know what to do next,” they would have responded, “We do trust God; He’s told us how to structure our worship, and we’re following His instructions.” One question that began to bother me, as a young Christian, was this: “why do we assume that God is more likely to lead at the last minute? Isn’t it possible that He might be leading those who diligently seek His help in planning for worship? Isn’t it also possible that He’s been leading those who’ve written hymns, prayer books, and liturgies throughout the centuries? Why do we think God only leads in spontaneous ways?” If I’m leading worship and preaching next Sunday, shouldn’t I trust God to lead me as I prepare during the week? He’s given me this time; shouldn’t I make use of it? Then, having prepared diligently, I can cry out to Him for help and grace and for His anointing on the service.
The fact is that our worship is going to have a structure. Even the most spontaneously-oriented charismatic worship services I’ve attended had a structure. The question is not whether or not our worship will be structured. The question is where our structure is going to come from. Will it be something we unconsciously drift into, as we rely week by week on the inspiration of the moment? Will we get our structure from the entertainment industry? Or will we listen to the things God has done in the past and aim for a structure that honors our oneness with the historic Church and exalts the God who’s revealed Himself in Scripture? The celebration in Nehemiah 12 has a definite order and structure, and this order is rooted in the work God has been doing among His people throughout many centuries.
The third thing is that the order of worship the leaders are following provides a means for the corporate expression of joy and thanksgiving. There’s a temptation, in free churches, to associate liturgy and order with spiritual deadness. We assume that the Church was highly spontaneous in the beginning, when the Spirit was at work, but then after the people started drifting away from God they developed liturgies. Liturgy, from this perspective, is a direct fruit of spiritual decline. Order and structure are connected with spiritual deadness; live worship is “casual and relaxed.”
But this time of celebration in Nehemiah 12 is anything but dead. The people aren’t just “going through the motions.” They aren’t just rattling the words off the top of their heads while they daydream about all the things they’d rather be doing. Listen to verse 43: “And on that day they offered great sacrifices, rejoicing because God had given them great joy. The women and children also rejoiced. The sound of rejoicing in Jerusalem could be heard far away.” Rather than becoming a hindrance, the order of worship became a vehicle to express their joy. It enabled them to give thanks in ways they might not have considered on their own. Rather than functioning as a straitjacket, it set them free to express their joy in God’s presence.
Thomas Howard grew up in a prominent Evangelical family; his sister, Elizabeth Elliot, has written a number of influential books. In his book, Evangelical is Not Enough, he describes his experience of worshiping in the Church of England while he was a student. At first, he looked with some disdain at the Anglican Church, but later he had a change of heart. Listen to what he says about his struggle to develop a consistent prayer life: “For many years I had tried, intermittently, to gird up my loins and settle into a faithful manner of daily prayer. But two difficulties always ran my efforts onto the shoals. First, sooner or later I found that I was neglecting them because I did not feel in the mood to pray. And second, when I did address myself to prayer, I found that I ran out of things to say.... Evangelicalism had taught me the importance of prayer and had indeed taught me to pray. It had encouraged me to pray daily. But the impression I had formed was that one was more or less on one’s own here. The Holy Ghost would inspire me, and I would be able to pray” (pp. 69-71). He believed this, and he’d known people who seemed to develop a strong prayer life in this way. But it hadn’t worked for him, despite his best efforts.
Then he discovered the written prayers of Lancelot Andrewes, a 17th Century Anglican bishop who wrote, among other things, a series of daily prayers for each day of the week. So Howard began praying these each day, whether he felt like it or not. He says: “I cannot pretend that Andrewes’s order for private morning prayers has kept me steady from the moment I adopted it. But at least it has steered me away from those two sets of shoals. Like the worship at St. Andrew’s Church and Evening Prayer at the university chapel, it has taught me that one’s coming to God has nothing to do with how one feels. One simply makes the act of prayer. It is analogous to the Jews’ bringing their alms and sacrifices to the temple; you do it because that is what the people of God do. Moreover, in so doing, you discover that, far from being mere drab duty, it orders your life and undergirds it and gives it a rhythm” (p. 70). The order and structure in Nehemiah 12 provided a channel for the expression of their joy and gratitude in worship. The form wasn’t a hindrance; it freed them to worship God joyfully with an exuberance that could be heard far away.
Tradition, order and structure are not hindrances to true worship and celebration. Although Eugene Peterson grew up in a church that was hostile to written prayers, he later on made a discovery: “along the way, I began to come across books of prayers that gave me words to pray when I didn’t seem to have any of my own. I found that books of prayers sometimes primed the pump of prayer when I didn’t feel like praying. And I found that left to myself, I often prayed in a circle, too wrapped up in myself, too much confined to my immediate circumstances and feelings, and that a prayerbook was just the thing to get out of the brambles and underbrush of my ego, back out in the open country of the Kingdom, under the open skies of God. In the process of discovering, to my surprise, alive and praying friends in these books, I realized that all along the prayers that had most influenced me were written (in the Bible), and that the lively and spirited singing we did in church was, for the most part, praying from a book, the hymnbook. My world of prayer expanded” (Living the Message, p. 338).
We’re part of a Church that has been worshiping God for 21 centuries, and when we come together for worship, we join with all those in heaven and on earth that are worshiping in the name of Jesus Christ. We use contemporary elements in our worship, because God is still at work among His people and our worship needs to reflect this. But we also maintain our connection with the past; we have no right to do otherwise. There’s a great wealth of resources in the historic Church, and using them maintains a tangible connection with God’s people who’ve gone before us. God’s work didn’t begin last year, and it didn’t begin with us; we want our worship to reflect this awareness.
Our worship, like the worship of ancient Israel, needs to be strongly rooted in the past, in the apostolic tradition, which is embodied most purely in the New Testament, and then, in a secondary way, in the creeds and worship of the early Church. That’s why Scripture readings need to be a major emphasis in worship, and that’s why the pastoral prayers I write are adapted from the prayers of various people in the history of the Church. We’re not on our own; we’re worshiping as part of the body of Christ. God has done great things in His Church throughout the centuries, and He continues to be faithful in fulfilling His promises. Let’s join together in worshiping Him, not because doing so will give us goose bumps, or because we enjoy singing all the songs, but because He is worthy.
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