Why the Liturgy is not a matter of personal preference

One "YouTube intellectual" that I've been watching for the last couple of years is a Roman Catholic layman named Brian Holdsworth.

He seeks to explain and defend basic Christian beliefs and practices, and is particularly geared toward "the internet generation."

Much of his content has to do with specifically Roman Catholic questions, but many of his points and arguments could just as easily be echoed by orthodox and Methodists, Anglicans, Lutherans, and other Protestants as well.

This excellent video covers some of the same ground as a blog post I wrote years ago called "The Liturgy questions us: What is 'relevant' anyways?"

The Liturgy means "the work of the people" or "the public service" and is used to describe what Christians classically have done when we gather together for worship.

The liturgy typically includes things like reading Scripture and celebrating Holy Communion with the Great Thanksgiving Prayer.  It typically includes things like the Creeds, the Doxology, the Lord's Prayer, and the closing blessing or Benediction.

Yet in recent years there has been a tendency in many historic denominations to downplay the importance of, or jettison altogether, some of these historic liturgical practices in order to produce a worship experience that is more "seeker-sensitive" and which feels more "relevant."

What this often results in is a truncated liturgy that consists of singing a few songs modeled on contemporary pop music, and then a very practical, sometimes "self-help" oriented" message, based upon a few sentences of Scripture, rather than a sustained reading of one or more longer passages.

Yet there are theological problems with reconstructing the liturgy based upon the cultural fads of the moment (which is usually what is meant by "relevant").  One of the problems with building the service around our own preferences, (as Holdsworth points out) is that, to the extent that what we do expresses only personal or local preferences (or the preferences of the current cultural moment), then our worship ceases to be something that we hold in common with other Christians; it ceases to be "catholic" in the sense of being something that we share in common with a world-wide community of believers.

I've thought about this in terms of music when doing nursing home services.  Christians in nursing homes, coming from all manner of different denominations, all nevertheless treasure many of the same old hymns.  These hymns represent a worship experience that was held in common across denominational lines.

Since many of our churches now follow a "top 40" style of music, where the songs we sing this year will be displaced by newer songs next year, and those in turn will be displaced by still others the year after that, I do wonder whether my generation will share many "songs of faith" in common when it comes time for us to be in the nursing homes.

All that is not to say that I oppose new music; I actually love new music, and every "old hymn" you can think of was once a brand new song that nobody knew; but I think new music and other worship practices should be integrated into a larger worship tradition that is held in common, and remains constantly recognizable across the generations, even as new elements are added in.

Those are a few thoughts and ideas to introduce this video: