From our friends at St. Peter’s Anglican Church in Tallahassee, FL, here is another of their excellent teaching videos. In this one, Father Michael Petty leads a class on the meaning of the Eucharist in the Anglican liturgy.

St. Peter’s also makes notes available to use while watching. Download notes here. (MOD: With regard to downloading the notes, clicking the link on St. Peter’s page will take you to another link at the bottom of the page. Right click (or Ctrl-click for Mac) to download the PDF file.)

Instructed Eucharist from St. Peter’s Anglican Church on Vimeo.

Today’s post is by guest blogger, Chaplain Mike

Those of you with sensitive ears, cover them for a moment. I’m about to utter a dirty word.

OBLIGATION.

Let me give you another one.

DUTY.

I confess to being partially accountable for the fact that these are dirty words to many today, for I grew up in the American Baby Boomer generation. We came of age in a society of rules and manners, of authority and expected norms of behavior. And we rebelled, hard.

[Continue reading]

Since our posts and comments have referred a lot to liturgy lately, I thought it might be good to revisit a nice little tool to help people understand various aspects of liturgical worship. Our first look at this book can be found here. Today, we have a another look and review from Patrick Kyle of New Reformation Press. Thanks, Kyle!

Over the holidays we threw a party for our friends on New Year’s Day, kind of a post party party. One of my friends walked in with a book that immediately caught my eye.  It is titled the ‘Pocket Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship’ authored by Brett Scott Provance and put out by IVP Academic. This volume is one in a series of fourteen Pocket Dictionaries published by IVP.  This series looks to be really promising. You can check it out here.

Being only slightly obsessed with liturgy I quickly prevailed upon my friend to lend it to me. [Continue reading]

I’ve served at two churches with exceptional pipe organs and organists. Some of my best memories of worship are about the postlude.

The last amen had sounded, the congregation was leaving the worship space and the organist, with the help of Bach, was taking the roof off the building.

I absolutely soaked it in. Could not get enough. If you have this sort of postlude possibility, I am officially envious.

Those postludes sent us out with JOY. Wonderful waves of the majesty of God, going out the doors, out the windows, right through us into that broken world that Jesus loves so much. [Continue reading]

We’re nearing the end of this series. I’m very honored by all of you who have stayed along for the entire ride. I hope that someone has given consideration to the lost glory of the Protestant liturgical tradition and the many wonderful Biblical, Gospel and ecumenical connections that are possible in re-establishing some form of it in evangelicalism.

The Benediction is the “good word” that brings the worship service to a formal close. For many Christians, some form of a scriptural Benediction will form these closing words, such as the Aaronic blessing we have all heard many times.

May the Lord bless you and keep you; may He make His face to shine on you and be gracious to you; may He lift up His countenance on you and give you peace. —Numbers 6:22-27 (NIV)

There are many Biblical passages that were either intended as Benedictions or can be easily formed into benedictions. [Continue reading]

I used to look at the big Dictionaries of Liturgy and wonder if they were worth all that money. I held onto my dollars and spent years not knowing what a collect was.

You don’t have to live in this kind of humiliation. IVP has published the Pocket Dictionary of Liturgy and Worship by Brett Scott Provance, a wonderfully comprehensive resource that won’t cost you a semester’s tuition and will provide you with all the liturgical information you need to actually know what your Anglican and Lutheran friends are talking about when they say “rubric.”

Just this morning I brought the book with me to breakfast, where my friend Joe asked me what the Ave Maria actually was. Right there in the Pocket Dictionary was a fine article with the lyrics and a complete explanation. Perfect. And that is the case with over 600 terms, persons and pieces of liturgical history.

The Dictionary is balanced between Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Orthodox and Protestant/Evangelical traditions. Some of the articles are quite substantial. It’s a superb resource for the IM audience and I highly recommend it for you or as a gift for that person you know who is seeking to get out of their own liturgical box into the broader, deeper, more ancient church.

I’m glad IVP gave me this book to review, because now I’m one of three Baptists who can identify a baldachino.

For our liturgical friends looking in on this series, the public invitation will be a strange animal indeed, conjuring images of the sawdust trail and weeping sinners pleading at the foot of a stage while an evangelist urges them to pray through. In fact the invitation is simply a portion of the service where worshipers who may wish to make certain public moves towards confessing their faith or joining a church do so by an initial public act in a worship service, usually at the end of a service by walking forward to speak to the minister.

I am a committed opponent of the use of the public invitation in worship. I have written extensively about this here at Internet Monk in many past essays. Leave Your Seat, Leave Your Sin, parts 1, 2 and 3. [Continue reading]

Silence has been banished from most contemporary worship as if it were an outright evil, yet what modern worship consumer is not likely to come back from a monastic retreat saying “I loved the silence?”

The Protestant liturgy has no tradition of silence, but periods of silence have often been incorporated into Protestant worship.

For example, the pastoral prayer is sometimes preceded by silence. Sermons can be followed by silence. Some congregations have announcements well before the prelude, then call for relative silence during the prelude. The basic idea of the prelude and/or postlude may involve silence for some churches. [Continue reading]

In his excellent book, Mother Kirk, Douglas Wilson makes a marvelous defense of the ministry of the written pastoral prayer. The average reader will say “What is he talking about?” And that is the problem: an important area of worship that is the responsibility of the pastor has been very neglected. So much so that the suggestion of doing the work of restoration sounds almost bizarre.

Protestantism has plenty of tradition in this area, from the lengthy prayers of the Puritans to the published prayers of Charles Spurgeon to the collected prayers of Walter Brueggemann.

It should be obvious by this point that the evangelical liturgy requires more than just an understanding of liturgy. It requires a work ethic; a workmanlike approach to the liturgical aspect of creating a congregational worship experience. [Continue reading]

See Dennis Bratcher’s excellent article on “The Prayers of the People” in liturgy. A full tutorial on different kinds of prayers, litanies, collects, etc is available from ELC Canada.

The idea of congregational “prayer requests” in a worship service is enough to cause anyone orchestrating a seeker service to run screaming from a planning meeting.

In my own tradition, asking for verbal prayer requests runs a real risk of killing any gathering in which it occurs. One will very likely hear “too much information” about medical procedures, family problems and various situations where God’s intervention is required. The focus of prayer is rarely anything other than personal and medical. If one is a visitor in such a situation, these kinds of enumerations can provide an instant reason to never return. [Continue reading]

Here’s the intro to this series. All posts are under the “Evangelical Liturgy” category.

In the past two years, I have written extensively here at IM in an attempt to recover some sanity, frequency and meaningful practice of the Lord’s Supper in my Baptist tradition. You can find those posts in the “Baptists” and “Church” categories in the IM archives.

For this series, my purpose will be modest: how does the Lord’s Supper (please allow me to use one term, with understanding other Protestants and evangelicals may use others) fit into the evangelical liturgy and into a recovery of Liturgy in the Protestant church?

I would begin by saying that a recovery of a liturgical place for the Lord’s Supper in evangelicalism is not to become Catholic, Lutheran or Anglican, but to learn from those traditions where possible and appropriate. There are aspects of the Lord’s Supper that evangelicals will want to affirm and practice that are of little interest to more “catholic” Christians, and there are aspects of more sacramental practice that evangelicals will want to avoid. [Continue reading]

We’ve been talking the Evangelical/Protestant liturgy recently, so why not something to give us some background in an evangelical Anglican liturgy. I’ve been watching with great interest- OK, with undiluted envy- the growth of one of the new Anglican congregations in the southeast, St.Peter’s Anglican in Tallahassee, Florida. If you aren’t getting their podcasts, you are really missing a positive, exciting example of why ACNA churches are going to do some amazing things. (If you can, listen to the wonderful 4th anniversary sermon 10/11/09, Blessed to be A Blessing.) They have big plans.

A growing Anglican church has a lot of evangelicals to educate in the basics of liturgy. Rev. Eric Dudley is a wonderful preacher and a fine teacher. In this presentation, he takes an hour to guide you through the basics of Anglican liturgy. Many of you in the IM audience will learn a tremendous amount about the larger, deeper tradition in the Anglican and Episcopal churches. Listen to his explanation of not being “sermon centered” and what is an “Anglican altar call.”

The Nuts and Bolts of Anglican Liturgy from St. Peter's Anglican Church on Vimeo.

I need to be very clear at the outset: we won’t be having a discussion on the theology of baptism. I will be talking about the place of baptism in liturgy, and I will be doing so from the standpoint of a credobaptist describing the Protestant liturgical worship service.

Most formal worship spaces, even simple ones, will have a baptistry or baptismal font. In those churches where the baptistry/font is a permanent part of worship architecture, there is a constant reminder of the place of baptism in the Christian life.

In my tradition, faith unites us to Christ, but baptism is the “confession” of Christ before men that initiates participation in the gathered people of God. The baptistry/font is frequently a part of worship as baptisms are performed and confessions of faith given in the waters of baptism. [Continue reading]

This entire series is introduced here, and you can find all of the posts under the “Evangelical Liturgy” category in the categories menu.

A hymn I grew up singing said that “My faith has found a resting place, not in device or creed.” A frequent accusation made against Baptist conservatives during the conservative resurgence was that they were “imposing creedalism” on the Southern Baptist Convention.

A rule of thumb for denominational conflict: before making an accusation, make sure that the matter under discussion is actually a bad thing.

A second rule of thumb, particularly for any Baptist moderates or evangelical liberals left with the impression that “creedalism” remains an effective taunt: be sure that you don’t find yourself defending the disease and ridiculing health (or medicine, in this case.) [Continue reading]

About 98% of the Christian blogosphere is written by preachers about preaching, so I have to wonder how much I need to say on this point. In the past, I’ve done a brief series on “What’s Wrong With The Sermon?” Much of that would be appropriate here.

This post is particularly about the place of the sermon in the evangelical liturgy. The first thing I want to say is that the sermon must be prominent, but not dominate a service of worship. We are living in a time when preaching is experienced in extremes and balanced preaching is rare.

What is balanced preaching?

Appropriate length. Not too long (most anything past 25 minutes is in danger) or too short. (I heard a Catholic homily last week that clocked in at just under 5 minutes.) [Continue reading]