Why does the Order of Worship Seem Backwards?

This is an article I wrote in 1995.

Some of you have had questions about the worship service. They have all been good questions and I thought I would address some of them in this monthly column beginning with the question “Why does the order of worship seem backwards?” This is a wonderful question! Let me try to offer an explanation that is “short enough to be interesting, but long enough to cover the subject.”

To understand the answer to this question, you need to have some understanding of the history of our liturgy. Let’s look at the development of our liturgy through five steps: the worship of the early church; the ritual of the medieval church; the liturgy of the English Reformation; the Sunday Service of John Wesley; and, the modern liturgy.

The early church liturgy generally consisted of two parts: the Synaxis, or what we call the Service of the Word, and the Eucharist, or the Service of the Table. The first part of the service was open to all who were interested in attending. It included prayers, readings from the Psalter, Canticles, lectionary readings, and a sermon. The sermon was followed by a blessing and the passing of the peace. After this, all unbaptized people were expected to leave before the Eucharist began. In the Greek-speaking church, Baptism and the Eucharist were called Mysteries and were open only to baptized Christians (or those about to be baptized in the case of baptism). Early witnesses indicate that this was the pattern of the church’s worship in the East (Egeria in Jerusalem) and in the West (Hippolytus in Rome).

By the time of the medieval church, the liturgies of the Greek-speaking East and the Latin-speaking West evolved along different lines. Our liturgical lineage comes through the Latin Rite which had become elaborate and highly stylized. Increasingly the laity had less and less to do with the worship. It ceased to be a liturgy in the literal sense meaning “the work of the people.” The Mass (as it was now called) was often celebrated by a single priest without another person present. The worship of the church became the work of the clergy.

During the reformations of the 16th and 17th centuries, much was done to restore the place of the laity in the liturgy of the church. Martin Luther translated the Mass into German so that it could be understood by the German-speaking people he served. The Bible was translated into German for the same reason. Sermons were to be preached in the vernacular (although even John Wesley followed the custom of preaching at Oxford in Latin in the 18th century).

Under the leadership of Thomas Cranmer, the English Church began to undergo many of the same reforms. After the death of Henry VIII, Cranmer provided an English liturgy in a Prayer Book (what is now called the Book of Common Prayer), an English Book of Gospels, and a Book of Homilies (sermons) to be read in the churches. Many of our most beloved prayers come from Cranmer. Cranmer is the author of much of the ritual many of our members love. His words continue in A Service of Word and Table IV beginning on page 26 of our Hymnal.

What many people fail to realize about the Wesleyan Revival of the 18th century was that it was an Evangelical Revival in the fullest sense. The Revival brought a renewed emphasis on preaching (Wesley also referred often to Cranmer’s Book of Homilies) and a renewed emphasis on the Eucharist. Another name for the Methodists was the Sacramentalists (both were meant as derisive terms). Wesley emphasized that Methodists were not only to attend the gatherings of the Societies for preaching, but they were also to continue attending the services of the Established Church to receive the Sacrament. Wesley was critical of Church of England clergy whom he felt were neglecting a frequent observance of the Eucharist.

In 1784, John Wesley prepared The Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America with other Occasional Services for the soon-to-be formed Methodist Episcopal Church in North America. In the preface he wrote:

I believe there is no liturgy in the world, either in ancient or modern language, which breathes more of a solid, scriptural, rational piety, than the Common Prayer of the Church of England. And though the main of it was compiled considerably more than two hundred years ago, yet is the language of it, not only pure, but strong and elegant in the highest degree.

John Wesley in White, Sunday Service, 5 pages after page 37.

The liturgy of the Methodists was to be essentially the liturgy of the Church of England. Unfortunately many liturgical and theological changes evolved on the frontier. First, there was not an adequate number of ordained clergy to celebrate the Eucharist in every congregation of Methodist Episcopal Church and its preaching houses. The ordained clergy (called circuit riders, because of the long circuits they were appointed to) would often make it to each church on a quarterly basis with the consequence of the Eucharist being celebrated on a quarterly basis. The typical weekly worship service was lead by a local preacher, a lay person who was licensed by the church to preach. This local preacher was not ordained and could not celebrate the Eucharist. This caused the Sunday Morning Service to evolve into a preaching service (a Service of the Word without the Service of the Table). The liturgy was abbreviated (even eliminated), the offertory (which had been before the Eucharist as an offering of the Bread and Wine) was moved to before the Sermon and simply consisted in taking up the collection! The use of the lectionary (which Wesley had included in the Sunday Service) fell into disuse and often only one shortened lesson was read on Sunday.

During the liturgical changes of the latter half of the 19th century, this basic pattern of worship was ritualized. Parts of the earlier liturgy (from the time of Cranmer) were restored, but usually out of place. The coherency of the earlier pattern of worship was lost not only to Methodists, but to much of Protestantism. Even the Protestant Episcopal Church tended to use the service of Morning Prayer rather than the Eucharist as its typical Sunday Morning service. The pattern of frontier worship became the commonly accepted pattern of worship in America.

The modern liturgical renewal (which began in American Protestant churches in the 1970’s) was made possible by several factors.

1. It was recognized that there was now an adequate number of ordained clergy for our churches. There is no good reason for the Sacraments to be neglected in our churches.

2. There is a desire to reform the worship to the patterns of the early church and the reformation churches including a Service of the Word and a Service of the Table. Both are expected to be a part of every service of Sunday Worship as they have been for most of the centuries Christians have been worshiping.

3. Laity longed for a restored place in the churches worship. This necessitates a restoration of the liturgy (work of the people).

The pattern of worship we now have in the Hymnal (see pages 3 to 5) reflects the pattern of the early church and of the English Reformation. We can sense the same flow of praise and worship that has been handed down to us by generations after generations of Christians. We can still hear the echoes of Thomas Cranmer and the English liturgy in the words we use. We can still experience the revival of the preached Word and the Eucharist as intended by John Wesley. This is our heritage—our tradition. This is the tradition handed down to us by the early church, Thomas Cranmer, and John Wesley. It just got lost for a while. Let us not lose it again.

So that is why the service seems to be backwards. We had become used to a scrambled order to begin with. Consider the flow of our worship: gathering; hearing God’s Word; responding to God’s Word by an expression of faith and confession of sin; making our offering to God and lifting up our prayers of Thanksgiving. You know, it makes sense!

You may be interested in reading more, so I have included a brief bibliography. I have tried to keep it simple. It is far from exhaustive, but I think offers a fair representation of the issues covered.

Bishop, John, Methodist Worship in Relation to Free Church Worship, Scholars Studies Press, 1975.

Dickens, A G, The English Reformation, Schoken Books: New York, 1964.

Dix, Dom Gregory, The Shape of the Liturgy, The Seabury Press: New York, 1982.

Dix, Gregory and Henry Chadwick, The Treatise on the Apostolic Tradition of St Hippolytus of Rome, Bishop and Martyr, Morehouse Publishing: Ridgefield, Connecticut, 1991.

Jasper, R C D and G J Cuming, Prayers of the Eucharist: Early and Reformed, 2nd Ed., Oxford University Press: New York, 1975, 1980.

Jones, Cheslyn, Geoffrey Wainwright and Edward Yarnold, The Study of Liturgy, Oxford University Press: New York, 1978.

Jungmann, Josef A, The Early Liturgy to the Time of Gregory the Great, Francis A Brunner, Translator, University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame, Indiana, 1959.

Thompson, Bard, Liturgies of the Western Church, William Collins Publishers, Incorporated: New York, 1961.

White, James, John Wesley’s Sunday Service of the Methodists in North America, The United Methodist Publishing House, 1984.

Wilkerson, John, Egeria’s Travels to the Holy Land, Revised Edition, Aris & Phillips: Warminster, England, 1981.