A quote from an Anglican minister caught my attention recently. He said that his idea of heaven was ‘a Baptist sermon with Anglican liturgy’, and his idea of hell was ‘a Baptist liturgy with an Anglican sermon’.

Us Baptists don’t officially have a liturgy. The Baptist Union of England’s website proclaims:

There is no set Baptist liturgy. Each local church and community is free to determine its own pattern, though prayer and praise, listening and reflecting on scripture, and sharing Holy Communion will always be central.

The Baptist Union of Australia website states:

We believe every individual believer is free to access God and serve Him in his or her own way (within biblical lines). For this reason Baptist churches are often very different from each other. Some are very traditional, others very radical, and others are somewhere between. We have no prayer book, no bishops, no hierarchies’. We are committed to each church being free to shape its own style, language and ministry.

[By the way, have you noticed that Australian Baptists really suck at doing websites?]

I would heartily disagree with the official view – We do have a ‘set’ liturgy. It is almost as ‘set’ as an Anglican liturgy, if not in words certainly in form. Baptists both benefit and suffer from the fact that they originated in a movement. A movement is always something which ‘moves away’ from certain excesses or bad practises or doctrine. The process always seems to involve chucking the baby out with the bathwater. With respect to worship, the emphasis on extemporaneous liturgy has brought both blessing and banality.

Whilst liturgy can become predictable and rote to some, it is infused with language that explores the full width of expression to describe God’s character and to incorporate Scripture.

The biggest problem to my mind with extemporaneous forms of prayer and worship is that the words we use are those that come readily to mind. All too often for a worship leader or prayer leader this means reaching out and dragging and dropping a pastiche of Christian cliches into a sentence construction that leaves the English language battered and bruised.

On a few occasions I have made a transcript from recordings of a service so that I could ask a worship leader what they meant by praying, “Lord we really just want to, errrr, glorify and magnify your name and Lord we really just want to declare your…….wondrous works and glorify you and thank you for…….the fact that we can worship together in freedom and declare your praises and….Lord we really just want to….invite you to be with us here today….injesusnameamen”.

It’s almost as if Baptist prayer works on a template: [fill in the blank spaces for this Sunday]

“Lord we really just want to [........................................], and Lord we really also want to [..................................] and Lord we want to declare [....................................], and Lord we really [.................................], injesusnmaeandforhisglory [said fast] Amen!.

Communion as it is done in Baptist churches differs greatly from liturgical denominations in content but it certainly has a set form. Usually an elder delivers a mini sermon about the meaning of communion, trying to explain what it is. Then another elder gives thanks for the bread, and another thanks for the cup [don't say wine when it's Ribena!]. Then the congregation sits in deadly silence as the elements are distributed. A latter development is the ‘holding of the cup’ until the presiding elder [or pastor] says we can all eat and drink together after further prayers. Then the cups are passed up the isle and collected and we move on. A latter and radical development is the soft playing of piano or keyboard music during the distribution of the elements.

I have banned mini sermons from being used and instead try and allow people to encounter the mystery of God’s unfathomable love by taking them on a process which starts with reflection and confession and leads to an assurance of faith after we have partaken of the elements. This last weekend I went further and added a further contemplation after the elements: inviting people to consider who they need to forgive, thereby extending the grace of God they celebrated into the lives of their debtors.

These developments are warmly received by people hungry to encounter God and widen their experience of worship. [More on communion to follow on a separate post].

For those pastors and leaders who wish to expand the repertoire of Baptist liturgy finding resources is rare. I have only ever come across one book available in Australia for Baptists with patterns of worship and liturgy for all occasions [weddings, funerals, dedications etc], and that is: Patterns and Prayers for Christian Worship. A Guidebook for Worship Leaders, a Baptist Union initiated publication published by OUP, 1991.

[For a full list of all current and previous such publications in the U.K. check out this site run by a very cluey Baptist academic http://www.gilco.org.uk/bibliography/baptistliturgy.html]

It is time for Baptists to collaborate and help enhance our liturgies. We have the advantage of freedom, and we don’t have to find ourselves bogged down by a lockstep approach to forms of worship. Our freedom is our advantage, but currently the reason for the sometimes shallow and glib approach we have to worship forms. It’s easy to ad lib our way through worship, it takes time to reflect more and come up with a more rigorous and creative approach to how we spend our corporate time together in worship.

Part 2 to follow, chime in in the meantime.