As believers, our worship reflects our beliefs. The content of our liturgies must be given theological consideration. The word liturgy can sound ominous, but the truth is that every church already practices liturgy. Liturgy is the form and order that gives shape to the Christian experience of worship. Too commonly, however, our liturgies have become nothing more than schedules designed to make sure we end on time and get done everything we need to get done in the middle. Nevertheless this service order is a liturgy.

Special care must be given to assure that our worship is centered around the person of Christ and not on ourselves. The best way to guard against this is to participate in forms of worship that have been shaped by Christians through the work of the Spirit throughout the churches own life. If the church in worship does not partake in predetermined rituals (e.g. professing the creed, praying the ‘Our Father’, eating the Supper), we become the subjects of our own worship, lost in our own world or as Robert Jenson calls it ‘religious self-concentricity’, alienated from the Gospel’s concreteness and specificity.

There are those who would argue that filling out these liturgies with all of those activities that have historically given shape to the life of the church (e.g. professing the creed, praying the ‘Our Father’, eating the Supper) would be quenching the Spirit and ordering the worship experience according to man and not according to God. In response to this Robert Jenson argues that far from hindering the Spirit, the liturgy is the Spirit’s accomplishment, and as Chris Green paraphrases, is “the ordained means by which God engages his people.”[1] To be sure High-Church traditions often fail to practice these liturgical activities in the right Spirit. When this happens tradition becomes traditionalism and thus quenches the work of the Spirit. Therefore the aim of liturgical worship cannot be legalistic.