liturgy on Navigation

Years ago, during a vacation in New Hampshire, Jonathan and I climbed Mount Washington, which is notorious for erratic weather. It can change from sunny and warm to snowing in a few hours. The wind is...

Liturgy is not, in the end, open to our emotional whims. it re-points the person praying, taking him somewhere else.

How do you deliver the authentic faith and great wisdom of the past into the new cultural situation of the twenty-first century? The way into the future, I argue, is not an innovative new start for th...

Worship, then, needs to be characterized by hospitality; it needs to be inviting. But at the same time, it should be inviting seekers into the church and its unique story and language. Worship should ...

I came to appreciate liturgy during a time in our church’s life when we were rediscovering the gospel. We planted the church in 2000, and for the first several years, we struggled to discern the best ...

The common pattern of the order of worship in the church reflects the pattern of the progress of the gospel in the heart.

When I am away from Liturgy for too long, I find I burn for it now, for the steadiness of the calendar, the words" that ring out in repetition, the heavy scented air. When I return each week, I a...

[T]he liturgy helps us enter a counter-intuitive story. In an individualistic culture, the liturgy helps us live a communal life. In a culture that values spontaneity, the liturgy grounds us in someth...

But if roteness is a danger, it is also the way liturgy works. When you don't have to think all the time about what words you are going to say next, you are free to fully enter into the act of pra...

The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements. First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and atten...

The foundations of my Christian faith were laid in mid-20th century fundamentalist churches. For introducing me to Jesus, I am grateful. However, over the years I have had to cast aside and recover fr...

Liturgy prevents the narrative form of Scripture from being reduced to private individualized consumption.

[People] need to find words that can reconnect them with each other. That is the gift of good liturgy, yeah. We're not talking about fluffy stuff. We're talking about real life for people arou...

What is Liturgy? I know that not all of us come from so-called “liturgical” traditions, but all of us do use a liturgy of sorts. Liturgy is a compound Greek word meaning “public work” that is associa...

The liturgy is the place where we wait for Jesus to show up. We don't have to do much. The liturgy is not an act of will. It is not a series of activities designed to attain a spiritual mental sta...

The Sunday before Easter is Palm Sunday, commemorating Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and beginning Holy Week. Even less-liturgical churches often dip a toe into the liturgical waters, distributing palms...

“…the liturgical traditions of the Church, all its cycles and services, exist, first of all, in order to help us recover the vision and the taste of that new life which we so easily lose and betray, s...

Good Christian liturgy is friendship in action, love taking thought, the covenant relationship between God and his people not simply discovered and celebrated like the sudden meeting of friends, excit...

Liturgical time raises our sights above the dailiness of life to the essence of life.

Asking for a "Friend"... You are ready for Holy Week. You are probably reading this because you're already thinking about next year— you're just that organized and put together...

I'm very eclectic, musically as in other things! But also to frame the hearing and knowing of Scripture within a context of worship, which is what Anglican liturgy does, just seems to me such a ve...

It is useful to reflect that the word 'liturgy' did not originate in church or worship settings. In the Greek world it referred to publish service, what a citizen did for the community. As the...

Thanksgiving is thus the liturgy of Christian living. It is the continuous sacrifice that Christians offer. Gratitude to God is the continuous sanctification of the world.

Every call to worship is a call into the real world.

Ancient worship . . . does truth. All one has to do is to study the ancient liturgies to see that liturgies clearly do truth by their order and in their substance. This is why so many young people tod...

The author chuckles at the resistance to using a prepared, written liturgy in prayer. He compares it to being unwilling to dress in any clothing we did not make ourselves, or being unwilling to drive ...

A Blue Christmas Service is offered especially for those hurting during the holidays. It’s often offered December 21, the longest night of the year. Some come because they are mourning the death of...

In short, liturgies make us certain kinds of people, and what defines us is what we love.

Once upon a time there was a rabbi who, whenever he wanted God’s presence, went to a special place in the woods, lit a fire, said some prayers, and did a dance. Then God would appear to him. When he d...

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good t...