Anglican Adjectives pt. 2: Liturgical
For those of you desiring to learn more about the Anglican tradition and its history, I invite you to pick up JI Packer’s wonderful book The Heritage of Anglican Theology. In this book, Packer lays out seven shared “Anglican adjectives” — essentials shared by all Anglicans.
The seven adjectives are: biblical, liturgical, evangelical, pastoral, episcopal, national, and ecumenical. In this series of brief posts, I plan to tease each of those adjectives out.
What It Means To Be “Liturgical”
Anglicanism has always had a prayer book that set the standard for worship. This use of the prayer book stems from this belief, “the worship of God is central to the Christian calling in this world, and that the worship of God is best done when we do it together as the church has in fact been doing ever since the second century.” The prayer book allows us to worship together, even with other Christians who are thousands of miles from us (that’s extraordinary!).
“Liturgies emerged naturally in the Christian church at a very early stage… The emergence is spontaneous, because you do not have to argue that the best way to honor God is to do it together—so let us have a liturgy.”
Christians were producing hymns and liturgies as early as the first century! There are sentences and quotations in the New Testament Epistles that are likely hymns and parts of local liturgies. This is a spontaneous and natural outflow of worship—this is good. This is the model we are following.
“Liturgical worship is so natural that it really does not need any justification.” It is a proper development of the church. Liturgies form out of a shared Christian desire to worship God—specifically to worship God together, to worship God in truth, and to worship God in beauty.
As we enter the liturgy, we are shaped by it! And this is a good thing, because these are words, prayers, and songs that have shaped Christian worship since its beginning. Liturgies shapes us, while they also invite us into worship of the living God.