How did Protestant worship come to have the shape it has?
You might wonder, how did Protestant worship come to have the shape it has in our time, in all its diversity?
We tend to think that the way we worship is the way that Christians have been worshipping for 2000 years. But it isn’t. Nothing like it.
James F. White traces the roots of Protestant worship to three sources: First, there is Anglican morning prayer contained in the Book of Common Prayer, with the addition of the homily. (Three cheers for the Anglicans!) Second, is the eucharist service of the Reformed Tradition, expressed in the Westminster Directory of 1645. (Three cheers for the Presbyterians!) The third source, according to White, is the frontier camp meetings, first held in Kentucky in the early 1800s. These services proceeded with “preaching, prayer, hymn singing, and spiritual counseling.”[1] We should add that multicultural worship in Westesn churches today is also infused with Eastern orthodox traditions, African traditions, diverse Asian traditions, First Nations traditions, and more. Monastic prayer traditions are also playing an increasingly important role.
Diverse Protestant worship traditions today draw from this variety of sources unequally, in our highly contoured and ever-changing worship landscape. Sadly, all too often corporate worship in the West today is globalized rather than global, skirting local aesthetics and cultures, and mimicking the aesthetics and the form of a small number of mega-churches.
I my current book project, Improvising Community, I include a chapter on worship where I seek to cast a vision for worship that is rich and biblical.
[1] James F. White, A Brief History of Christian Worship (Nashville: Abingdon, 1993), 159.