The past two months have been very stressful for my family. The details are not important to this post, but because of these events I have found myself attending my parents’ church more often. It is a small Anglican Catholic church made of stone and the inside is filled with beautiful dark wood and floors that creak. Here is a picture of what it looked like over the Christmas holidays.

I grew up in the Episcopal church but didn’t come to faith in Christ until I was in college. After college I moved to Atlanta and since then I have been a member of two very large Southern Baptist churches. I met and married my husband at the first and then we raised our family at the second where we’ve been members for the past 28 years. One thing we love is being involved in the music ministry, he in the choir and me in the orchestra. Over the years the style of worship has changed and evolved resulting in a more traditional service in the sanctuary with pews and hymn books and a more modern service that takes place in the activity center. That venue has become the most popular over the last five years. There’s a band and lights and all the things that are common in American evangelical megachurches right now.

The small Anglican church has two services on Sunday. The early service is called a prayer service and there is no singing and no sermon. This is the only service my parents attend. The priest leads us through a liturgy that includes the corporate recitation of prayers, creeds and Scripture and culminates in coming to the altar, kneeling, and receive communion. The readings of Scripture change each week but it is generally the same each and every Sunday.

When I first started going I had mixed feelings about it. I love to sing. No wait, I need to sing! It is spiritual food for my soul. Not singing in church feels wrong. I’m also a Bible nerd and love good preaching. So each time I would go to this prayer service in the small Anglican church I would always leave feeling like I was missing something. I also wasn’t sure how I felt about all the sameness, the rote nature of it every week. It struck me as cold and insincere. But I also could appreciate it in a way that I never could when I was a child and an unbeliever. Now I understood everything I was saying and realized how much Scripture was packed into the liturgy! We were reciting psalms and creeds and prayers that were chock full of wonderful truth. In 28 years at my large SBC church I can only remember reciting a creed in the worship service one or two times.

But if I’m being honest, I still looked down on it. My church was better. My way of doing church was superior. There was more life, more warmth, more sincerity.

Over the past two months I have started to change my mind a little bit. Some of that has to do with a new priest at the church who I’ve gotten to know. He is young and vibrant and just as much a Bible nerd as I am. I’ve noticed that he is very intentional about how he recites the liturgy. When he quotes the words of Christ to the disciples at the Last Supper, he slows way down.

This………….is…………my………….body.

And likewise,

This………….is………….my………….blood.

I haven’t asked him why he does this yet, but it’s spurred me to ask this question: Have I ever meditated deeply on these words? His intentionality is encouraging me to do so. Speaking of communion, the small Anglican church offers it every Sunday. Can this encourage someone to take it for granted? Yes, if you’re not careful. But what about the large SBC church? There’s a danger there in celebrating the Lord’s Supper too infrequently. Someday I’ll finish my draft of a post about the formative value of the sacraments, but for right now, I am appreciating the thoughtful intention of this new priest who has encouraged me to slow down and contemplate more deeply.

But what about the sameness of the liturgy? I have a vague memory as a child being involved in our Episcopal church as a kind of junior acolyte. Every Sunday it was the same recitations, the same prayers. I almost had it memorized. But I didn’t understand it! As I’ve been attending the small Anglican church more often, I’ve started thinking about the significance of the sameness. This world is full of change which only seems to be getting faster and crazier. What if the sameness of this liturgy is a kind of polemic in our cultural chaos, calmy and consistently preaching the faithfulness of God and his word? One of the ministry philosophies at our church is an unchanging message but ever changing methodologies. I can see the wisdom of that, up to a point. At its best you make sure to be creative in how you reach people. But I can see how this philosophy can easily become unbalanced where the church ends up sticking its finger in the wind to see what will appeal best to a consumeristic community.

Not many people attend this early prayer service at the small Anglican church. And following the liturgy is not always easy. Some don’t know when to stand or what to recite. I’m still getting lost trying to figure out what page we’re on in the prayer book and when we’re supposed to stand and sit. But despite the awkwardness and imperfection, despite the seemingly timid and lackluster voices around me, there’s a simple yet powerful beauty to the corporate experience of reciting the ancient creeds and standing silently as the deacon comes to put out the candles at the end of the service. There may be something missing in this service that’s present in my Southern Baptist megachurch, but my church isn’t filled with as much soberness and dignity. It has been calming to me to enter into this small space and enjoy the silence of just being in God’s presence.

One of those Sundays when all was seemingly unpredictable and crazy in our family, my dad and I drove back to the house after the prayer service. I told him that his church may not be the same as mine, but I was beginning to appreciate many things about the liturgy that I hadn’t understood before. The sameness that seemed boring and lifeless to me now stood as a comforting reminder that some things remain the same: God, his Word, and the free invitation to partake of the sacrament of communion. The predictability of the liturgy was serving as an anchor during the storm we were experiencing.

“Exactly,” my dad responded.