Mark Galli on The Liturgy

From this post on Galliblog:

The liturgy, as such, exposes the narrowness and superficiality of our fevered search for relevance, and exposes the youth cult that is the subtext of all relevance. The talk of relevance, of incarnating the gospel in a specific cultural context. is usually talk about twenty-somethings and, at the most, “young families.” You will not find many “missional churches” seeking to craft their worship to reaches the poor, the homeless, welfare moms, drug-addicted men, or those trapped in nursing homes and convalescent hospitals. These are not cool target audiences. These type of people do not shop at Abercrombies, and they are anything but upwardly mobile. In fact, get too many needy people in your church, and you’ll find they may stall the church’s upwardly mobile growth curve.

The liturgy, by contrast, does not target any age or cultural group. It does not even target our century, defying the narcissistic notion on which much of modernity hangs: that this is the most important era in human history. Instead, the liturgy presents a form of worship that transcends our time and place in history. Its earliest forms developed in ancient Israel centuries ago, and its subsequent development took place in a variety of cultures and sub-cultures—Greco-Roman, North African, German, Frankish, Anglo-Saxon—and has been prayed meaningfully by bakers, housewives, tailors, teachers, philosophers, priests, monks, kings, and slaves. As such, it has not be shaped, designed, programmed, fashioned to meet any particular group’s needs. It seeks only to enable people—people in general–to see God, because the liturgy knows something that our age has forgotten: people’s greatest need is for God.

I grew up in a liturgical Lutheran church. I really dig what this guy is saying here and would say a hearty "Amen" to it, but the problem that I see in the liturgy is that for most people it is a raw case of "familiarity breeds contempt". Unless our minds are continually drawn back to the reasons why we do what we do and say what we say in our worship services, we too quickly transform into creed reciting robots that mindlessly muddle our way through the worship service. The responsibility of "drawing back our minds" to the reasons for what we do in worship falls at the feet of the leadership. Unfortunately in the church where I grew up, this rarely happened and I think the result was often times a lack of mental and emotional engagement on the part of the people.

All churches have a liturgy no matter what your church label is. The bigger question is: 1)Do your people know why you are doing what you are doing in your worship service and 2) it what you are doing in your worship service Biblical? I think if the answer to these two questions is "yes" then we are well on our way to God-honoring worship.