The Value of Experiencing Corporate Worship from Another Tradition

The following post is a part of a series about learnings from reading
Jaroslav Pelikan’s Five-volume The Christian Tradition: A Development of Doctrine.

Over my sabbatical I attended a worship service at an Eastern Orthodox church. I generally knew what to expect. In addition to reading Volume 2 of Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition: The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (600-1700), I had also completed Timothy Ware’s introductory book, The Orthodox Church, a couple of weeks earlier. If you don’t know much about Orthodox Christianity, you’re not alone. Pew Research shows the United States is 46% Protestant, 20% Catholic, and only .5% Orthodox. That’s right, point-five percent! By contrast, in Europe Eastern Orthodoxy is the second largest Christian denomination (35%), with Roman Catholicism first (46%). There are many countries where Orthodox Christianity is the majority faith, like Greece (90%), Serbia (84%), Romania (81%), and Russia (79%). For a large portion of the world, the only Christianity people practically know about is Eastern Orthodoxy.

You might ask, “Where have these Orthodox guys been?” Their answer would be, “We’ve always been here. You are the newcomers!” Like Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy considers itself to be the original, true church believing their leadership can be traced in a line back to the Apostle Peter. Indeed, the church prides itself as loyally maintaining the ancient, apostolic deposit of faith. As such, they possess a generally conservative spirit that boasts of changing little to nothing – no modernization, contextualization, development, or critical reflection. One of the ways this conservation shows up is in the worship service (called the divine liturgy), which takes its cues from liturgical elements used in the 4th and 5th century. Thus, an Orthodox worship service is to not only to experience how the church worships but how it worshiped for the better part of 1700 years.

This was one of the biggest reasons I wanted to attend a service. I knew it would feel different. Orthodox worship services abide by the liturgical calendar (which measures time by the life of Christ), has a priest (who primarily faces the altar like the congregants), are ceremonial in approach where incense is offered, candles lit, hymns chanted (acapella), Scripture read aloud in big chunks, and congregants stand almost the entire service, crossing themselves throughout. Indeed, the people participated by standing, kneeling, bowing, crossing, responding, blessings, greetings, etc. The center of the worship is the Lord’s Supper (which is lengthy) instead of the sermon (which is brief). The service lasted two hours, and this followed an earlier hour-long prayer service. Honestly, I liked the other-worldliness of it all. During the service, I kept reminding myself that this is how the majority of Christians experience “going to church.”¹

It mirrored my visit a couple of years ago to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, built upon the spot where tradition holds Jesus was crucified and buried. There too, pilgrims crossed themselves, knelt in various places, chanted ancient hymns in Greek or Latin, and confessed creeds and corporate prayers as they would in an Orthodox church. There was no worship leader in skinny jeans directing folks donning Sendero hats and flipflops in the latest Elevation tune following a devotional given by pastor sporting retro Jordans and athleisure pants. It began to dawn on me that my non-denominational, evangelical, Protestant style of worship where we sing contemporary songs with a band, listen to a 35-minute sermon from the Scripture, and use video screens for assistance, wasn’t only foreign to the majority of church history but to the global church that is much more liturgical, ceremonial, reverential, and formal. The irony is that what I regarded in Orthodox worship as foreign was actually familiar, and what I held as familiar in evangelical worship is experientially foreign to most believers throughout the world and time.

Worshiping in both Jerusalem and my local Orthodox church revealed how much I am product of Protestant Evangelicalism. As with any background, it brings both pros and cons. I appreciate how modernization and cultural relevance (as well as theology) has shaped my church’s liturgy. The benefit is that what happens in worship at CCCC is not only understandable but engaging in a way that speaks to moderns while retaining elements of historic worship (e.g. prayers, confession, Lord’s Supper). We sing songs from us, offer prayers formed on the spot, and hear teaching from God’s Word in a way that is clear, substantive, and hopefully prophetic. There is much I love about my Protestant evangelical corporate worship, but I’ve learned some things in reading about and experiencing Eastern Orthodox worship.

I want to be more charitable and less dogmatic
about different worship styles and elements.

To be fair, I struggled to connect with the repetitiveness of certain elements, the rote feeling in parts, and recitations in Greek instead of English. I’m also fairly iconoclastic in that I don’t kiss images of saints or bow before crosses. Additionally, I don’t pray to the Virgin Mary or the saints, nor do I regard the priest as a vicar of Christ. I could say more about my challenges with Orthodoxy, but I’ve learned that it is better to seek understanding in differences than merely dismissing them outright. If worship elements like chanting, crossing, and bowing aren’t exceptions but the rule both historically and globally, then I should strive to be less reactionary and discover the why behind those practices. Far from thinking my own way of worship is the “right” one, I should learn why these elements from other traditions have endured the centuries. I may discover liturgical riches in the wider Christian tradition I’m not availing myself of because I’ve dogmatically and erroneously regarded my own particular tradition as the proper one. On the other hand, I may realize that I just disagree with them, but at least I will have done my homework and shown respect for my brothers and sisters in Christ in doing so.

Learning about and experiencing other worship traditions
can aid us in evaluating our own.

Experiencing an Orthodox service caused me to ponder about potential weaknesses in evangelical worship. Ask yourself, “Why does our expression of worship seem so different than those throughout church history? Why are we the minority? Did evangelicals figure out something other Christians haven’t or have we lost some things they’ve steadfastly held, or something in between? Have we in large part found ourselves increasingly captured by modernism, pragmatism, and cultural relevance which has created a growing detachment from a proper theology of worship?” Those are questions worth asking. As I worshiped in the Orthodox church I thought about healthy critiques of my tradition, such as evangelicalism’s congenital disconnection from the historical church,² service elements that slide toward irreverence, and the temptation of depending on mood, lighting, and emotion, instead of Word and Spirit when it comes to what is genuinely transformational. Additionally, much of the evangelical worship experience increasingly mirrors a secular concert where performance risks overriding participation. Is it a good thing if we can’t tell the difference by and large between a church’s service and a secular concert? Perhaps heeding older traditions such as Eastern Orthodoxy would offer helpful correctives.

Observing other traditions should prompt us
to discover the origins behind our own practices.

I don’t typically perform the sign of the Cross as Orthodox, Catholics, Lutherans, Anglicans, and other Christians do. The temptation is to immediately dismiss it as unbiblical, superstitious, or ritualistic. “That’s just something Catholics do!” But the fact is the practice of signing the Cross been around in some form since 200AD. That’s a LONG time! Ironically, I’ve seen Baptists blow a gasket with churches who don’t have altar calls in their services, not realizing it’s a 19th century innovation. The same can be said for the sinner’s prayer. This doesn’t mean these practices are questionable by default, but there is something to be said about elements in worship which are fairly recent creations as opposed to those with a long history in the life of the church. While it’s true something isn’t good merely because it’s old, there is wisdom in regarding with respect that which has lasted over time because likely there is a sound reason for it – whether one agrees with the specific practice or not. That’s why I read Pelikan’s series. I wanted to know the origins of Christian belief and practice. In addition to attending a service of a different tradition, it prompted me to ask why do we do what we do when we gather for worship? Instead of living in the ignorance of uncritical acceptance, maybe we discover that some of our practices have little footing in the life of the Church Historical, and because so, we regard them as less essential than before. Indeed, maybe we discover other ancient practices that better communicate God’s grace to his people. This is the value of observing other Christian traditions in our time and over time.

1. The service is liturgically similar to Roman Catholicism.
2. For example, not only are many evangelicals unable to recite the Apostles’ Creed, they don’t even know what it is. This would be unheard of in almost the entirety of church history.