Why Liturgy Matters

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Ligon Duncan
Sometimes I come to public worship and I am dead inside, and my brothers and sisters encourage me to come before the Lord. And so there is that horizontal thing that you want happening in the whole of the public worship service, but certainly in the singing.

Matt Smethurst
I say to prospective members of our church, when you join the church, you join the worship team. When you join the church, you join the choir. Yeah, we you know the people on stage, as it were, are there to accompany and enhance, not to perform.

Matt Smethurst
Welcome back to the everyday pastor. A new podcast on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt smitherst and I’m Luke Duncan, and we are here to continue our conversation from the previous episode about corporate worship, Sunday worship, how we ought to approach that, what we ought to do, what we ought not to do. And we wanted to talk even more practically this time. You know, last episode, we kind of laid some groundwork about the regulative principle and the difference between elements and forms slash circumstances. And really just the main thing we’re trying to communicate is that God sets the terms for how we worship Him when we gather as His people. But let’s think even more about okay, what does that mean Sunday should look like? Should churches have a liturgy, an order of service? How should pastors think about structuring the actual gathering on Sundays, looking

Ligon Duncan
well for evangelical Protestants, liturgy just means the order of service. It’s not some mystical sacramental thing. The order of service is how you do the elements of worship in. What order do you do them in what way? So for instance, typically, we pray more than once we know we’re supposed to pray in public worship. Yeah, in most Protestant service, typically, there are three significant prayers. There’s an there’s an opening prayer of adoration and invocation, where you ask God to be present, to bless His people, where you ask God to tune our hearts, to sing his praise and to worship Him and glorify Him. Then that usually there’s a pastoral prayer, and usually there’s some kind of a closing prayer in a service. Now, there are other prayers that get prayed in evangelical Protestant settings. So the question is, when you know, when do you do that? And how do you do that? That’s what order of worship or liturgy does. And I do think that that churches need to think about that, because candidly, in some evangelical environments, I see the order of what is done influenced very heavily by the way you would do a talk show. I have a friend who will joke and say it’s a Cold Play concert followed by a TED talk, you know, where you’ll have a set of music and then you’ll have a message. And I want guys to think more about what they’re doing than to do just that. It’s

Matt Smethurst
not less than that, but it’s more Yes.

Ligon Duncan
And so why do we do? What we do? In what order do we do? Sometimes, when you have a long musical set followed by a message, consciously or unconsciously, people are trying to create an emotional environment. And in that regard, I think a lot of Evan Joel Protestant worship has been influenced by Pentecostalism. And there’s a different theology of worship and spirituality at work there. And so I again, if you, if you have a word derived service of worship, there ought to be some reasons that you do things in certain orders. And I’ve been

Matt Smethurst
not to quibble, word derived as a fine term, yeah. But even stronger, we could say word driven. Yes, really, word ordered. Yeah,

Ligon Duncan
that’s what you’re saying throughout, throughout the service. That’s right. And so you’re wanting to, first of all, you’re wanting to look and see what was done in public worship services in the Bibles. And the very first public worship service in the Bible, the word is read. It’s in Exodus 24 Moses is gathered to people at Mount Sinai. And from that point on, for the rest of the Bible, every public worship service has the reading of Scripture. And then what you begin to see is the preaching of Scripture accompanies the reading of Scripture, the singing of God’s word accompanies the prayer of and of course, prayer is maybe the earliest thing that is used in the Bible for public worship. And so all you see all these components, and there’s a rationale to how, how you do them. So I’ve worshiped. Equipped with you at River City Baptist Church in Richmond, and there’s a logic to what you do when you do in the service. And I’ve heard you talk about that a little bit before. What’s in your mind as you structure the order of of service? Well,

Matt Smethurst
it’s interesting the way you just explained it. I never quite thought of it like that, where the earliest thing we see when God’s people gather in Scripture, we have the reading of Scripture and the praying to God, yeah, and then other things kind of follow naturally from that as Revelation unfolds. But those two original things really are the two main building blocks I like to think of which is in the corporate gathering, God speaks to us and we speak to him, yes, so it’s God’s voice to us and our voices back to God. And I had a, by the way, I

Ligon Duncan
had a worship Professor Robert L Raymond, 30 years ago, who wrote a book called, Oh come let us worship, which was on evangelical public worship. I think Baker published the book, and that was a big thing. What you just said was a big thing. He said, you always have to think of the dialog that’s going on in worship. God is speaking to you, and then you’re speaking back to God. And he wanted that rhythm kind of in your mind when you’re planning public worship, and that came out in the service that I attended.

Matt Smethurst
And so, of course, there are different faithful ways to do it. The way we do it at River City is we have a song of preparation, which is just, in many ways, a cue for people to find their seats, so that the service doesn’t begin with people still milling around. It kind of gives people a cue, sit down, get, you know, get situated, and sing along, if you’d like. And then a service leader who’s not the preacher, goes up and does a kind of welcome, reminds people of why we’re here, who this service is for, that you know that this is, this is a church service for people who are weary and broken and worn. Maybe you’re doing great, but a lot of people aren’t, and if you’re not doing great, you’re in the right place. I love the the gospel. Welcome that that Ray ortlund gives at or used to give at Emmanuel church in Nashville. I think he got it from Jim Boyce at 10th pres in in Philly. But it’s something to the effect of and these are the first words spoken in the service to all who are weary and need rest, to all who mourn and long for comfort, to all who fail and desire strength, to all who sin and need a savior. This church opens wide its doors and its hearts with a welcome from Jesus, Christ Himself a friend of sinners. Yeah, welcome to this gathering, you know. So we have said that before, but usually the service leader will just get up and say something like, welcome to this gathering of River City Baptist Church. Now this is going to seem maybe really pedantic, but we don’t just say welcome to River City Baptist Church. We say, Welcome to this gathering of River City Baptist Church, which is just a small signal that what’s what we’re welcoming you to is actually the assembly, the gathering,

Ligon Duncan
not a place. It’s a people, exactly.

Matt Smethurst
And of course, it’s not less than a place. It’s a people who worship one place. Welcome to this gathering. And then, and then the service leader will give a bunch of announcements. And then we actually have a time of about 45 seconds of silence, which the service leader introduces to just kind of prepare our hearts for worship. And I’ll be honest, I used to, I used to communicate this wrongly. So when we first planted our church, I would sometimes, because I led the first, say, two months of services to kind of give other service leaders a sense of what we’re looking for, and the way I would frame, the way I would introduce that moment of silence is I would say something like, you know, we all bring various kinds of distractions and burdens, so let’s take a few moments of silence to quiet our hearts and kind of rid our minds of distraction. But what I ended up doing is, sometimes I sounded like Eastern mysticism, kind of like empty our mind. So what I try to say, and actually this is, you know, some church members kind of called me out on that, and they said, Hey, shouldn’t we say something more like, let’s, let’s pray that the Lord would repair our hearts to fill our minds with his truth. So I’m learning as I go that’s good, and I love that, though, because especially in our noisy screen saturated age, with the exception of when we’re sleeping, there just aren’t many times during the course of a day when we’re totally unplugged and we can experience. Silence. And so it’s there is a gravity to that those 45 seconds of silence as the announcements are over, and now we’re preparing to worship the living God. And so the very next thing that is said is the call to worship. And I tell our service leaders, don’t even say the Bible verse, not that it’s sinful to it’s just we want the we want the words that break the silence to be the voice of God Himself, exactly. And so I think, I think in our service yesterday, it was Psalm 95 just come worship and

Ligon Duncan
bow down, just by starting a public worship service with the Word of God. Calling God’s people to worship is one of the most transformative practices a lot of people, instead of having sort of a chummy, you know, hey, we’re really glad to have you here, you know, let’s sing a song to have God’s voice saying, Come to me. He’s summoned. You’re already preaching the gospel when you do that, because when, when Adam and Eve rebel against God, they are sent away from the garden, and when God says to his people, come let us worship and bow down. Let us kneel before the Lord our Maker, you’re already hearing the gospel. Come back into my presence, come before me with thanksgiving, come into my courts with praise. You’re already hearing the gospel, and so you’re hearing the voice of God, but it’s a gospel word, and so that is a transformative thing that people can do in a public works. Start with the Word of God and start with a word that is calling you into His presence, right?

Matt Smethurst
Because we’re not just saying, Hey, let’s go hang out with a buddy, right? We’re saying we’ve been summoned by a king that’s in his presence, and then the service leader will introduce a couple of songs. And before we sing, we sometimes try to remind people what we’re doing. So we’re not just singing vertically to God, we’re singing horizontally to one another. Look, and this is something that I’ve only become aware of in the last 10 years of my Christian life is I think I always assumed that, well, first of all, I thought corporate worship was musical worship, but it’s musical worship is a subset of that. But even just thinking about musical worship, I think I solely thought of it as a kind of vertical encounter between the congregation and God, and even worse, between just me and God, as if there are hundreds of individual quiet times going on in the same room. But according to Ephesians, chapter four, Colossians, chapter three, we are to address one another with psalms, hymns and spiritual songs. So we’re not just singing to God, we’re singing to one another, and I’m not throwing shade on churches who dim the lights necessarily. Again, I think there are, there are, you know, sincere motivations, but we don’t turn the lights down during worship because we want to be able to see and encourage one another, because the Bible commands us to

Ligon Duncan
it’s not a theater, it’s not a concert, it’s a gathering, it’s an assembly of the people of the Lord. And we need one another. We don’t just need the people on the platform in front of us and and think of that, that when when the New Testament says singing to one another, it’s basing that on the Psalms. Think of some even the psalm, Psalm 95 Come let us worship and bow down. It’s the psalmist is speaking to brothers and sisters in the Lord. Sometimes I come to public worship and I am dead inside, and my brothers and sisters encourage me to come before the Lord. And so there is that horizontal thing that you want happening in the whole of the public worship service, but certainly in the singing of public worship. So you want an environment that doesn’t say I’m sitting in a dark theater watching something that’s happening in front of me or consuming something that is being done for me, but I am actually a participant this. This hit me when, when I My mom was a choir director, and so I had, you know, I had no choice but to sing in the choir from the time I was a little kid. And I love that. That’s a that’s a wonderful, wonderful thing. But when I got to Scotland, and I’m worshiping with Psalm singing, non instrumental Presbyterians. It hits me, okay, if any worship is going to happen today, I’m going to have to do it, because nobody is going to be doing it for me. And that’s a good lesson for all of us, whether we’re Psalm singers and non instrumental worshipers or not, whether they’re instruments helping us sing, whether there’s a choir or a worship team helping us sing, we’ve got to be in the mindset I’m here to give to the Lord the glory to his

Matt Smethurst
name, the electricity went out. Would you be able to keep singing as a congregation?

Ligon Duncan
And so we you want to have that attitude, and having the lights up is one way that you can subtly send the message we’re in this. Together. Yeah,

Matt Smethurst
we understand some of our listeners, friends might disagree with us on this particular application, but here’s the important principle, the most important instrument in a church service is the voice of the gathered congregation, right? So I say to I say to prospective members of our church. When you join the church, you join the worship team. Yeah, when you join the church, you join the choir. Yeah, we, you know, the people on stage, as it were, are there to accompany, that’s right, and enhance, not to perform. Yeah, we are the ones lifting. And

Ligon Duncan
it’s the voice of the people of God that you want to be able to hear. So whether, whether it’s a modest group of instrumentalists, or a refuti organ, or whatever else I want to hear the people of God singing. That’s the That’s the voice that that that I want to hear, that’s the voice I need to hear. And so we everything needs to be done in the congregational singing in order to emphasize that instrument.

Matt Smethurst
Yeah. And then after singing, another thing we’ll we’ll do in our service is we’ll have a scripture reading followed by either a prayer of praise or a prayer of confession. That is a is a reflection on the text that’s that’s been read. And often the the the scripture reading text is something that’s thematically related to the morning sermon, often from the opposite testament, I,

Ligon Duncan
like you did not. It wasn’t overbearing and it wasn’t too verbose, but there was a lot of explanation about what you were doing in the service when I was with you. In fact, I noticed you had, you had a lot of notes for yourself, because you were leading part of the service when I was with you the last time. And so, so I was, I was going to preach, but you, you were, you had done some preparation for the service. Now you want to talk a little bit about, well, how you do it? Part of that’s

Matt Smethurst
because we were a church plant. And so I’m really trying still to take every opportunity I I have to drop little bits of teaching throughout to tell people why it is that we’re doing what we’re doing. So yes, it’s for the visitor, because we want the visitor to feel like we’re bringing them along. So for instance, that’s why in the service you were at, I before we saying, Come thou found I took a moment to say what Ebenezer means. Yeah, I always want to be mindful.

Ligon Duncan
By the way, thank you for giving me my Ebenezer and my interposed. I hate it when people take those words out of come Thou Fount. I need my interposed, and I need my Ebenezer. So thank you for explaining what it was and leaving it in there, because it’s out of Scripture Exactly.

Matt Smethurst
And in addition to that, I there’s just different reminders that I like to give from time to time, where I encourage our service leaders to give. Some of which is, just sing loudly as if the things we’re singing are true, because they are like, let’s sing as if the the the tomb is empty, but the throne of the universe is not. And if, because if, if we can’t lift our voices as if these things are true, then we’re just waste wasting our time. Religiosity makes a lame hobby, and so I want to remind our people of that. Yeah, so the scripture reading prayer of praise or prayer of confession. If it’s a prayer of confession that’s followed by an assurance of pardon, sing a couple more songs, and then I lead us in a pastoral prayer, or congregational prayer. Now this is something also I think I’m growing in. It is a and maybe we can explore this further in a future episode, because I really want to hear from you on this. It’s harder to pray publicly as you’re leading a whole congregation. It’s harder than it than it looks. I feel like I’m I’m just still finding my footing a little bit because you want it to be authentic and natural. You want to be praying, but you’re also teaching modeling, and sometimes you have to be giving details that God knows. So you’re praying for some missionary that most people may not know of. You have to say where they are and what organization they’re with, but you’re talking to God who already knows these things. So talk for a moment just about how you grew in leading those pastoral prayers. And maybe begin here. Logan, why should a pastor consider doing a pastoral prayer? What is it and why? What’s its utility?

Ligon Duncan
Well, one huge thing is, of course, the if engaging with God is the main thing we want to do in public worship. Prayer is the expression of the souls of God’s people, communing with Him, praying his word back to Him, praying the desires of their heart, crying out to Him, whether it’s lamenting and confessing or rejoicing and in Thanksgiving. And you want it to be real. And as you’ve said before, as we’ve taught you, also. Don’t want it to be insincere. You this. This has to be true for the prayer who is helping people come before the Lord, and it’s got to be in language that helps them lift up their hearts to the Lord. That is a hard thing to pull off. So I commend what I studied prayer. Not not write a prayer and read it, but study for the prayer. You need to have an outline in mind so that you’re not wandering from Dan to Beersheba. When I started as a pastor, Matt, I prayed too long. I had already had professors say, Don’t pray too long. Long. Prayers are for the closet, young man. I can remember a professor saying, because sometimes you can, you can come across as spiritual by the length of your prayer. You don’t want to do that. I did that this past and and so I had to discipline myself. And I had people timing my prayers as a young pastor, and I that was not proud of that. I realized, okay, I’m I’m wearing people out on this, and I and I need to dial I need to dial back. I need to do something that will actually help them. You don’t want them to be exhausted going into the service, and it’s hard to listen to a public prayer. It takes, it takes practice to be able to just not, instead of just kind of sitting back, and I’m going to think about other things until he’s done, to be able to follow along. It takes work, and so it also takes work by the purpose person leading. So this became an area that I really wanted to work on. I was helped by a lot of ministers. Matthew Henry wrote a book called a method for prayer with scriptural expression, which I read. It was commended to me by a professor in seminary. And I got the book, and I edited the book, and I produced the book, and we there’s even a website that you can go and get the book free. Matthewhenry.org and that helped me structure prayer. Let me tell you. Ch Spurgeon really cared about pulpit prayer, and his pulpit prayer was just as impactful on his people as his preaching was, and so people in his congregation started taking down his pulpit prayer so you can the Christian focused publication has a collection I did not know of CH Spurgeon prayers, and they are phenomenally good. And so let me tell you, I go to those Spurgeon pulpit prayers and he’ll walk you through the main elements of of prayer, and give you an idea about how you can do those things. I that became a real emphasis of mine. I wanted to

Matt Smethurst
know you familiar with this recent book, oh, wow, praying in public, in a guidebook for prayer in corporate worship, by Pat Quinn forward, by Kevin DeYoung, and who publishes it? It is crossway 2021,

Ligon Duncan
I am delinquent. I need to go grab that now. Seven guiding principles, website, at our break

Matt Smethurst
to adoration, confession, supplication, including lots of historical I just think

Ligon Duncan
it’s good for pastors to get material like that and plan and study. And then what I would typically do is, I don’t have it here. I had a smaller set of notes. These are my notes from Matthew Henry’s outline for prayer. And as you can see, if you prayed that outline, you’d be praying for about 30 minutes every Sunday. That’s what I am ending.

Matt Smethurst
Do you want to try to do a version with smaller font? World is that.

Ligon Duncan
But what I would often do is I would pick components out of that outline that I was going to emphasize on a particular Sunday, and I would have notes that I had studied ahead of time scripture references in mind that I was going to quote, and then walk through an outline of adoration and confession and Thanksgiving and supplication, or some slight modification of that outline, and so that people knew what I was doing, they could fall Okay, he’s been on that for 30 seconds. He’s about to do the next one, you know, for the next 20 or 30 seconds. And and they it can help people follow along with you. And I started, after a while, I started realizing, okay, people actually are following along, and they’re appreciating so one thing that happens is, you’re actually helping your people learn how to pray out of

Matt Smethurst
themselves. One of the kind of ways I try to model that is, I have an order that I people have come to expect it. There’s a bit of a drum. So I’ll start with basically a reminder of the Gospel, the fact that we don’t deserve for God to speak to us, much less for him to invite us to speak back to him. So it’s a double grace. And then I will move into praying for one of the promises in our church covenant, or one of our churches, priorities, kind of values, and I’ll just move through those systematically. And so yesterday was Sunday, and I prayed for our promise in our church covenant, that we’ll be active in evangelism, taking the initiative to proclaim Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, leaving the. Results to God, of course, is language adaptive. I

Ligon Duncan
also love the Sunday I was with you. You prayed for other congregations. Well, yeah,

Matt Smethurst
that’s where we moved to. Next to one is kind of a I like to move from that which is River City focused, to Lord we praise You. We are not the only show in town. We’re not the only gospel minded church, and so I like to pray for another local church by name, and not just other Baptist churches. You know, Anglican churches, Presbyterian Bible Church. And I like to have texted the pastor that week to say, what are you preaching on? So that I can specifically say, we pray for our friends at Stony Point, Presbyterian church this morning, as as their pastor, Steve Constable, is preaching to them from First Peter chapter three. That’s so good. And then moving from our church to our city to from I don’t do this every Sunday, but from time to time, I’ll pray for some kind of governing leader, or people in positions of authority, because we’re commanded to in First Timothy Chapter. Timothy chapter two, and then something International, a missionary or international work, and then sort of a prayer for the for the sermon. So there’s obviously other ways to do it, but that’s kind of the structure we miss. Good

Ligon Duncan
Well, I think clearly you care not only what you do in the order of service, but you prepare to help other people understand why you’re doing what you do, and then help them to do it with you. I thought that was helpful. Sometimes there can be too much verbiage in sort of instructing people. I felt like there was a very nice balance there in the in the public service at River City, I streamlined

Matt Smethurst
it because, because, again, I’ve gotten some helpful, critical feedback from some church members I trust, and so I’m trying to send and we

Ligon Duncan
do, we talk, we’ve talked about service review. We we don’t practice that at first prayers, but we do that with the ministers, we will go over the services ourselves and ask, what did we do well? What did we not do well? And we try and watch how much verbiage, how helpful the verbiage is. You know, that sort of thing we do. Try and go back through and say what worked and what didn’t.

Matt Smethurst
And then, just to kind of put a bow, not on the conversation quite yet, but on, on this aspect of it, time of giving sermon, closing response, hymn, song, and then, and then a benediction. Just briefly say, what, what is a been? Why is a benediction something worth doing? Well,

Ligon Duncan
number one, it was commanded by God to Moses, to Aaron, to the priests in Numbers chapter six. The whole idea was, when God’s people come to bless him, God wants to send them away with a blessing. The idea is you cannot out bless God. When you come to bless God, he is going to bless you more. And so Moses, you know, God says, Moses, I want you to tell Aaron, to tell the priest that when the people come, do not let them go until you say, The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you. The Lord lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace. And so is

Matt Smethurst
that the one that Aaronic blessing is that the one you would do every week? No, I

Ligon Duncan
tried you very much. I tried to vary a lot of benefits. There one and so I have a I built a list of benedictions that I tried to cycle through. There were some, you know, that the classic apostolic benediction, you know, is Trinitarian. And a lot of pastors that do benedictions like to do that one more often than others, but I gathered benedictions from all over the New Testament, especially, but also the Aaronic benediction, and would cycle through on those things. But I wanted to leave God’s people with a word of blessing from him, because I’m not the one that blesses them, but I get, I get just like you were talking about the call to worship, exactly His Word is what they need. He’s what they need. They don’t need me. They need

Matt Smethurst
God. Initiate. His voice initiates. He summons us into His presence, and he sends he’s

Ligon Duncan
the first word that they hear and the last word that they hear. And I just think that’s so important to the structure of a worship service.

Matt Smethurst
That’s an example of an order of service of a liturgy. Hopefully, it’s clear by now why we think that’s important. Is it possible, though, again, to over emphasize liturgy?

Ligon Duncan
No question. Yeah. I mean, and you know, the reformation is reacting against a sacralized liturgy where there’s sort of a spiritual, mystical element to the way that the service is done. And I, you know, there are a lot of evangelical friends of ours that have been attracted to Rome or to Eastern Orthodoxy or to something like an Anglo Catholicism, and that’s not what I’m commending at all. I think that’s, in fact, I often find. That people that are suffering from an experiential deficit themselves seek that experience to be filled in a liturgy. And that’s a liturgy is there to get out of the way so that we can commune with a living God, and so when it draws when, when it’s viewed as the supplier of the experience. I’m already nervous. And so yes, I think there can be an unhealthy attraction to liturgy. And that’s not to say that some liturgy will not be more formal than others. I think when a lot of low church evangelicals come to first press Jackson, they think we’re high church. We’re not actually high church, we’re low church. Presbyterians are low church, but we do have a rather formal liturgy. I think if they, they came to River City, they’d find you friendlier than we are, but you are structured very, very similar to what what we do at first pres Jackson, we’re wearing robes, and, you know, we look a little more formal, but we’re actually doing very, very similar things. It’s just that so many evangelicals come from services where there’s no apparent structure to them, and precisely those kinds of folks can get attracted to these sort of sacralized forms of liturgy. That’s a bad move in my in my view, spiritually and biblically, because the Bible just does not give us a prescribed liturgy. It tells us the elements, it explains circumstances, and then the Bible asks you to use sanctified common sense and order things according to the to the general principles of the word you use,

Matt Smethurst
the phrase the liturgy is not the supplier. It makes me think, almost like if the word is water that’s flowing to us, the water of life, liturgy is like the pipes. Yeah, the pipes are not the point. But without pipes, the water is not going to get to where it needs to go. And I think some churches need to, need to think about emphasize liturgy more, some perhaps less. That’s right, I have a dear Anglican pastor friend who jokes that his church is low church. Anglican and I and ours is high church Baptist. Which reminds me, actually, one other thing that we do in our services often is we will recite a creed, nice and creed, apostles, Creed. Sometimes, I think even once or twice, we’ve done Chalcedonian Wow. Definition, is that something worth doing, or is that? Is that just letting kind of traditionalism creep into the morning work? I

Ligon Duncan
think it’s a good thing to do. It has been historically done in Protestant churches, and it reminds us of a proper catholicity. The word Catholic means universal, and it means an open affirmation of the things that all Christians have agreed that the Bible teaches. And so that’s a good in a day and age where truth is at a discount and relativism is rampant. It is a wonderful thing to affirm central Christian doctrines together, not because of tradition, but because of Scripture. Those creeds are formulating for us in a tight and precise and succinct way, things that the Bible teach teaches us about God, about Christ, about the Holy Spirit, about salvation, etc. And those are good things for Christians to rehearse.

Matt Smethurst
And I think a good thing actually about the emerging generation is I do think many of them are longing for something more rooted, more ancient. And so what I often will say is something to the effect of, you know, our church may be young, but our beliefs are not we’re not trying to reinvent the wheel. We didn’t turn up yesterday. We’re not trying to be cute with Christian doctrine. That’s right. We stand on the shoulders of our mothers and fathers in the faith. And here’s what Christians have confessed for, say, 1700 years across time,

Ligon Duncan
and I agree, and I’ve seen, you know, I have been in a generation in the 70s when that was viewed as sort of passe and stilted and too stiff and formal to now where there is a widespread appreciation for that, that open affirmation that we did not invent the Christian faith. It didn’t start with us in the founding right? It goes all the way back to the beginning, and we affirm the same things that the apostles taught and that the early church taught and the Reformers taught. We’re we hold the same faith.

Matt Smethurst
Let’s end here. Let’s say that a pastor is listening to this and would like to implement some of these changes. Perhaps he’s inherited a set of customs that he now sees might not be as biblical or helpful as as they could obviously. It’s a case by case thing you’d have to sit down and talk to the to the brother, hear what the situation. Is. But do you have just have any general wisdom you would come in to pastors, for example, wanting to get rid of a traditional and a contemporary service, or wanting to make some kind of major change to the structure of Sunday worship? What wisdom would you commend?

Ligon Duncan
Well, one is to acknowledge from the outset that those changes can be dramatically different in the way that they, that they that they happen, depending upon the church environment. In some places, those things can be enormously difficult. In other places, it doesn’t end up being a big deal. It ends up being a positive thing. You really have to know your local situation. And then, for me, the key is this, your leadership has to really believe that it’s the right thing to do. They cannot do it just because you want to do it. If, if they’re doing it because you want to do it, when something goes wrong, you’ll get the blame, or when you leave, they’ll go back to doing it. The other way, you really want the leadership to say, Yeah, this is we. We do convictionally believe that this is what we need to be doing. The harder the change, the more conviction you want the shared leadership of the congregation to say, yes, we need to be doing this together. And that may mean it may go slower than you want it to go. People listening to us are going to laugh at this. But when, when I was a young pastor, at first prayers, we had a hymnal that was very much influenced by sort of mid 20th century revivalism, the theology of it, you would have been concerned with some of the material in the you would have liked some of the songs in it, but other songs, you would have thought, I’m not sure that’s what I would want my congregation to be singing. And so from the beginning, I thought, boy, I would rather have a hymnal that had more robust scriptural hymnity. But that was a big deal change in that church. And fortunately, the man who was the minister of music there, he and I saw eye to eye. He had been there. In fact, he retired this year after 61 years on the church staff. So you talk about the credibility that guy brought. Well, when it came time the hymnals were starting to fall apart, and he said, Look, now’s the time for us to change the hymnal. Hymnals are falling apart. And he said, You, you let you, let me handle this so that you don’t take any other and so I know that sounds funny to people listening to this, that it would be such a big deal switching a hymnal, but it was in that church and and yet, I had leadership. He went to the worship committee full of elders and some godly congregation members, and talked it through, and they said, Yeah, we we really ought to adopt a really good, robust hymnal. And that’s

Matt Smethurst
just wise leadership one. One of the reasons that I when we planted, we had, I had founding elders, if you know from the beginning, is be, is a because I think the first thing to know about elders in the New Testament is that they’re plural, right? But also because it’s a lot better to be able to say we decided rather than I decided. And I can’t draw from the pastoral experience you can, but I have heard it said that young pastors, or new pastors, they overestimate what they can accomplish in one year and underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 Yeah,

Ligon Duncan
and that’s a Jim boy saying that I have boy. I’ve quoted that to myself over and over again. And I do think some things, it’s better to take a little time and you definitely want to build consensus in leadership and little things in worship can set folks off. So, I mean, you’re talking about combining traditional contemporary. I have a friend right now in a PCA church, and he has been very careful and wise and slow in how he’s done this, but it’s a war right now in his church, he’s trying to get everybody back together in the same place, worshiping God when they have been split up, worshiping traditional and contemporary at the same time, and, and, and it’s it’s a war for him right now. So here’s the deal. Preference drives so much of this. And by the way, not just preference for the leaders, but preference for the congregation direct. It drives a lot of stuff that happens in churches, and you have to be really careful when you’re getting ready to put your finger on people’s preferences that are not rooted in principle. They’re not thought out. They’re just familiar. That’s right, yeah. And so I would, I would counsel, know your situation, make sure you bring along your leaders and then explain why you’re doing what you’re doing. And even then, there may be some people that just say, Well, I’m I’m done with that. I’m lay the long game. I’m gone, you know. But you have to do what’s right. Do it slowly if you need to build consensus, explain why you’re doing what you’re doing.

Matt Smethurst
Pastors, we. Hope that this episode of the everyday pastor has helped you find fresh joy in the work of ministry. Please share with others. Help us get the word out so that we can, by God’s grace, be a blessing to those laboring in the trenches of pastoral ministry.