Is Protestantism Irreverent?

This year, I went to the Good Friday services at Hope Fellowship Church here in Cambridge. The church is Baptist, but lately, they’ve begun to incorporate liturgy into the services: call-and-response readings, communal confessions and prayers, and the like. The incorporation of this into Good Friday services struck me as rather strange. We waited in silence for the service to begin, but it wasn’t really silence; it was people whispering, and babies crying, and doors opening, AC running, et cetera. The lights were off, but the modern stage was still lighted. Candles were lit, but there was no incense. We read the liturgy, but we sang the songs with guitar and drums. All in all, it struck me as a service that didn’t quite know what it wanted to be.

Perhaps my reaction was due to my instinctive expectation that liturgy in done in foreign languages, since I only go to churches which use liturgy when I’m studying abroad. I’ve been to Anglican services in Arabic; I’ve been to Lutheran services in German; I’ve been to Armenian services in Armenian (which I didn’t understand at all). I’ve been to Catholic services in Ireland, Spain, and aboard an aircraft carrier. I once attended Catholic Mass in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre on Easter when studying abroad in Jerusalem – it was in Arabic and Latin (see picture above). The vast majority of these churches were magnificent old buildings with incense and no air conditioning. The liturgy seemed to fit there: there was a real hush when you came in from outside, a change of atmosphere; reverence was a natural response.

Of course, I’ve been at the opposite end as well. I’ve been at services where people continued having conversations and playing songs during the Lord’s Supper, where nothing was planned or structured at all, and people just stood and talked as they felt moved, where we sang the same chorus over and over as people became more involved. During a service while visiting Yale, I was asked to hold my hands up and see if I could feel the Holy Spirit physically pressing on them (I couldn’t). I grew up Baptist, where you keep the house lights on for the service, the sermon is comparable to a decent theology lecture with life applications, and you definitely never turn the AC off. And that sort of service is what most of the church-goers I know are used to.

And yet I am drawn to these musty, mystic old churches, with their incense and their organs and their chants, and I think sometimes, amidst all our sensible-ness in the modern world, we miss something very important about them. I have multiple friends who have given up Evangelicalism for the Catholic and even the Orthodox church. This seems to be an increasingly prominent trend in Christianity, most recently with the conversion of “Bible Answer Man” Hank Hanegraaff to Eastern Orthodoxy. My friends, though, didn’t leave because of the teaching; they still think like Protestants. They left because they felt something important was missing – something mysterious and reverent.

Evangelicals tend to have a reputation for over-simplifying things, watering down the mystic aspects of them. We have the three-step method to becoming a Christian; you check off all the boxes, and you’re good to go. We have set of beliefs and rules and we stick with them, in a very straight-laced, respectable, 1950s sort of way. And somewhere along the line, the whole thing just gets – well, boring. It doesn’t have any of that awe and magnificence that first drove man to religion, wherever he was in time and space; it doesn’t have the shock and wonderment that shook the Roman world to its core back in 30 AD. It’s just kind of what you do.

Now, this isn’t the type of Protestantism I was raised on; I was raised with a full appreciation for that sense of mystery and awe and real human warmth and wonderment that ought to be at the heart of our religion.  Because while Protestants may often miss the point, liturgical churches often get it backwards. They hope to trigger this atmosphere of reverence largely by means of the hierarchy and the ritual and the incense, and they forget that those things are only accessories, and what is really meant to give rise to our awe and wonderment is God himself, is the Truth, however we choose to express our reaction.

To be honest, I probably think a good deal more like a Catholic than many of my Catholic friends, because I don’t have a very modern frame of mind. I see the physical world, but I also see the spiritual world layered on top of it, woven into it, in ways seen and unseen that are hard or even impossible to explain. But because it is my worldview, and not my worship style, that gives rise to my wonder, I have it always, not just when the service is exactly to my liking.

Which is not to say that one type of action or degree of liturgy will not be more conducive to any given person’s worship than another. We should not worship only with our minds, while forgetting the mystery that involves all of ourselves, nor should we yield ourselves to the mystery without engaging our minds, whether that be reciting an Orthodox liturgy or singing the same chorus twenty times without thinking. What, then, are we to do? Fortunately, Paul had the same question: “What am I to do? I will pray with my spirit, but I will pray with my mind also; I will sing praise with my spirit, but I will sing with my mind also.” It is for each of us to find his way of worshipping, but let us all take care that we worship with our whole selves.