How the Gospel Shapes Our Liturgy

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of four articles on the design of a corporate worship gathering. 9Marks does not promote one way to go about the design of a worship service. Nevertheless, this is a good example of how one pastor taught his church about corporate worship and liturgy design. Here is Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4.

We’ve been using the metaphor of church architecture as a way to think about the design of our Lord’s Day services. In designing a building, consideration is given to its parts, flow, and sight lines in the auditorium. Plenty of care will go into this.

But more important than the shape of our meeting space is the shape of our meeting. What are its parts, and how do they flow from one to another? Those are the questions we will consider in this post.

Another way to put this is, “What is our liturgy?” Liturgy is a Latin word that means work on behalf of the people. At our church, we typically call it our “order of worship” or “service design.”

Remember, we want our gathering to be formed and filled by the Word of God. This post is about the “formed” part of that commitment. As we’ve said, Word-formed worship trusts God’s means for God’s work as we give ourselves to the ordinary elements of praying, singing, reading, partaking in baptism and the Lord’s Supper, and preaching.

But there’s more. As our elders put it:

We also weave these things together to tell the story of the gospel. We typically do this with a progression, however subtle, from a call to worship and joyful praise, to confession and assurance, to prayer for the Word, preaching, and conclude with thankful response and a benediction. While the story of the world pulls us away from God and his grace, we want the story of our meetings to unfold and enfold us in God’s gospel and grace.

Let’s expand on this.

There are levels of detail in drawings for a building. Same here. For our purposes, we’ll keep it to five movements: a movement together in the gospel with our welcome and call to worship; a movement through the gospel with readings, prayers, and songs; a movement under the Word as the gospel is proclaimed; a movement around the table where the gospel is pictured in the ordinances; and a movement out with the gospel in our benediction.

Welcome and Call to Worship

This is our first movement, a movement together. In our opening comments, we take our cue from how the apostles greeted the churches and remind saints of our fellowship in the glorious saving work of our Triune Lord. At their best, a few brief “announcements” remind us we are not here as individuals but as family.

What churches have long called a “Call to Worship” marks the formal start to our service. Who initiated this meeting? Who are these people we’re in the room with? What are we doing here exactly? What do we expect to happen? The Call to Worship answers these questions from God’s Word. It reminds us that our gathering is a response to his greatness and grace. He called us into salvation, and he calls this meeting. By the Word, God speaks to us—even as we speak the Word to one another—with declarations, exhortations, invitations, and reasons to worship him.

For a short example, “Great is the LORD, and greatly to be praised” (Ps. 145:3). Here we have an exhortation from the Lord and a reason for it. Or, from the lips of Jesus, an invitation with a promise, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28). Or, “You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light” (1 Pet. 2:9).

These are the kinds of things we need to hear before we do anything else. He speaks, and we respond.

At a practical level, the Call to Worship gathers our attention from whatever just happened in the car to a set of themes for the service—one focused on what God has revealed about himself and another on our response. Wrapped in a few choice comments, this encounter with Scripture constitutes the opening of our service.

Gospel Rehearsal

The body of our service leading up to the preaching follows a general pattern that moves us through the truth of the gospel: God, sin, Christ, response. Put differently, we follow a pattern of praise, confession, assurance, and thanksgiving.

This flow reflects the pattern of Scripture. The Bible’s larger narrative begins with God, proceeds to our failure in the garden, advances to a story of God’s gracious salvation, and on the basis of that work calls us to repent and believe. When the apostles penned their letters to churches, they likewise worked from God and his glorious grace (Eph. 1–3) to our humble human response (Eph. 4–6).

We move through this gospel story with songs, prayers, Scripture readings, and historic readings. There are smaller cycles through this gospel story within the larger movement of our services. Many songs cover the gamut of Christ’s work, so transitional comments help move our attention to a particular emphasis in a given song.

Prayer for Illumination and Preaching

How the Apostle Paul spoke to Timothy and his church about preaching tells us something: “I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom: preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching” (2 Tim. 4:1–2). In preaching, we come under the Word together; that is, under its authority, rule, and blessing.

The preaching of the Word of God is the centerpiece of our gathering.

Speaking and hearing the Word is a spiritual act. For that reason, we pray. Before the Word is preached, we ask God to illuminate the Word to us, to open the eyes of our hearts to see and receive God’s Word as true (Eph. 1:15–23). Typically, this prayer takes the form of a song with comments from our service leader to highlight this transition in the service. Minimally, it involves the preacher’s own prayer before he opens the Word.

Everything flows to and from the preached Word. We work through books of the Bible with sermons whose shape and aim are the shape and aim of the text, and whose divisions follow the natural divisions of a book. All of this ensures that the arguments, exhortations, comforts, and emphases of the Word shape our church more than any one preacher’s interests or strengths.

Baptism and the Lord's Table

The covenant signs of baptism and the Lord’s Table are symbolic in that they visually represent invisible spiritual realities. That’s one reason the ordinances follow the preaching of the Word. Apart from the Word preached, these little pictures are unintelligible. Yet combined with the proclamation of the Word, these symbols nurture our faith.

These are individual acts, but also corporate acts done together as a congregation. They are deeply personal: by the first sign, we enter and welcome others into the family; by the second, we come together around the table to feast with our Lord until he comes.

Response and Benediction

For this concluding movement together, we search for just the right song to carry the most fitting response to the sermon. This may involve thanksgiving, consecration, commission, praise, or a combination.

After that, we go out with a benediction. Strung through our Bibles are several beautiful benedictions, blessings on God’s people. These are a natural way for us to part. For this parting and sending moment, we draw from the Bible’s benedictions, but we also craft our own. The Bible’s varied benedictions are an invitation for us to craft our own based on the facet of God’s grace preached in the Word of God.

We do other things too, though not weekly, including professions of faith, prayers of intercession for our church and the nations, testimonies of God’s Word at work, or several minutes for mingling with personal greetings.

The Setting and the Diamond

By now, you’ve probably picked up on a few features of our liturgy. I’ll make a few things explicit here at the end.

First, we mean for our services to be predictable week to week. It’s the nature of a liturgy that we settle into a rhythm, a spiritual habit as a church. Predictability doesn’t have to mean monotony. Nearly every sitcom writer, podcaster, or YouTuber uses a template. For decades, late shows have begun with a monologue and ended with a band. What changes is the content they use to fill it.

Second, we do want to be flexible. The Welcome will always come at the front, but we might move some of the other parts around here and there. We will confess our sins, but we may do that in any number of ways, with variation in emphasis or form. We may read a confession and sing of our assurance. We might sing a confession and hear a reading of assurance. Sometimes a pastor may lead in an element and sometimes a musician. In all of this, what is crucial is that we put off presumption and cry out to God, “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it,” and then sing with full heart of his lovely face, his sovereign grace, and the blood-washed robes that enable us to see and sing at all.

Finally, it’s our approach to be liturgically subtle. Churches do this differently. For our part, we have a definite structure to our services, but we don’t generally let the bones of either our themes or elements show too much. We call this an under-exposed liturgy, or a “sneaky liturgy.” We won’t typically say, “This is our time of confession,” but we do speak and even print some of these signposts in our Order of Worship.

A taco needs a shell, a building needs a set of plans, and a diamond needs a setting. That’s how a liturgy works to give shape to our Sunday gatherings. It’s a form for filling our gatherings with the appropriate content: the Word of the gospel. At the same time, we try not to be liturgical elitists, unable to worship in a church that doesn’t handle the service in just the same way. We want our people to praise the Lord, not the liturgy.

We only live up to the liturgical shape that forms our service by planning the gospel truth that fills our service. That’s where we’re going in our third post.