Liturgy: Need It, Want It?

For nearly 1500 years, liturgy such as Ash Wednesday and Lent and other sacramentals were a norm in all Christianity until the Reformation in the mid to late 1500′s.  For me, I grew up totally unaware of such traditions.  Certainly our Baptist church had it’s own traditions and traditions aren’t necessarily bad.  Each denomination or religion can make fun of the other one’s traditions.  Some of them are just funny, honestly: Pancake races on Shrove Tuesday?

Living in New England, I’m more aware of how liturgy has a place in many people’s upbringing and how that plays out in what they expect from a church. I’ve come to see both some advantage and disadvantages of traditions.  Sometimes I think we miss out on some of the advantages of doing liturgy.  Other times, I’m glad we try to get people to think of God outside of liturgy.  That’s really what it’s suppose to be about anyways, right?

Advantages:

• Help people set aside true time and remembrance on what God has done in times past.
• Helps bring the spiritual and the physical senses together to create a holistic feeling of being close to God.
• The more often you do something, the better you can get people excited about it and be organized around the event.

Disadvantages:

• Can cause people to trust in the traditional liturgy to give them spirituality.
• Can become more of a rehearsed action that is separated from truly thinking about it’s significance.
• Can become the “way things have to be” rather than changing it up to ensure the message is understood.

I’m sure there are more advantages and disadvantages? What are some that you can think of?