Why Do Evangelicals Need Liturgy?

By the Rev. Richard Lepage

If you love the Bible, you will love liturgy. That may sound strange. Many Evangelicals assume that liturgy is outdated, stiff, or less spiritual than “free,” modern, or contemporary worship. But that assumption usually comes from modern expectations of spontaneity, novelty, and entertainment, not from Scripture or from the way Christians have worshiped for most of history.

Historic Anglican worship is not a set of dusty rituals. It is the Bible, arranged so that a whole congregation can pray it, sing it, and say it together, and it is built from beginning to end around the gospel of Jesus Christ. To see why Anglicans (and, historically, all Christians) use liturgy, we first need to ask a basic question.

What Actually Is Liturgy?

Simply put, liturgy (from the Greek leitourgia, meaning “work of the people”) is the order, structure, and pattern by which a congregation gathers to worship God. Every church has a liturgy, whether it admits it or not. If a church prays, sings, and preaches in the same order week after week, that repeated pattern is its liturgy. As Mark Pickles puts it, every church has a form and a pattern; for some it is simply more deliberate than for others (Pickles, p. 50).

So the real question is not whether a church has a liturgy. The real question is what kind of liturgy it has. Is its pattern shaped by the Bible and the gospel, and rooted in the worship of the early Church? Or is it a surprisingly modern invention?

Much of what passes for normal Evangelical worship today is quite recent:

• The traditional Evangelical model. The familiar pattern of three hymns, a short prayer, one Scripture reading, and a sermon is not an ancient baseline. It was largely shaped by the revival movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, reaching its classic form in the crusade era of the 1950s and Billy Graham.

• The contemporary seeker-sensitive model. The newer, informal model, with a praise band, modern worship songs, stage lighting, and a topical “self-help” or “positive thinking” talk, is a late-twentieth-century creation. It grew out of a deliberate effort to adapt church to modern entertainment culture, guided by market research into what unchurched consumers said they wanted.

Neither of these modern approaches reflects the rich, historic worship pattern of the early Church.

A Service Made of Scripture

Historic Anglican worship, especially as found in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer,

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is different. It is built out of the Bible itself. Samuel Bray and Drew Keane, editors of the International Edition of the 1662 Prayer Book, note that almost 80% of the words in the Book of Common Prayer come from the Bible (Bray and Keane, p. 17). Archbishop Thomas Cranmer designed it that way on purpose. In the Prayer Book’s own preface, he explains that in these services “nothing is ordained to be read, but the very pure Word of God, the holy Scriptures, or that which is agreeable to the same.”

Here is what that looks like in practice. A worshiper who simply follows the Prayer Book will:

• pray through the entire book of Psalms every month;

• hear most of the Old Testament read through once a year, and the New Testament several times a year, in Morning and Evening Prayer;

• hear an Epistle and a Gospel reading at every Communion service; and

• pray prayers, confessions, and songs that are woven from Bible verses, even when they do not look like quotations.

For example, when a congregation prays Morning Prayer, it is speaking the Bible almost from start to finish:

• The service opens with a verse calling us to repentance, such as “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).

• The confession echoes Isaiah: “We have erred, and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep” (Isaiah 53:6).

• The declaration of forgiveness rests on God’s promise that he “desireth not the death of a sinner” (Ezekiel 33:11) and on Jesus’ call to “repent ye, and believe the gospel” (Mark 1:15).

• Then we pray the prayer Jesus taught us (Matthew 6:9–13) and say, “O Lord, open thou our lips: and our mouth shall shew forth thy praise” (Psalm 51:15).

• We sing Psalm 95 and the Psalms for the day, hear one reading from the Old Testament and one from the New, and answer with songs from Scripture, such as the songs of Zechariah, Mary, and Simeon (Luke 1:68–79; 1:46–55; 2:29–32).

• We confess the Apostles’ Creed, which summarizes the Bible’s story of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and close with prayers drawn from the language of Scripture.

Holy Communion is the same. The Ten Commandments (Exodus 20), the “Comfortable Words” of the gospel (Matthew 11:28; John 3:16; 1 Timothy 1:15; 1 John 2:1–2), the angels’ song “Holy, holy, holy” (Isaiah 6:3), the words of Jesus at the Last Supper (1 Corinthians 11:23–26), the song of the angels at Bethlehem (Luke 2:14), and the closing blessing, “The peace of God, which passeth all understanding” (Philippians 4:7), all come straight from the Bible.

This matters more today than ever. Many people in our post-Christian culture, including many who come to church, know very little of the Bible. They may never have read a whole Gospel or memorized a single Psalm. Liturgy does not assume Bible knowledge; it gives it. A newcomer who attends a Prayer Book service for a year will have heard more Scripture, and said more Scripture out loud, than many church members hear in a lifetime of topical talks.

A Service Shaped by the Gospel

The Prayer Book is not just full of Bible verses. It is arranged to preach the gospel. At its heart is a clear biblical pattern: confession of sin, declaration of forgiveness, instruction from Scripture, confession of the faith in the Creed, prayer, praise rooted in the Psalms, and thanksgiving.

Worship is not driven by personality, entertainment, or emotional manipulation, but by the logic of the gospel itself: Guilt, Grace, Faith, and Gratitude.

• Guilt: We come honestly before a holy God and confess that we are sinners who cannot save ourselves.

• Grace: We hear God’s promise of forgiveness, freely given because Christ died for our sins.

• Faith: We trust that promise and take hold of Christ.

• Gratitude: Forgiven, we respond with praise, prayer, and a changed life.

J. I. Packer, one of the best-loved Evangelical teachers of the last century, showed that this sin-grace-faith pattern runs through Morning and Evening Prayer, Holy Communion, Baptism, the Litany, and even the funeral service. He went so far as to say that “only evangelical worship can be edifying” and that the Prayer Book is built to be exactly that (Packer, The Gospel in the Prayer Book). Remarkably, even Gregory Dix, a twentieth-century Anglo-Catholic scholar who disliked Cranmer’s theology, admitted that Cranmer’s Communion service was the only effective attempt ever made to give liturgical expression to the doctrine of justification by faith (quoted in Pickles, p. 50). Friend and critic agree: this is gospel worship.

Why Liturgy Was Essential for 1,500 Years (and Still Is Today)

To understand why the early and historic Church relied so heavily on liturgy, look at church history through a practical lens. For about 1,500 years, from the time of the apostles until Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid-1400s, owning a personal Bible was impossible for almost everyone.

Bibles had to be copied by hand on vellum or parchment, so a single copy could cost more than an ordinary worker earned in years. And even if an ordinary believer were handed a Bible, he usually could not read it, because very few people in the ancient and medieval worlds could read.

How, then, did the average Christian learn Scripture? How did ordinary believers memorize the Psalms, take in sound doctrine, and learn how to pray?

They learned through the liturgy.

For fifteen centuries, the main way ordinary Christians were taught the Bible (catechesis)

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was the weekly, shared, “call-and-response” reciting of Scripture in worship. As the minister declared God’s Word, the congregation answered with God’s Word. Week after week, year after year, believers chanted the Psalms, recited the Creeds, prayed biblical prayers, and confessed their sins together out loud. Liturgy was the “auditory Bible” for a world that could not read, planting the holy text in the hearts and memories of the faithful. As one historian of Scripture puts it, for most pre-modern Christians “the primary contact with Scripture was in liturgy” (William Graham, quoted in Pickles, p. 53).

Some people think liturgy only works for well-educated, bookish churches. Pickles argues the opposite: in places where people do not read much, repetition and spoken words are exactly how truth is learned, which is why no one thinks we should stop singing hymns in such places (Pickles, p. 52). Our own culture is highly literate in one sense but largely illiterate when it comes to the Bible. That makes liturgy’s old strength a new strength.

What Liturgy Actually Forms: The Heart, Not Just the Mind

A key insight from Thomas Cranmer, recovered by the Anglican scholar the Rev. Canon Dr. Ashley Null, is that Christian worship does not begin with the intellect, but with the heart. As Null summarizes Cranmer:

“What the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.

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Ashley Null, summarizing Thomas Cranmer

This is not merely psychology; it is theology. Cranmer understood that we are driven less by reason than by desire. We are not governed by cool analysis, but by loves that are either disordered or rightly ordered. The mind does not lead the will; it follows it, and the will is shaped by what the heart loves.

This has huge implications for worship. If worship only offers positive self-help advice or entertains an audience, it will fail to change people. But if worship shapes desire, what the heart loves, it reshapes everything downstream: the will, the emotions, and even the mind itself.

That is exactly why Cranmer’s Bible-soaked liturgy is not minimal or spontaneous, but repetitive, scriptural, and orderly. It is designed not merely to inform the mind or stir up a passing feeling, but to reform our loves. The Christian philosopher James K. A. Smith makes the same point: before we are thinkers, we are “loving, desiring, affective, liturgical animals” (quoted in Pickles, p. 52).

Liturgy as Re-Forming the Heart

Null develops this further in his reading of Cranmer. God’s grace does not merely correct our beliefs; it reorders our desires. The heart is allured, or wooed, by the love and grace of Christ, and begins to love and desire God truly. From that reordered love, obedience follows. In Null’s words, for Cranmer “human gratitude clearly flowed from divine grace” (quoted in Cathedral Church of the Advent, A Commentary and Guide to Our Liturgy).

This is why repetition in liturgy is not mechanical but deeply formative. As the Rev. John Fonville observes, liturgical repetition works like learning a language. We do not become fluent through novelty, but through repeated immersion in the same patterns until they become instinctive. In the same way, we become fluent in the gospel by praying its words again and again.

Week by week, confession, absolution, Creed, and prayer are not redundant; they are re-formative. They train the heart to love rightly, and therefore the will to choose rightly.

Feeding Sheep vs. Amusing Goats: The Myth of Contemporary Worship

Much contemporary Evangelical worship assumes it has escaped liturgy altogether. In reality, it has simply replaced historic, biblical liturgy with a late-twentieth-century entertainment model, built around stage production, emotional music, positive-thinking messages, and the personality of the preacher.

When that happens, worship easily slides into entertainment instead of spiritual nourishment. Long before modern megachurches existed, Archibald G. Brown, a London pastor trained by Charles Spurgeon (the words are often credited to Spurgeon himself), issued a sharp warning against turning the gathered church into a place of entertainment:

“The devil has seldom done a cleverer thing than hinting to the Church that part of her mission is to provide entertainment for the people, with a view to winning them… My first contention is that providing amusement for the people is nowhere spoken of in the Scriptures as a function of the church… The duty of the church is feeding sheep, not amusing goats.”

Archibald G. Brown, The Devil’s Mission of Amusement

Brown’s charge goes to the heart of Christ’s command to Peter: “Feed my sheep” (John 21:17). Worship is meant to be a soul-nourishing feast of God’s Word and sacraments, not a performance or a self-help lecture to keep spectators interested.

C. S. Lewis, the Anglican writer and apologist, saw the same danger in constant innovation and performance in worship:

“Feed my sheep; not try experiments on my rats, or even teach my performing dogs new tricks.”

C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

Lewis was warning against novelty for its own sake. Worship is not meant to be a laboratory for church growth, but the steady feeding of Christ’s flock by shepherds who, like Christ, know their sheep and call them by name. Lewis also warned that novelty easily shifts attention away from God and onto the performer. In modern terms, that can mean the celebrity pastor or CEO-style megachurch leader who does not know the names and struggles of his sheep, yet presumes to feed them as if he did. The result is not deeper closeness, but a weaker sense of the Church as a real family gathered together before God.

The Rev. Canon Chuck Collins likewise observes that when worship is driven by commentary, personality, or constant change, it becomes shallow and short-lived. What replaces historic liturgy is not freedom, but a different kind of formation, one shaped by cultural trends rather than by Scripture.

Formation vs. Entertainment

The deeper issue is not whether a church uses liturgy, but what kind of liturgy it uses. Os Guinness has warned that when the Church bends to cultural pressure to be relevant and immediate, it risks losing its prophetic depth and theological seriousness. Worship becomes shaped by what draws a crowd rather than by what forms disciples.

Marva Dawn, a noted writer on Christian worship, likewise warned against the “dumbing down” of worship. The central question, she argued, is not what is most engaging or popular, but what actually forms faithful disciples over time.

This is where Anglican liturgy stands apart. It is not designed to entertain or to chase shifting tastes, but to form Christians through repeated exposure to the timeless truths of Scripture, confession, the gospel, the Creed, and the sacraments.

“But Isn’t Liturgy Just Going Through the Motions?”

Evangelicals often raise three honest concerns about liturgy: that it becomes boring through repetition, that set prayers leave no room for the Holy Spirit, and that people can say the words without meaning them. Pickles admits that all of these can happen, and then answers them (Pickles, pp. 50–51):

• Repetition can bring freedom, not boredom. When the words are familiar, we are not distracted by figuring out what comes next or wondering whether a new song says something true. Our attention can rest on God. C. S. Lewis put it memorably: “A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice” (Letters to Malcolm).

• Preparation does not quench the Spirit. No one thinks a pastor honors the Holy Spirit by refusing to prepare his sermon. In the same way, prayers that have been carefully written, tested by Scripture, and prayed by faithful Christians for centuries are no barrier to the Spirit’s work.

• Every church repeats something. Churches without a written liturgy still repeat the same songs and patterns every week; those patterns have simply not been tested with the same care. Without a good liturgy, a congregation is left at the mercy of whoever is leading that week.

And yes, anyone can say words without meaning them. But that is just as true of a worship song as of a written prayer. The answer is not to stop praying Scripture, but to pray it from the heart.

Why Repetition Is Not the Enemy of Life, but the Shape of It

In a modern culture addicted to novelty, instant gratification, and self-improvement fads, repetition and reverence can feel unfamiliar or even boring. But in biblical and Anglican theology, repetition is exactly how love is formed. Think of a marriage: the same words of love, spoken again and again over a lifetime, do not grow weaker; they grow deeper. And humble reverence is what Scripture explicitly asks of believers who come into the presence of the living God:

“Therefore let us be grateful for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and thus let us offer to God acceptable worship, with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”

Hebrews 12:28–29 (ESV)

If the heart truly governs the will, as Null explains from Cranmer, then worship must first address the heart. It does so not through topical sermons or the constant novelty of motivational talks, but through faithful expository preaching and repeated immersion in God’s Word, until our very desires are reshaped to be like Christ’s.

That is why the Book of Common Prayer does not assume we are already formed. It assumes we must be formed again and again by Word and Sacrament until we are finally conformed to the image of Christ our Savior (Romans 8:29).

A More Ancient and More Biblical Way

Liturgy is not a medieval relic. It is the Church’s inherited biblical grammar of worship. For most of Christian history it was the main way ordinary believers learned Scripture, doctrine, and prayer, long before printed Bibles or modern revivalism existed.

In a fragmented, biblically illiterate, entertainment-saturated culture like ours, its value is clearer than ever. Christians are often poorly taught even in Bible-believing churches. In such a time, the steady repetition of Scripture-soaked worship is not a weakness but a mercy.

As the Church has long summarized it:

Lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi. (The law of prayer shapes the law of belief, and the law of belief shapes life.)

Evangelicals may be surprised to learn where the first part of that phrase came from. It goes back to Prosper of Aquitaine in the fifth century, who used it to defend salvation by grace alone. He pointed out that the Church prays for God to give faith to unbelievers, which shows that the Church believes conversion is God’s work from start to finish (Davie, pp. 2–3). From the beginning, the principle that we believe what we pray was a defense of the gospel of grace. And as Martin Davie explains, faithful Anglicans insist that Scripture comes first: the Prayer Book has authority because it faithfully expresses the Bible (Davie, pp. 8, 11).

Anglican liturgy does not compete with Scripture; it amplifies it.

It does not bypass the heart; it forms it.

And it does not rely on novelty, praise bands, or positive-thinking talks to hold our attention, because it assumes something far deeper: that God, by his Spirit, works through repeated, Word-centered, Christ-focused worship to feed his sheep, reorder what we love, and conform us into who we are called to be, image-bearers of Christ who glorify God and enjoy him forever.

If you love the Bible, come and pray it with us.

Notes

1. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer is the doctrinal and liturgical standard of historic Anglican worship. More than a service book, it embodies Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s vision of a biblical liturgy designed to immerse the whole life of the Church in Holy Scripture. Through the daily reading of the Old and New Testaments, the monthly recitation of the entire Psalter, and prayers, creeds, and collects saturated with biblical language, the Prayer Book teaches the laity to read, hear, sing, pray, confess, and ultimately live God’s Word. Trusting in the “living and active” two-edged sword of Scripture (Hebrews 4:12), Cranmer believed God would use his Word to convert sinners to Christ, reform his Church, and deliver the English nation from the ignorance and superstitions of Roman Catholicism that had obscured the gospel, giving practical expression to William Tyndale’s vision that even the common ploughboy would know the Scriptures better than the Pope. The Prayer Book was therefore designed not merely to order public worship, but to catechize the faithful and conform their doctrine, worship, and daily lives to the Word of God.

2. Catechesis, catechetical: from the Greek katecheo (literally “to sound down” or “to teach orally”), it refers to the systematic teaching and grounding of believers in the core truths of Scripture and Christian doctrine. While many Evangelicals today think of catechisms as Roman Catholic, structured catechesis was central to the Protestant Reformation, producing famous Protestant teaching tools like the Heidelberg Catechism, Luther’s Small Catechism, and the Catechism in the Book of Common Prayer.

3. Ashley Null uses this phrase to distill Thomas Cranmer’s understanding of human nature. Cranmer, the principal architect of the Book of Common Prayer, recognized that human beings are driven primarily by their affections and desires rather than by pure intellect. The heart (our affections) leads the way: we are shaped by what we love. The will (our choices) follows the heart: we act on what our desires incline us toward. The mind (our intellect) then justifies the choice, using logic to defend what the heart already wanted. This is why Cranmer designed Anglican liturgy to be repetitive, Scripture-soaked, and re-formative. To change a person, worship cannot simply inform the intellect; it must reorder the loves of the heart.

Works Cited

• The Book of Common Prayer (1662), “Concerning the Service of the Church.”

• Bray, Samuel L., and Drew Nathaniel Keane. How to Use the Book of Common Prayer. InterVarsity Press (draft of February 21, 2023).

• Bray, Samuel L., and Drew Nathaniel Keane, eds. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer: International Edition. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2021.

• Brown, Archibald G. The Devil’s Mission of Amusement. London, c. 1889.

• Cathedral Church of the Advent, Birmingham.

  A Commentary and Guide to Our Liturgy: Morning Prayer and Holy Communion.

• Davie, Martin.

  Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi: Liturgy, Doctrine and Scripture in History and Today.

  London: The Latimer Trust, 2019.

• Lewis, C. S. Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer. 1964.

• Packer, J. I. The Gospel in the Prayer Book. 1966; repr. InterVarsity Press.

• Pickles, Mark. Gospel-Driven Anglicanism: A Personal Plea. London: Oak Hill College, 2017; 3rd ed. 2021.