A Brief History of Evangelical Worship

Most believers think of congregational worship as something that takes place for a few brief moments during the worship service, chiefly as a prelude to the sermon. The sermon, in turn, is seen by many Christians as the high point of the service, as “what really matters” in the Sunday program.

That emphasis on preaching as the culminating part of the service probably has one of its main roots in the sixteenth century, during the Protestant Reformation in Europe. That period in history coincided with the influence of the Renaissance, a cultural era characterized by a great intellectual revival and a strong appetite for ancient works of Greek and Roman philosophy and literature.

The outlook of the Protestant reformers was strongly influenced by the Renaissance’s passion for intellectual and rational pursuits. Moreover, the first evangelicals had been marked by their violent struggles against the heresies of the Catholic Church. That is why they placed such emphasis on doctrine and systematic theology as central to the Christian experience. Calvin, Luther, Zwingli, and the other leading figures of the Protestant Reformation were, above all, great theologians, as well as men of action. Over time, the doctrinal and teaching dimension of the worship service became paramount in the Protestant world.

One consequence was that congregational praise and the emotional and even physical aspects of worship gradually diminished in importance, until they became a secondary part of the new evangelical worship service. The former visual and sensory richness of Roman Catholic worship diminished in importance and even came to be seen as an obstacle to true worship. The desire to purify worship and strip it of anything that might suggest idolatry led to the removal of the statues, paintings, and rituals typical of the Roman Catholic church.

The sense of mystery evoked by incense, candles, and carved wood gave way to the simplicity and lack of ornamentation of the Protestant church. Praise was simplified to an extreme. The worship service became something much more cerebral and inward. It came to depend more on what took place in the believer’s mental and conceptual space than on what happened in the physical space of the church. The Reformers’ good intentions in eliminating the idolatrous aspects of Roman Catholic worship also eliminated wholesome elements of enthusiastic and fully spiritual worship.

Undoubtedly, this historical summary considerably simplifies what is, in truth, a very complex subject. But the essential truth is beyond question: through many centuries of the Church’s history, especially during the modern era, enthusiastic praise and the symbolic acts that are part of worship have not played the powerful and essential role we see reflected in Scripture. Instead, worship has become mere scaffolding, a prelude to other things regarded as more important, such as evangelism, preaching, or teaching.