Peri

I suppose, being an outsider, you care little about liturgy or the word proclaimed through it.
But Im guessing you appreciate fine music. Perhaps you are an 'insider' to the fine music scene. If that is the case then you might appreciate that there is a vast difference between the experience of hearing a virtuoso perform a Bach Partita and listening to a five year old struggling to get through twinkle twinkle (without Mozarts variations, of course).

They are vastly different experiences and each can be special in its own way. Hillsong is more like the 5 year old than the the virtuoso. Dont expect to plumb the depths of human experience through the music of the five year old. Likewise, dont expect too much from the Hillsong attempt at 'liturgy/worship'.

Done well, liturgy is far more than the mere repeating of familiar words in a rigid structure. Consider the difference between Macbeth performed well and merely read. The play can be the vehicle for a profound experience but that is not achieved merely by reading the script. Nor is it achieved by butchering the script at random.

Sells and Christian religionists,

Trust you find psychological comfort based on what you believe over the Easter Period.

O.

The writer does not understand the word liturgy. All churches have liturgy. Liturgy is simply the format of worship. What perhaps he meant to say was that some churches have very formal and others more informal liturgies.

The Bible records many styles of worship: personal and private worship, family worship, small group worship, Corinthian church worship, Tabernacle worship, Temple worship, Davidic worship, and heavenly worship are only a few examples. In each case, the style of liturgy was different, varying from the very formal to the very informal.

To insist upon something that neither Jesus nor his Apostles insisted upon is to create a legalism or wowserism. That is when tradition becomes a yardstick for judgmentalism and division. I am not interested in the Christianity of men, but the Christianity of Christ, its founder. The only liturgy that he insisted upon was to worship God in spirit and in truth, period.

"This is Christian worship captive to pastoral care; the needs of the people take centre stage rather than the worship of God. The result is oozingly sentimental."

I agree with you that this is a bad aim. But I do not believe that formal liturigcal worship will guard against this. Man looks on the outward appearance; God looks at the heart.

I have no problem with the way the men who run your church have decided to hold mass/church services over the years. I do have a problem that you believe this is the ONLY God-ordained way of worship. I see this as akin to the people who believe that the KJV is the ONLY English translation of the Bible which is the Word of God, without accepting the limitations that 16th century men ordered to translate a Bible under a secular king may have faced.

In the OT David disrobed (to the level of underwear or naked?) in his spontaneous love/adoration of God. At Pentecost, people started speaking in strange tongues, in ways other theists were not yet used to. Later in Acts, God revealed Himself to the "uncircumcised" and told His people to "eat" with these Gentiles. Far from the expected religious order of the day, I'm sure.

It is not fair for you to try and put worship of God into a box. To worship God is to adore Him. I believe that, yes God is a God of order. But I also believe that worship is something that comes from both the head and the HEART. Trying to take the heart out of it, by smothering it in convention and tradition purely for tradition's sake, makes it inseparable from the kind of “piety” the Pharisees thought they had in Jesus' day. Remember its the street people, tax collectors, fisherman and prostitutes who understood God's grace better than the religious elite, those who had memorised and taught from the Scriptures for so many years.

The opposite extreme is making it all about the heart, or becoming self-centred pop psychology. Christian worship should never be about self, however, in blessing God we ourselves do become blessed with the increased intimacy we have with Him. The Bible instructs men to love their wives as Christ loved the Church- is it such a stretch of the imagination that the Church must love God with the same intimacy, intelligence and emotion with which a man might love a woman?

I am opposed to both legalism and lasciviousnesss (worldliness) within the church. It is the Fear of God and the Love of God which keeps us from either of those ditches. Neither of these can be measured merely by structure and format of a church service.

Gawd - reminds me a bit of the Sunnis and the Shias.

From outside the theocratic fishbowl, they all look like different variations of goldfish. Catholic/Protestant::Shia/Sunni.

Big deal. Who cares about whether the spiritually deficient need an interlocutor between themselves and their imaginary friend?