What Churches of Christ believe about worship could, I suppose, be expressed in a single phrase, namely that it should be "according to New Testament practice." It is when we come to ask exactly what the New Testament practice of worship was, that difficulties start to arise. Even so, certain general points may at once be made. It is clear that this worship consisted of prayer, singing of Psalms and hymns, reading of the Word, teaching (Exposition of the Word) and the frequent celebration of Holy Communion. To this we may add the missionary preaching of the Apostles, though there is no clear evidence that this was carried on inside the framework of a service (see Cullman, Early Christian Worship--S.C.M. Press, 1954--pp. 28 and 29). Thus we are told in Acts v, 20, 21 that the Apostles entered the Temple early in the morning to proclaim the Gospel ("tell the people all about this new Life"--Phillips), but there is no indication that any act of worship accompanied their proclamation.

      In general terms, then, we may claim that our celebration of Holy Communion as the central act of worship every Sunday is according to New Testament practice; and we may add that our Order of worship at Holy Communion, when rightly used, also follows the earliest form of service, going back in its main characteristics to New Testament times. Our evening service we may regard as a version of the old Synagogue service of prayer, singing, reading and preaching in which the Exposition of the Word has been replaced by the Proclamation of the Gospel. In this way we represent the missionary preaching of the Apostles, although we have put this into the setting of on ordered service of worship.

The New Testament--a Blue Print?

      Many of our people, however, would not want to leave the matter in terms of generalities. Indeed it has been our claim, especially as expressed through the local congregation, that our worship is "New Testament" in a far more detailed sense than that so far suggested. In making such a claim we are often relying on the literal and piecemeal interpretation and application of certain selected passages of Scripture. We are using the New Testament simply as a blue-print, and in a way which very often will bear no detailed analysis.

      For example, some churches would say that the singing of a hymn immediately after the Communion has New Testament authority, because it says in St. Matthew (xxvi, 30) that after the Last Supper they sang a hymn. The same churches will regularly go on from this point to listen to a sermon, apparently in complete ignorance of the fact that after singing their hymn Jesus and His disciples, far from doing this, "went out into the Mount of Olives." The sermon (in terms of Jesus' discourse) had already taken place, but anyhow this was not a church service at all: it was a common meal. Therefore, if we are to make fair use of this text we should be celebrating the Communion

not as a church service but as a supper in an upper room. By thus citing this text we are also producing something (i. e., sermon after Communion) quite contrary to the earliest known Order of the Communion Service. This one example may serve to show the anomalies which can happen when attempts of this kind are made to justify individual elements in our worship as being "New Testament."

Special Pleading.

      It is always difficult to see one's own affairs objectively, but a little reflection on an instance like that just outlined may lead us to suspect that entangled with cur genuine concern for the upholding of New Testament practice is a great deal that the lawyers would describe us "special pleading." Much of this special pleading has resulted from certain factors which have played a major part in shaping our particular plea about worship, and three of these will now need to be considered. These factors, for all their appearance to the contrary, are of the kind called in present Faith and Order discussions "non-theological" or "social and cultural," There is a most valuable chapter outlining the whole subject of these "forgotten factors" and containing the text of a most stimulating letter from Dr. C. H. Dodd in the book by Oliver S. Tomkins, The Church in the Purpose of God (S.C.M. Press 2nd ed., 1952). Their influence is far more pervasive than we at first realise or would readily admit.

The Plea for Simplicity.

      The first factor concerns our whole Nonconformist-Puritan background by which we are closely linked with the practice of Calvinistic worship. The Calvinists, themselves in revolt against excesses in ritual, believe that no sensory things can assist in leading the worshipper to a closer experience of God. Far from assisting, such sensory apparatus as images, beautiful decorations, church music, keep the attention from God altogether by causing it to dwell on earthly beauty. Contemplation of God, the "wholly other," can therefore he assisted only by a complete austerity and bareness. Buildings, inside and outside, must be completely plain, worship must be utterly simple. To the Calvinist, in the words of Bernard Manning, "any sensuous or artistic heightening of the effect is not so much a painting of the lily as a varnishing of sunlight" (The Making of Modern English Religion S.C.M. Press, 1929--p. 101). The plea for simplicity in worship gained much force from the beginning against the upholders of tradition by the claim that it was "according to the Scriptures," even though this claim called for a blind eye being turned to the liturgical richness of the Epistle to the Hebrews or Revelation.

      Our own closeness to this Calvinistic background of worship needs little underlining. Our fear of music and of art, our sparse and often ugly decorations, our comfortless church interiors, our fear, in short, of both the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty are plainly a legacy from this Calvinistic-Puritan background. Again, our pleading for simplicity in worship, with us also at the cost of ignoring the liturgical elements of Hebrews or Revelation, is felt to be so much more authoritative by having as its main justification that it is "according to the New Testament." At its worst such worship scarcely deserves the name of worship at all. Bernard Manning put this in a memorable sentence when he said, "Divine service among the Calvinists passed easily, when the spiritual temperature dropped, into a sort of public meeting" (op. cit. p. 102). How true of so much of our own worship today!

Mutual Ministry

      The other two social and cultural factors we need to consider are both from our own point of view crossings into the main stock of Puritan-Calvinistic practice. The first of them is our reassertion of the importance of the "mutual ministry." It is because of this particular emphasis that we have made so much, for example, of the prayers of the church, of having a different reader for each lesson, of members of the congregation giving out hymns (now fortunately almost a mere memory!), and because of this there no doubt arose also the practice of servers at Communion (or other members of the congregation) offering thanks for the bread and wine. These things, we would say, all stress the one-ness of God's people, the true "laos," and add great support to our belief in "the priesthood of all believers."

      Yet so far as the giving of thanks at the Communion is concerned our zeal for this mutual ministry has led some of us into a practice which is quite contrary to that of the New Testament. We read that at the Last Supper Jesus gave thanks and all the evidence goes to show that in the earliest form of service the President likewise gave thanks. Paul's words of institution, as given in 1 Corinthians xi, themselves suggest that this was so. As Jesus gave thanks so the one who presides at the table in His name also gives thanks. Here in fact is a case where the claims of the mutual ministry m, n apparently override New Testament claims. It is also ironical that for all this pleading about the mutual ministry in worship, our service is nothing like so "mutual" as the Anglican Communion Service--or any ether Anglican worship. There, the basis of the service lies in versicle and response, and by the response of the people there results an act of worship far more corporate than our own in which a few people at the most take any active part.

Being Different.

      This brings us to the third factor, which might be called that of "being different." We need always to remember that the formative years of Puritan and Nonconformist worship were years of bitter hostility among churches. Suspicion and divisiveness were the rule of the day. They were times when it was an obvious means of vindicating the rightness of one's position, to order worship differently from other religious bodies. From this I suspect that a number of elements crept into our worship. We must be different from others, especially the Anglicans. Is that, perhaps, why we stand or sit instead of kneeling for prayers? Is that why we have been so afraid of set prayers, even though many of our extempore prayers are used by their authors with liturgical regularity? Is that why our so-called New Testament Communion Service so rarely has in it any Psalms or canticles?

      More interesting still, does this fact explain why we "receive in" new members by giving them "the right hand of fellowship"? This is certainly not the Scriptural method of receiving new members; the mention of it in Galatians ii, 9, occurs in quite a different context. But would not the laying-on of hands, as in Acts viii, 17; xix, 6, have seemed too much like a ceremony of Confirmation? Again, have we been reticent about holding any Infant Dedication service because of our conviction about Baptism, even though Jesus took little children to Himself and blessed them (St. Mark x, 16)? It is timely to heed Dr. Dodd's warning and ask ourselves whether behind "this sometimes rather strident emphasis

on our 'distinctive witness' there may not lie a special kind of corporate pride" (Tomkins, op. cit. p. 79).

      We may see, then how deeply our plea for New Testament worship has been influenced by social and cultural factors: by our whole Calvinistic-Puritan background, by the demands of the mutual ministry and by the past history of Nonconformist-Anglican (to say nothing of Protestant-Catholic) dissent. Our very "position and plea" itself has been partly fashioned out of such non-theological factors as these and we have been led, contrary to all our inherited ideas about tradition, to establish in matters like the giving of the right hand of fellowship a tradition of worship all our own. A dispassionate analysis of the situation reveals how far removed is much that we habitually practise from New Testament worship itself.

Proof Texts.

      Two other matters are also worthy of comment. First, there has been a habit in the local churches of supporting some practice by the purely dogmatic interpretation of certain New Testament passages. Such interpretation often entails the awkward "explaining away" of other passages and would convince nobody but the already convinced. Yet we have stubbornly persisted in this arrogant approach to our selected verses. For instance, there seems to be an idea current in some of our churches that in New Testament times Communion was celebrated only once per week (this first arose, perhaps, out of the desire to vindicate our own practice of weekly Communion against more frequent Anglican-Catholic celebrations). The authority for this idea, as it has been presented to me, is Acts xx, 7, the argument being that Paul was in a hurry to leave Troas, and would not have waited seven days had he been able to take Communion with the Christians there before the Lord's Day. There is not a shred of evidence for this argument in the text, and anyway it can only be maintained at the cost of "explaining away" Acts ii, 46, saying that the word "daily" at the beginning of the verse goes with "continuing . . . in the Temple," though not with "breaking bread from house to house"; a sense which is anything but obvious in the original Greek. A less far-fetched argument could be adduced, namely that the expression "broke bread" refers to the taking of ordinary meals, but this is unlikely to appeal to many of those who uphold the once-per-week position. The whole matter needs to be considered in the light of the use of the Agape and its relationship to the Communion proper.

      Nothing can justify the method of interpreting verses so that they fit in with previously accepted practices. The practice should be introduced because of the Scriptural authority, and not vice-versa. The Faith and Order document on Worship prepared for discussion at the Lund Conference puts this matter well. "The New Testament," it says, "must not be used as a mine of proof texts to justify existing practice, but used rather to gain a deeper common understanding of the wholeness of Christian life and experience. Without the critical faculty there can of course be no standards of truth. But its exercise must relate to those standards without overmuch regard to the special pleading of any one particular tradition." (Ways of Worship S.C.M. Press, 1951--p. 355.)

The Argument from Silence.

      Secondly, there is the use, always dangerous, of the so-called argument from silence. This has been introduced to provide Scriptural

authority against the holding of Church Anniversaries, as against the use of organs in Sunday worship. So far as organs are concerned, however, it seems to me that here we come across what is at bottom another non-theological factor. Organs are "Popish inventions" (how often "literature" on the subject reminds us of this fact!), and they can therefore arouse much emotional disturbance in the upholder of simple (i. e., "New Testament") worship against the ritualist. Scriptural authority must be found as against that of Church tradition, and to do this the argument from silence has to be employed. Here are the Puritan conscience and the desire to be different asserting themselves again under theological guise. The argument from silence has also been used against Infant Baptism. But as the Church of Scotland Interim Report of the Special Commission on Baptism (May 1955) points out "the argument from silence no more excludes infants from Baptism than it excludes women from the Lord's Supper, although there is not a single mention of women participating in Holy Communion in the pages of the New Testament" (p. 19). This gives an ironical twist to our timeworn slogan, "where the Scriptures are silent, we are silent."

      Again, we have made general principles out of social factors operating in New Testament times, for example, in using 1 Corinthians xiv, 34, as authority for not allowing women to take part in public worship. This passage in any case can scarcely be reconciled with xi. 5, in the same letter, unless recourse is had to pre-judged and dogmatic interpretation. (This matter has been more fully dealt with in the Report of the Commission on the Ministry--1954 Year Book, Appendix pp. 19-21.) There is a constant need for us to be re-considering our use of New Testament passages, and for sifting out the real New Testament elements from what might be called Churches of Christ tradition.

Does it Matter!

      Our reaction at this stage may well be to ask whether all this matters. If we are satisfied with the tradition of worship we have built up, is that not enough? Anyhow, changes are often ill received in the local church. The answer is that it matters very greatly; it is a major ecumenical matter. The age in which we live is no longer one in which divisions among the Churches are being exploited and perpetuated, but one in which the churches are seeing in what ways they can draw more closely together. It therefore calls us to a full re-investigation of our worship, to sort out what we hold as basic principles and to separate them from cultural and social factors which are in fact no legitimate barrier to reunion. Is there really any principle at stake other than our emphasis on the Sunday morning Communion Service as the central act of worship of the week, and the maintaining in it of its original two-part form: the Administering of the Word and the Administering of the Sacrament? Or how far should we insist on the right of any member to preside at the Communion Service, as illustrating our belief about the priesthood of all believers? Or how far should we allow ourselves to remain divided over the theological meaning of the Lord's Supper if we are agreed on the principles underlying its conduct? These are all current Faith and Order issues, and a whole chapter (IV) of the Report of the Third World Conference at Lund, Sweden. is devoted to the subject of worship

      Among our own people James Gray has given an excellent introduction to this kind of study in his book, Essentials for a Living Church: A Study of Scripture and Tradition (Berean Press, 1954). He here

puts forward what he considers to be "the paramount and now urgent concern" both for ourselves and other Christian bodies. This is "the examination of the New Testament for principles of permanent application; for the unity beneath the diversities; the essentials to be distinguished from the non-essentials" (p. 48). Again, he writes, in words that provide an admirable summary of what has been said in this present article, "the close scrutiny which has been given to the New Testament in recent generations has shown beyond dispute that there is no single detailed pattern of Church order or Church life to be found in the New Testament; and the deeper understanding we now have of the nature of the historical process, of the pervasiveness and power of social factors in moulding persons and institutions, and of the unconscious elements in human life--all this has made forever impossible the simple plea for the Restoration of an exact New Testament pattern of the Church." But although the idea of using the New Testament as a blue-print must be abandoned, the upholding of New Testament principle as a norm of worship, as of Church order, remains of vital importance.

The Place of Tradition

      The process of re-investigation will lead us inevitably to realise two facts: first, that we have been far too glib in our claims about having a New Testament form of worship, and in denying it to others: secondly, that we have ourselves developed a tradition, and we must therefore acknowledge the right of other religious bodies to have their traditions of worship--or else abandon tradition altogether. But we cannot possibly do this; for where the New Testament gives so little guidance we shall inevitably be led into the developing of a tradition of our own. We cannot say, then, that we will dispense with tradition; rather we must ask by what norm tradition is to be controlled and judged. Can any norm be accepted other than that of New Testament principle? Our prejudices against tradition have their source almost entirely in the old antagonism between Scripture and tradition, which takes us back to the Anglican/ Catholic-against-Puritan, simple worship-against-ritual factor. It is often difficult for us to think of tradition outside this context. Yet every one of us, at heart, feels the essential rightness of tradition. This feeling has led us to approve the Order of the Ordination Service as used at Annual Conference. We believe, one might say, in Succession, if not in Apostolic Succession! All this shows plainly enough our convictions about the place of handing on the Word: of tradition in fact.

      Our aim may professedly be to abide by the practice in worship of the New Testament Church, but provided we have the humility to admit that we have made our own selection of New Testament elements, largely under the influence of the particular church tradition in which we have been brought up, and provided we have the singlemindedness, where we are ostensibly wrong, to bring what we do as far as possible into line first with New Testament principle, and then with New Testament practice so far as we understand it, there is hope for us. A sentimental attachment to established ways constitutes no valid reason for delay.