Anglicans for the last ten years have sought to define, through a great deal of study and “trial use,” the role of liturgy in the life of a church whose historical identity is reflected in its worship. Throughout the Anglican Communion there is also a felt need for understanding liturgical inculturation alongside renewal.
Two realities that shape any attempt at generalization about American Baptist churches make it difficult to characterize worship in the American Baptist Churches/USA. First is the fundamental principle of the autonomy of local congregations in matters of governance and practice.
The Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), numbering some 400,000 members, has congregations in every state of the U.S. and several provinces of Canada. The church body conducts foreign mission work and supports its own worker-training system.
True religion does not consist in any ritual observances, such as forms or ceremonies, even of the most excellent kind, be they ever so decent and significant, ever so expressive of inward things. The religion of Christ rises infinitely higher and lies infinitely deeper than all these.
Worship in a “united and a uniting church” properly reflects the rich traditions of the four major denominational streams of the United Church of Christ (Congregational, Christian, Evangelical, and Reformed) and of the many ethnic communities within its membership.
The change in the worship experience of twentieth-century Roman Catholics may be appreciated by briefly looking at history. In the sixteenth century, Reformers had posed challenges to the lack of intelligibility of medieval Catholic worship experience to the laity. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) responded to the challenge by revising liturgical books, but the Latin language was retained and the textual uniformity remained.
The Reformed Church in America is a semiliturgical church. Its liturgy is a part of its constitution (along with the creeds and the Book of Church Order). New liturgical forms join previously approved ones and together form the total corpus of the liturgy.