Jesus couldn’t have been clearer on the need for worship: quoting Deuteronomy 6:13, he reminds the tempter that “you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve” (Luke 4:8). But although most Christians are agreed on the need to worship God, there are huge disagreements on how to worship him properly.
In place of the sacrifice of the Mass, Protestants invented new manmade religious services, ultimately creating many different worship traditions. But as different as they are, most of them have one thing in common. As the Protestant liturgist James White says, “most Protestant worship, historically and at present, has not made the Eucharist its central service,” and “when the eucharist is celebrated, it is often tacked on to the end (or beginning) of the usual Sunday service.”
What does this rejection of the Eucharist mean for true worship?
Let’s start with the bad news: the problem with a good deal of Protestant worship isn’t that it’s worship done badly. It’s that it’s not worship at all. I’m not just referring to the stereotypical megachurches in which pastors preach self-help clichés under the veneer of Christianity. I’m also talking about a good deal of so-called “traditional” Protestant services. For instance, here’s a prominent Baptist pastor talking about what a privilege it has been “to preach each Sunday behind one of the most, if not the most, influential, twentieth-century pulpits in the Western world,” and describing the role of the pulpit in the Baptist conception of worship:
That pulpit, like most pulpits in Baptist life, stands in the middle of the building, on center stage, so to speak. It is there to make a statement that central to Baptist worship is the preaching of the book of God to the people of God. . . . Proclamation, the preaching of the gospel, should be central to Christian worship. The sermon is the central dynamic in the worship experience. It is the fulcrum upon which the entire service of worship hinges. Everything that comes before it should point to it, and everything that comes after it should issue out of it (24).
That might make for a lovely religious talk, but none of what he describes there is worship. And it’s an incalculable loss to go from having churches built around the altar, where Jesus Christ is truly present and is offered to the Father, to churches built around the pulpit, in which a pastor tells us what he thinks Jesus’ message is.
Perhaps that sounds unfair. Some, like Biola’s Barry Lietsch, would reply that Protestants are simply following the model of Jewish synagogues: “To this day Protestant worship is indebted to [synagogues’] emphasis on prayer, Scripture reading, teaching, lay involvement, and elder rule” (99). To be sure, there are some obvious similarities between what you’d find in many a Protestant church on Sunday morning and what you would find in a first-century synagogue (see Luke 4:16-21; Acts 13:15,27).
But the problem is that Jesus didn’t consider Scripture reading or preaching to be worship, or even prayer. If we don’t see this, it’s because we tend to conflate preaching, praying, and worshiping. But to Jesus, these are three clearly distinct things. We might say that preaching is talking about God, praying is talking to God, and worship is giving God what is his due (sacrifice, divine honor, etc.). And for Jesus, these three things were done in three different places.
The synagogue is clearly a place for religious instruction and for preaching. Jesus gave the Bread of Life discourse “in the synagogue, as he taught at Capernaum” (John 6:59). So it’s a place of teaching. But it’s just as clearly not a place of prayer.
Today, synagogues are the place where Jewish believers come together for prayer, but this wasn’t the case back in Jesus’ day (34). There’s a famous first-century synagogue in Jerusalem with an inscription on the floor that describes the synagogue as a place for “reading the Law and studying the commandments, and as a hostel with chambers and water installations to provide for the needs of itinerants from abroad.” But as Rabbi Reuven Hammer points out, there’s “no mention of prayer.” He argues that “although the argument from silence is never absolute, the evidence is overwhelming that synagogues in the time prior to the destruction of the Second Temple were primarily places for the dissemination of knowledge of the Torah on a popular level, and that whatever prayer took place there was either connected to study or secondary to it” (61).
After all, it’s not as if the New Testament is silent about the synagogue, or silent about prayer. Both are mentioned repeatedly. Yet we never read of anyone praying in the synagogue. In fact, it’s more extreme than this: the one time the synagogue is connected with prayer, it’s Jesus saying not to pray in the synagogue. That’s because the synagogue in Jesus’ day was a place for secular business and the study of Scripture, not a place of prayer or worship.
Jesus forbade praying in the synagogue not because he thought synagogues were bad places. He visited them weekly, going “about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every infirmity” (Matt. 9:35). The synagogue is fine as a gathering spot, and it’s a great place to find a crowd to whom you can preach the Good News. But the implication of Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 is that “the synagogue is a public place like a street corner, not a proper place for prayer.” The Pharisees and hypocrites weren’t praying in the synagogue because it was a house of prayer (it wasn’t); they were praying there because it was a public place (like a street corner) where they could be seen acting piously.
This is indispensable for rightly understanding Christian worship. There’s nothing wrong with gathering together to read Scripture and discuss its meaning or to listen to an expert tell you what it means. That can be an important help in your spiritual journey; it was for Jesus, who was in the custom of attending synagogue weekly (Luke 4:16). But this can’t fill our spiritual need for prayer, and still less for worship.