Over the past several years, I have taught seminary courses on the theology and practice of worship in the Reformed tradition. The syllabus requires students to interact with worship services posted online, evaluating the elements, coherence, and execution of the liturgy. The services are not pre-screened and represent different styles, but they are all from PCA churches.
The assignment requires students to critically engage worship services, cultivating a conscious interaction with matters that frequently fly under the radar. After reviewing many worship services, I have noticed several consistent liturgical themes that deserve comment. This essay focuses on the call to worship by exploring its historical roots, analyzing modern liturgical practices, and concluding with several theological reflections.
Historical Roots of the Call to Worship
Prior to “The Directory for the Public Worship of God” (1645), the service of Morning Prayer from “The Book of Common Prayer” (1559) opened with a Scripture sentence, such as Psalm 143:2, Joel 2:13, or Matthew 3:2, to prepare worshippers to confess their sins to God. After confession, the minister declared an absolution and led the congregation in a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Then, the minister guided the congregation through a responsive portion of the liturgy, culminating in a brief call to worship: “Praise ye the Lord.” The congregation subsequently sang Psalm 95—a psalm resonant with commands from God to worship him.
Therefore, Anglicans were not without a call to worship, but the command to worship God was subordinate to the corporate confession of sin, absolution, and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. This order, along with the use of Psalm 95, reflects ancient church traditions that Thomas Cranmer revised from the Sarum Rite in “The Book of Common Prayer” (1552).1
Following the liturgical practices of John Calvin, John Knox opened corporate worship with a recitation of Psalm 124:8: “Our help is in the name of the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.” This verse served the dual function of ascribing praise to God and professing dependence on God. After this recitation, the pastor promptly transitioned into a public prayer of confession. The opening quotation of Psalm 124:8 was used to prepare the congregation for confession but wasn’t a call to worship.
To open a service with a call to worship is a liturgical development of the Westminster assembly. In the “Directory,” details regarding the call to worship are sparse: “The congregation being assembled, the minister, after solemnly calling on them to the worshipping of the great name of God, is to begin with prayer.”2
The guideline is simple: once assembled, the minister issues a call to worship followed by an invocation. Because Presbyterian liturgy operates on Scriptural principles, not a prescribed liturgical text, the precise content of the call to worship is left to the discretion of the minister. However, in keeping with the Presbyterian desire to regulate worship by Scripture, ministers generally drew the call to worship directly from the Bible.3
On American soil, colonial Presbyterians adhered to the “Directory” loosely. In 1789, a revised “Directory” was adopted. However, “the denomination had produced what could almost be described as a non-directive Directory.”4 Over the next 200 years, various directories, manuals, and books emerged in attempts to provide more order and consistency for Presbyterians in worship.
The call to worship appears in some of these works, not others. For instance, the revised “Directory” of 1789 indicates that the service was to begin with an invocation, omitting the call to worship altogether. The PCA’s “Directory for Worship” follows this path and excludes the call to worship from its catalog of Scriptural elements for corporate worship, indicating that the service is to begin with the doxology followed by an invocation (BCO 47.9; 52.1).
However, “The Book of Common Worship” editions from 1906 and 1946 incorporated a call to worship into their liturgical orders. Popular contemporary liturgical guides, such as those of Robert Rayburn, Bryan Chapell, and Tim Keller, also recommend a call to worship at the beginning of their services.
In summary, the call to worship has a distinguished historical pedigree. In the “Directory,” Presbyterians adopted and transformed this liturgical tradition, instituting the call to worship as the first element of corporate worship. Subsequent generations did not always incorporate this practice, but contemporary practice in the PCA has generally received the call to worship as an element of worship despite its absence from the denomination’s “Directory for Worship.”
Modern Liturgical Practices
Though PCA churches continue to incorporate the call to worship into the liturgy, it is important to note that the substance of the call to worship often lacks discrimination. Frequently the call to worship employed by the minister, or musician, is simply an indicative statement from Scripture about God’s being or his works on our behalf in Jesus Christ or a devotional aspiration expressing the worshipers’ desire for the presence of God.
For instance, I attended a service recently in which the minister opened the service with a call to worship from Psalm 63:1:
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
My soul thirsts for you;
My flesh faints for you,
As in a dry and weary land where there is no water.
Though a beautiful prayer expressing the soul’s longing for God, this verse is not a call to worship. Technically speaking, a call to worship is a summons, or command, from God to assemble before the Lord and offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving and praise to him.
In other words, the call to worship is an imperative. This imperative is frequently accompanied by theological reasons that provide the basis, or rationale, for why the congregation is to fulfill the summons. However, the call to worship itself consists of a command from God.
At another service, the minister began with a call to worship from Exodus 19:4: “The Lord has said, ‘I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to myself!’” Though a rich declaration from God about his work to redeem, this is an indicative statement about God’s deliverance, not an imperative summoning us to worship. It’s a common mistake.5
Consider the following classic example of a call to worship from Psalm 95:1-5:
1 Oh come, let us sing to the LORD;
let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation!
2 Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us make a joyful noise to him with songs of praise!
3 For the LORD is great God,
and a great King above all gods.
4 In his hand are the depths of the earth;
the heights of the mountains are his also.
5 The sea is his, for he made it,
and his hands formed the dry land.
In verses 1-2, we see a proliferation of imperatives in which God summons his people to worship: come, sing, make a joyful noise. Verses 3-5 provide the basis for this activity: the Lord is a great God and King, the Creator, Sustainer, and Governor of all things. The imperatives, summoning God’s people to worship, are grounded in a theological rationale, stating who God is and what he has done for his own people.
Ministers have an enormous treasury to pull from in crafting the call to worship. Verses can be quoted directly or stitched together; opportunities for creative construction abound. Additionally, it is important to note that the call to worship is not the property of any one style of service (traditional, contemporary, or more liturgical) but is a biblical element of worship suited for any style of Presbyterian worship.
Theological Reflections
Though some may dismiss this critique as a pedantic quibble, a poorly-constructed call to worship reflects three significant things about our present approach to divine worship.
First, it reflects a failure to appreciate the dynamic of divine worship. In “O Come, Let Us Worship,” Robert Rayburn observes that the call to worship initiates a “divine-human dialogue.”6 This dialogue entails a call-and-response dynamic: God summons his people to worship, and the congregation answers with an opening hymn, song, or spiritual song to announce his praise. By opening the service with a dialogue, ministers set the table for their congregation to commune with God throughout the service. The call to worship establishes this dynamic, commencing a sacred dialogue between God and his beloved children in and through Jesus Christ.
Second, it reflects a failure to appreciate the context of divine worship. In Christian worship, the primary orientation of worship is vertical, not horizontal. Unfortunately, in modern Presbyterian services, there is a tendency to neglect the vertical orientation of worship in favor of horizontal concerns (evangelism, education, fellowship, spiritual edification, etc.). Prioritizing the horizontal focuses on techniques to make services relevant to contemporary audiences. However, Christian worship is not relevant due to its horizontal impact; Christian worship becomes relevant when it orients to heaven in the vernacular.
In worship, the earthly and heavenly spheres intersect as the church gathers before God’s throne in the presence of the angels (1 Corinthians 3:16; 11:10; 14:25). By the Spirit, we come to the city of the living God, with the angels and all the saints, in and through our Advocate and Mediator, Jesus Christ (Hebrews 12:18-24). This vertical, or transcendent, orientation applies to the gathered church without reference to the architecture of the sanctuary or the formality of the liturgy. Transcendence is not the property of any style of service—traditional or contemporary. Vertically oriented services simply recognize the cosmic context of their assembly, prioritizing their engagement with God and expecting horizontal effects to flow from this communion.
Third, a poorly-constructed call to worship reflects a failure by the minister to embrace his role in divine worship. The minister’s role is to speak on God’s behalf. Whether the call to worship, assurance of pardon, sermon, or benediction, the minister serves the congregation by ministering God’s grace through his Word to his people. This is the vocation of the minister. In the voice of the minister is the voice of God. This should not bloat ministers with self-importance but imbue them with a sense of the importance of each element in the liturgy. Presbyterian ministers need to take up their divinely assigned role and not allow it to devolve into that of a lecturer or emcee.
Conclusion
Presbyterian worship is a sacred dialogue between God and his people. The call to worship plays an important role in that dialogue as the first word from God that summons his children to assemble in his presence. Modern Presbyterian liturgy would benefit from paying more careful attention to the substance of the call to worship, as this first word of the liturgy sets the table for all that follows.
Chuck Colson serves as senior pastor of Christ Church Presbyterian in Jacksonville, Florida, and also serves as guest lecturer at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando.
1 Richard Paul Blakeney, The Book of Common Prayer in its History and Interpretation (London: James Miller, 1866, second edition), 337.
2 The Directory for the Public Worship of God (Glasgow: Free Presbyterian Publications, 2001, reprint), 375.
3 Westminster Confession of Faith 21.1
4 Julius Melton, Presbyterian Worship in America (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2001, reprint), 27.
5 Even Terry Johnson commits this error in the examples he provides by selecting indicative statements from Scripture that lack a command from God to worship. Terry Johnson (ed.), Leading in Worship (Oakridge: The Covenant Foundation, 1996). For instance, Psalm 19:1; 124:8; 145:18; Isaiah 57:15a; John 4:24; James 1:17; Revelation 4:11 are not technically Calls to Worship. If a command to praise God is attached to the indicative statement, then these verses can be helpfully incorporated into a Call to Worship.
6 Rayburn, Let Us Worship, 174.