Christian worship from the beginning has been characterized by a variety of styles. Contemporary scholarship suggests that there was no single original style of worship, but rather that worship patterns varied from place to place in the early church. Knowing this fact, we can see the current range of worship practices as a positive characteristic that enriches the church.

Christian worship from the beginning has been characterized by a variety of styles. Contemporary scholarship suggests that there was no single original style of worship, but rather that worship patterns varied from place to place in the early church. Knowing this fact, we can see the current range of worship practices as a positive characteristic that enriches the church.

When the serious scientific study of worship began to be pursued in the nineteenth century, it was primarily as a historical discipline: scholars wanted to know how we had reached the forms of worship practiced in the present, how worship had changed and developed throughout the history of the church. Although more recently the scope of worship studies has expanded to include other methods of analysis, the historical approach still tends to occupy the position of primary importance in scholarship.

More importantly still, those engaged in worship renewal in many Christian churches in the present have as their aim the recovery and restoration of ancient forms of worship. There is a tendency to view the early church as the “golden age” of Christianity and its forms of worship as embodying better than what followed the true meaning and spirit of the Christian faith. So, for example, the common shape that is emerging in many churches today is modeled upon what is thought—however mistakenly—to have been the pattern of worship in the early church, and the structure of initiation rites (baptism and confirmation) is in large measure an archaeological enterprise, reconstructing the practice of the fourth century. However, I believe that there are three serious defects in this approach.

First, we do not know anywhere near as much about the details of the worship of the early church as we once thought we did, and so our attempts at the reconstruction of the past are more often a romantic idealizing than an accurate reflection of what really happened. Moreover, what we do know suggests less the existence of a single, standardized worship practices and more a pluriform and variegated style of worship within different communities that only very slowly and belatedly accepted some measure of conformity under the pressures caused by the need to define orthodoxy over heresy in the fourth century. If we really wanted to model ourselves on the worship of the early church, therefore, the worship of our various traditions would actually look much less like one another than they tend to.

Second, even if we were in a position to be able to produce an exact replica of early Christian worship in our churches, there would still remain the question of whether we ought in fact to do so. In other words, is the past normative for the present and the future? Previous generations of scholars thought that it was, but that assumption can be challenged. The customs and theology of primitive Christianity do offer us insights into the nature of Christian worship that we would be unable to get in any other way, but so for that matter do the practices of later centuries and of our own day.

Authentic Christian worship does not have to reproduce precisely the pattern of third-century worship. Though we may claim to possess the faith once delivered to the saints, no Christian today holds exactly the same beliefs and doctrine as a Christian of the ante-Nicene period, and no Christian today lives in a cultural context identical to that of the early church, however striking the parallels may be in some situations. Why then must we force contemporary believers to wear nothing but the "formal dress" of the prior ages?

Third, underlying both of the previous points there is a more fundamental question: Can or should any single form at all be considered as universally normative for Christians, regardless of whether that form originated in the third century, the sixteenth century, or the twentieth first century? To posit universal norms for worship, implies that there exists in heaven some Platonic ideal of the perfect act of worship that we must constantly struggle to replicate here on earth. It is a static rather than a dynamic view of worship that suggests that God does not delight in the infinite variety and richness of creation but wants to be worshiped only in one predetermined manner. Should we not rather expect acts of worship to reflect both the diversity of the beliefs of particular groups of Christians and the variegated cultures in which they are set?

This critique is not meant to imply that there are no norms at all for Christian worship, that anything goes and people should be free to do whatever they like by way of practice. What it is trying to say is that the rightness or quality of an act of worship cannot be measured against some universal yardstick. We need instead to ask such questions as: Does the worship enable the people engaging in it effectively to express their own particular piety, or does it try to impose a false piety upon them? Is it an authentic expression of the beliefs of that specific community or tradition? Does it “work”; does it succeed in doing for the group whatever it is meant to do, or does it hinder that process? For in the end worship can only be judged good of their kind and in their context, and not in an absolute sense.