2 thoughts on “Liturgy: Freedom from Spontaneity!”

  1. ‘Freedom from spontaneity’….two thoughts:
    1) As a free-church minister, I’m ‘supposed’ to be spontaneous every week and it takes a lot of work!!!! There is a sort of ‘snobbery of spontaneity’ in our tradition, but if you preach and lead worship every week, you either have to prepare or you end up saying the same two or three things week after week. Listening to God and passing on what you’ve heard take discipline, not magic. So many of us seem to have a ‘magical’ view of the Holy Spirit.
    2) Many people have testified to the value of saying the Daily Offices, particularly when they are depressed. The liturgy provides a way of praying when the emotions can yield for ‘spontaneous prayer’.

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  2. I have been on a huge journey with this over the years.
    I developed an allergy to liturgy during my Catholic youth, and couldn’t get enough spontaneity when I first re-embraced Christianity.
    But, once I had sufficiently detoxed, it slowly began to dawn on me that liturgy wasn’t all bad, not when you actually understood they ‘why’ behind it. And as I experimented with alternative worship myself, and discovered how much energy it required (and diverted!) and had kids, and discovered how much they need repetition, it slowly sunk in that yes, liturgy definitely has its place.
    Now I would say that routine spontaneity can also be restrictive; that true spontaneity requires space for being non-spontaneous.

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