The Art of the Song "Oxygen" by Kings Kaleidoscope
Chad Gardner's song "Oxygen" musically reenacts the recovery of faith through tension, resolution, and the beauty of opposites.
Why Liturgy Matters (Response to Ligon Duncan & Matt Smethurst)
Treating liturgy as mere plumbing designed to get out of the way misunderstands creation and leaves believers spiritually starved for embodied worship.
I want to take some time to respond to a brief video clip that The Gospel Coalition put out recently. In the clip, Dr. Ligon Duncan and Matt Smethurst sit down to discuss liturgy. As a general rule, I do not have much interest in response-style content. I usually avoid it unless there is something genuine and interesting for us to learn in the process. But in this case, we definitely have something worth examining.
Now, to be fair, this snippet comes from a longer interview that contains many helpful insights, and I would commend the broader conversation to you. Here, however, we are not looking at the parts where we agree. We are going to focus on a particular set of claims about what liturgy is and what it is supposed to do.
To set the stage, here is how that portion of their exchange unfolds:
Matt Smethurst: Is it possible though, Ligon, to overemphasize liturgy?
Ligon Duncan: No question. Yeah, I mean, and you know, the Reformation is reacting against a sacralized liturgy where there’s sort of a spiritual mystical element to the way that the service is done. And, you know, there are a lot of Evangelical friends of ours that have been attracted to Rome or to Eastern Orthodoxy or to something like an Anglo-Catholicism, and that’s not what I’m commending at all. I think that’s, in fact, I often find that people that are suffering from an experiential deficit themselves seek that experience to be filled in a liturgy. And that’s… a liturgy is there to get out of the way so that we can commune with a living God.
Notice what Dr. Duncan is arguing here. He observes that many evangelicals are increasingly drawn to higher forms of liturgical practice—traditions like Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or Anglo-Catholicism. His diagnosis is that these believers are suffering from some kind of interior experiential deficit, and he cautions that trying to fill that spiritual void through liturgical forms is a mistake. Then he offers his defining thesis: the actual job and nature of liturgy is simply to get out of the way so that we can commune with the living God.
I want you to look closely at the relationship between those two thoughts. Why do you think so many evangelicals suffer from an experiential deficit in the first place? If you are telling your people that the primary goal of corporate worship is for its forms to get out of the way, is it possible that there is a direct connection between your definition and their hunger?
If you are the pastor or leader designing, forming, and ordering a liturgy, and your chief operating principle is that the physical service must disappear, should you really be surprised when your parishioners walk away with a lingering feeling that something is empty, lacking, or thin? You designed the gathering under the conviction that corporate worship succeeds only when its forms vanish.
The Evangelical Problem with Creation
What we are seeing here points to a much broader pattern in contemporary evangelical theology: a persistent difficulty in understanding creation and how physical reality fits into God’s world.
Later in the discussion, Matt Smethurst introduces a second analogy to illustrate their view. He suggests that liturgy is like the pipes that water flows through. Both pictures—the idea that liturgy must get out of the way and the idea that liturgy is merely plumbing—are remarkably telling. In both metaphors, physical forms and liturgical structures are treated as concessions. They are mechanical necessities we tolerate, but their highest virtue is invisibility. They are just pipes.
Consider what happens if you apply that exact same logic to other dimensions of God’s created order. What would you think if someone said that a mother is merely a biological vessel whose job is to get out of the way so a child can enter the world? You would immediately recognize that there is something profoundly deficient and distorted in that view of motherhood. A mother is not an incidental pipe.
Or what if someone argued that the physical creation is just a scaffolding that needs to get out of the way of redemption? You would immediately say that this misunderstands the gospel. It completely distorts the biblical relationship between creation and the kingdom of God.
This brings us right back to fundamental questions about Christ and culture. In H. Richard Niebuhr’s classic work Christ and Culture, he outlines several distinct models for how Christians have historically understood that relationship. The classic Reformed heritage—the very tradition Dr. Duncan represents—is defined by the conviction that Christ transforms and redeems culture. Grace does not abolish nature; it restores and perfects creation. Liturgical acts are themselves physical, cultural, creational realities. When brought into corporate worship, those acts are sanctified, perfected, and taken up directly into the divine service.
Getting Out of the Way of What?
This leads to a simple question: when someone insists that liturgy must get out of the way, what exactly is it supposed to get out of the way of?
Presumably, the answer would be the preaching of the Word of God. But consider what happens when a pastor steps into a pulpit to preach. Preaching depends entirely upon creational instruments. The preacher must use physical vocal cords and the physics of moving air. He must make constant aesthetic, physical decisions about dynamics, tone, cadence, and volume. Should this sentence be spoken loudly or softly? Should the delivery be urgent and fast, or measured and slow? When reading narrative dialogue, should he adopt different vocal inflections to distinguish characters?
If you push the logic of getting out of the way to its conclusion, you would have to strip all of those creational elements away. You would have to say that any vocal texture, rhetorical cadence, or physical presence risks distracting from the naked Word.
The same principle applies to the physical Bible itself. The Scriptures do not drop down from heaven as disembodied ideas. They come to us printed on physical paper made from trees, bound with glue and thread, and stamped with ink through the work of printers and human craftsmanship.
The physical book is a wonderful illustration of how God works. God takes timber, ink, paper, and human industry, and He elevates those creational materials to deliver His Holy Word to His people. That is precisely how we ought to think about corporate liturgical acts. Bodily actions, physical spaces, and structured forms are not obstacles blocking our vision of God. They are creational instruments taken up into the divine service, sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and employed by God to minister to embodied creatures.
When we insist that the physical scaffolding must disappear, we flirt with an ancient mistake. It may not be formal Gnosticism, but it carries a distinctively Gnostic instinct. It assumes that God primarily operates outside of, or in spite of, physical creation. It operates on the suspicion that physical matter and structured bodily forms are inherently distracting, so we must push them aside before real spiritual communion can occur.
Our Implicit Liturgical Assumptions
Evangelicals often believe they have abandoned liturgy, but in reality they have simply adopted an unexamined, implicit one.
Take prayer as an example. In the vast majority of modern evangelical services, the congregation never prays aloud together. If you point this out, the common response is to say, “Of course we pray—the pastor and the worship leaders pray on our behalf.” If you clarify that the people in the pews are entirely silent, the defense is, “Well, they are praying silently in their hearts.”
That is a revealing answer, because we do not apply that interior standard across the board. If you sat next to an evangelical believer in church week after week and noticed that he never opened his mouth to intone a spoken prayer, nobody would think twice about it. But imagine if that same person stood there silently during the music, week after week, never singing a single note out loud. People would immediately conclude that something was spiritually wrong with him. If he defended himself by saying, “Don’t worry, I am singing enthusiastically in my heart,” typical evangelicals would rightly push back. They would insist that singing praise to God is an embodied act that requires an audible voice.
Why do we demand audible, bodily participation for music while accepting complete physical silence for corporate prayer? We do so because we hold unexamined assumptions about which spiritual acts can remain purely internal and which require bodily expression.
A far healthier, biblical approach is to think holistically about creation. We must recognize that God made us as unified physical and spiritual beings, and that physical reality is not a barrier to true spirituality.
Look at the Incarnation. When the Son of God took on human flesh, Jesus’ physical body was not an obstacle His divinity had to overcome. His flesh was not an inconvenient pipe designed to get out of the way of His divine nature. Christ’s body was the very locus of revelation and the means through which divine grace was poured out upon humanity.
The same reality meets us in the Lord’s Supper. Bread and wine are physical, earthy elements, yet Christ uses those tangible gifts as the means of spiritual communion with His people. When we say that liturgy must get out of the way, we misunderstand how God interacts with His creatures. Liturgy is the tangible vehicle God uses to meet, shape, and commune with His covenant people.
Deconstructing the “Sacralized” Critique
This brings us to Dr. Duncan’s historical and theological critique. He claims that the Reformation was fundamentally a reaction against a sacralized liturgy that possessed an overly mystical element.
The word sacral simply means sacred. When someone objects to a service being too sacralized, it is hard to know what is actually being opposed. If we steel-man Dr. Duncan’s concern, what specific practices is he worried about when he warns against services becoming too mystical or too sacred?
Consider incense. Incense was explicitly commanded by God as a liturgical element in the Old Testament tabernacle and temple. In the Book of Revelation, incense appears in the heavenly throne room to represent the prayers of the saints rising up before God. Yet incense is often the first thing modern evangelicals point to as an example of unnecessary mystical excess.
When pastors dismiss sensory elements like incense, it reveals how little thought our churches have given to embodied worship. If you press the issue, you can walk through a basic line of questioning:
Should a church service smell bad? Obviously not. Should it smell pleasant? Most people would say yes, or perhaps that it should smell neutral. If it should smell good, what kind of good? There are thousands of pleasant scents. Should the room smell like a coffee shop, cleaning supplies, or something distinct?
As soon as you follow that logic, you realize that every aesthetic decision requires a theological justification. If your answer is that the worship space should smell completely neutral and blank, you still have to give a reason for that choice. Why should corporate worship strive for sensory absence?
Dr. Duncan is not an extreme iconoclastic Puritan. He would agree that every church makes concrete decisions about its architecture, windows, lighting, and acoustics. But choosing sensory minimalism does not produce neutrality. Neutrality itself communicates a theological statement. A barren, blank space tells the congregation something specific about the nature of man, the character of God, and the purpose of worship.
As Richard John Neuhaus pointed out decades ago in The Naked Public Square, there is no such thing as an empty, neutral space. A blank canvas is still making an argument. Historically, Christians across traditions recognized this reality. They believed corporate worship spaces should be beautiful, elevated, and expansive because physical glory communicates the transcendence and majesty of God.
The Inescapable Mysticism of Worship
The same confusion applies to the warning against mysticism. In traditional Christian liturgies, high ceremonies are not empty rituals meant to generate sentimental mystery. Every gesture, posture, garment, and movement carries a defined theological meaning.
More to the point, corporate worship in an evangelical Reformed church is already deeply, inescapably mystical. Think about what happens in Dr. Duncan’s own services:
First, the congregation engages in prayer, speaking directly to the sovereign Creator of the cosmos. Second, the Scriptures are read aloud, meaning mortals are receiving the living speech of God Almighty. Third, the church celebrates the Lord’s Supper, which Reformed theology insists is a real spiritual feeding on the body and blood of Christ.
Those three practices are profoundly mystical realities. Corporate worship is mystical at its very foundation. What traditional liturgical forms attempt to do is unfold and embody that reality outwardly. They seek to ensure that our physical postures, spatial movements, visual surroundings, and sensory experiences match the interior reality of what is taking place. If we are truly meeting with the King of kings, our external decorum ought to reflect that majesty.
We understand this intuition completely in the political sphere. Whenever a foreign dignitary, a head of state, or even a celebrated cultural figure arrives for an official visit, our casualness disappears. Every detail is planned, coordinated, and elevated. Rituals are introduced, protocol is observed, and the physical setting is dignified to match the significance of the guest. We organize every sensory detail to honor the dignity of the person being received. Why would we suddenly abandon that human instinct when gathering in the presence of the living God?
Furthermore, the historical claim that the Reformation was primarily an effort to desacralize worship does not hold up. The Reformers certainly reformed medieval abuses, but they did not seek to drain worship of the sacred. Neither Martin Luther nor John Calvin sought to desacralize the church. Both maintained high views of the sacraments, and both vigorously defended the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Treating the Reformation as a movement toward desacralized minimalism is a modern evangelical projection, not the historical reality of the magisterial Reformation.
Intellectual Palaces Versus Spiritual Homes
The fundamental framing of this discussion fails to address the real spiritual needs of believers today. When you talk to everyday evangelicals, their struggle is rarely that their churches have overemphasized liturgy. Their actual problem is the exact opposite. They are starved for reverent, substantive, embodied worship because the standard evangelical service has stripped away centuries of rich Christian liturgical inheritance.
Evangelicalism has done an extraordinary job building intellectual architecture. We know how to write systematic theologies, parse doctrinal propositions, and construct formidable theological palaces in the mind. But human beings are not disembodied brains on sticks. At the end of the day, believers do not merely want to tour an intellectual palace; they want a home they can actually inhabit.
Other historic Christian traditions have excelled at shaping that home. They have recognized that faith must inhabit our bodies, our senses, our architecture, and our daily habits. When evangelicals visit those traditions, they are often struck by how thoughtfully every element has been ordered—how the space smells, how the body moves, how the eyes are directed.
Interestingly, these are the very considerations we pour into our private living spaces. We care deeply about the atmosphere, beauty, and hospitality of our living rooms and dining tables. This dynamic calls to mind the warnings of the Old Testament prophets, who rebuked God’s people for paneled, beautifully adorned personal houses while leaving the house of the Lord in neglect.
We need to move past negative, dismissive accounts that treat liturgy as dangerous mysticism or reduce worship forms to mechanical plumbing. Instead, Protestants need a robust, positive theology of liturgical worship. You can hold fast to historic Protestant theology while drawing freely from the riches of historic Christian liturgy. Embracing embodied, sacred worship does not compromise Reformed convictions; it fulfills them. Our corporate worship should not aim to get out of the way. It should offer our best creational gifts to the God who redeemed both body and soul.