Pentecostals Worshipping the Trinity Round the Table: Some Thoughts and an Excellent Book
Today I want to enthusiastically recommend an incredibly good, brand new Pentecostal book — Resurrecting Worship: A Pentecostal Liturgy for Slow Burn Revival by Joseph M. Lear. I’m not going to write a review — as I hope to do that elsewhere — but I want to share a little bit about the book and encourage people to read it. And I'll do that in the context of offering some of my own thoughts on the same topic (as it’s a theme I’ve written a lot about in various places over the years and still have lots to say).
Good and Bad Liturgy
Every church has a liturgy. We might not realise it or like to admit it, but we do. The question isn’t whether we have a liturgy or not — it’s really whether we have a good liturgy or not. A liturgy might not be written down word for word in a book like in the churches we think of as liturgical, but it can still be rigidly followed. The liturgy of the Sydney Suburbs can be just as strong a tradition in the life of a local church as the liturgy of Antioch or Rome or Canterbury.
A good liturgy doesn’t only help individuals to worship. It draws us together as the people of the Triune God and builds us up together. It helps to form us in faith and for life, for the Lord is at work in it as we worship Him in Spirit and in Truth. As the church has understood through the centuries, lex orandi lex credendi — literally those words translate to “the law of praying is the law of believing,” but what it actually means is how we worship ends up determining what we believe and then, flowing out from that, how we live. A bad liturgy will form our faith in poor ways and misshape our lives. Good liturgy will form us in true faith and love, for faithful and loving lives to bring glory to our Triune God.
But how can we know if we have a good liturgy? Well, if we never think about it, that won’t help! Liturgy is intentional. And if what we do in church from week to week isn’t intentional, that might not help.
Here are a few immediate — and simple — tests. Could someone come to a service in your church and leave not having heard that Christ died for our sins and rose again? Could someone come to your service and leave not knowing that we worship the Triune God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Could someone come to your service and leave not hearing the Bible read as the Word of God? And not over a year or 6 months, or even 6 weeks. Those are the very basics of our faith, and if someone could come to any service and not hear them, then we’ve got our liturgy way out of whack. Good liturgy will keep the main thing front and centre. Good liturgy will mean we can’t lose sight of those things which are “of first importance” (1 Corinthians 15:3).
Trinitarian Worship
And so a good liturgy means our worship must always be Trinitarian. Now, obviously, the God we worship is the Triune God, so in that sense our worship always is Trinitarian. But a good liturgy will mean it is explicitly Trinitarian. Traditional liturgies give glory to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit again and again through the service. They structure their prayers so that they are explicitly addressed to the Father through the Son in the Spirit. They recite the Creeds and so explicitly proclaim their faith in the Triune God. If we rely on singing to carry the weight of our liturgy, then (unless we are incredibly intentional, and keep reaching far beyond the list of current top worship songs) we could easily go for weeks at a time without explicitly mentioning the Trinity. Wouldn’t it be a tragedy if the first time someone heard the Father, Son and Holy Spirit named together in church was at the moment of being plunged into the waters in the Triune name in baptism! (And wouldn’t it be an even bigger tragedy if that was the only time they ever heard it!)
Our salvation lies in the Triune God. The Father has sent His Son into the world to save us. The Holy Spirit opens our eyes to the glory of Christ and draws us to Him for salvation. It’s the Holy Spirit who unites us to Jesus when we trust in Him. And it’s in the Son and through the Spirit that we have access to the Father. Our entire faith is grounded in the fact that God is the Triune God! So let’s rejoice explicitly in the Triune God and come explicitly to the Triune God in prayer.
Joseph Lear shows in Resurrecting Worship how his church — Resurrection Assembly — does this. By baptism, saying the Creed together, and the way they pray corporately together as a church they intentionally ensure that their liturgy is constantly Trinitarian, and that everyone, from the oldest to the youngest, knows that the God who saves us, the God whom we worship, is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. A Trinitarian liturgy doesn’t exclude anyone. It’s not a way of complicating things. In fact, Lear shows how in Resurrection Assembly this helps them make sure that everyone can participate in their worship. (Get his book to see how!)
Word-filled Worship
Christian worship is rooted in God’s Word. He speaks to us as we read the Scriptures together, and we respond with praise and prayer. Reading the Bible isn’t just the preliminary to a sermon. If we only read like that, it makes it seem like it’s our human words that do the heavy lifting — as if God’s Word is a closed book until the clever preacher comes along to explain it. Now, preaching is vital. And we need the gifts of teachers, pastors, and elders Christ has placed in His church who are “able to teach” (1 Timothy 3:2).
But God doesn’t just wait until the preacher starts speaking to work by His Word. His Word itself is living and powerful. And it is a powerful and life-giving thing to simply listen to the Scriptures being read (without our comments). As Jospeh Lear writes, “To be Pentecostal ... is to take the Scriptures so seriously that we appraise our daily lives with them, and it means to always place ourselves in the grand Trinitarian story of the Bible.” If we’re going to be properly Pentecostal, we need “the Scriptures to be central to all we do” (Resurrecting Worship, p.51). That’s not just in a reference book sense — we need to read these Scriptures out loud together and listen to them together.
In Resurrection Assembly, they explain at the first Bible reading why they do it: “Because the Bible tells us to devote ourselves to the public reading of Scripture we read from ...” (Resurrecting Worship, p.53). And that public reading of Scripture is accompanied by singing Scripture and preaching the Scriptures too.
Eucharistic Worship
Christian worship takes place round a Table. That’s where the liturgy leads. For the Lord Himself invites us week by week into His own presence, to meet with us and bless us. And that He does as He speaks to us in His Word and feeds us at His Table. Word and sacrament is the shape of Christian worship. It has been from the beginning — as we see in Emmaus, Jerusalem, Troas, and Corinth — and it will be “till He comes.” Take away the Lord’s Table from our lives and our assemblies, and we take away worship. In fact, if we take away the Table, we take away the church! For, as we see in the earliest days in Acts, the church continues steadfastly, not only in doctrine, fellowship and prayer, but in the Breaking of Bread. Without the Word rightly preached and the Sacraments rightly administered, there is no church and no worship. As Jospeh Lear puts it in his excellent new book on Pentecostal worship, “without the Eucharist, the church is hard-pressed to claim they are actually giving thanks appropriately for Jesus’s sacrifice” (Lear, Resurrecting Worship, p.31).
You might not be familiar with the term Eucharist — or maybe you've heard it and assume it's got something to do with the Church in Wales (or the Church of England). Really it’s just one of very many names for the sacrament we Pentecostals more often call the Breaking of Bread or the Lord's Supper. (And for anyone who thinks Eucharist doesn't sound Pentecostal enough, it was a term used for the Supper by D.P. Williams himself, so it has a good Apostolic pedigree.) Eucharist means thanksgiving and comes from the Greek word for giving thanks in the New Testament accounts of the Supper. The early Christians recognised that the Thanksgiving Jesus Himself instituted was the high-point of our thanksgiving and praise. The greatest reason we have to give thanks to the Lord — and the reason which makes our giving thanks for anything else even possible — is found in the cross of Christ. And so, at the Table we make the highest of thanksgivings — a thanksgiving instituted by the Lord Jesus, for the Lord Jesus and all that He has done for us, and from which all the rest of our giving thanks to God flows. So the Breaking of Bread is the ultimate Thanksgiving and the summit of our worship.
The very earliest Christian text we have outside the New Testament instructs believers that they should “on the Lord's own day gather together and break bread and give thanks, having first confessed your sins” (Didache 14:1). This is exactly what we see believers doing in the New Testament — gathering together on the Lord's Day in order to break bread (Acts 20:7). And there’s no time gap between that instruction outside Scripture and that example in Scripture, for Didache 14:1 was probably written around the year AD 50. That’s around the same time as 1 Thessalonians or Galatians. Some want to date it earlier, and a few push it back to later in the century, but no matter which date is correct, it was still probably written before parts of the New Testament. So, right from the very beginning of the Christian church, we have evidence from both inside the Bible and outside it that Christians gathered each Sunday with the Lord’s Supper at the centre of their worship.
Shortly after the last book of the New Testament was written, Ignatius of Antioch wrote a warning against those who “abstain from the Eucharist.” These, he wrote, “hold heretical opinions about the grace of Jesus Christ that came to us” (Smyrneans 6:2). Ignatius was alive at the time of the apostles, and early church sources tell us he was a disciple of the Apostle John. So this wasn’t some late addition to Christian teaching. Like the pattern we see in Acts and 1 Corinthians, and the instruction we find in the Didache, Ignatius points to the central place of the Lord's Supper in the worship of the 1st century church. (Ignatius died as a martyr in the earliest years of the 2nd century, but was part of the church from his youth.)
By the time we get the first full post-New Testament description of Christian worship from Justin Martyr in the 2nd century, we find the pattern that has continued right up until today. Lots of Scripture read, a sermon, prayers, and the Breaking of Bread.
The centrality of the Supper in our worship isn’t something that fell from heaven during the Welsh Revival in 1904 or with the Brethren in Dublin in the 1820s. It’s something that goes right back to the earliest days of the Christian church — right back to the apostles and their disciples, just like we see in Troas in Acts 20. As the New Testament shows us and the Didache instructs, this is how Christians worship the Triune God. Singing praise is good, but the high-point of worship will always be at the Table.
In Resurrection Assembly, the Scriptural imperative for worship centred in the Supper means they “celebrate and give thanks by observing the Lord’s Supper every Sunday service and at most other church gatherings abstaining only when we gather at a location or a time that not everyone in the church can access” (Resurrecting Worship, pp.31-32).
But it’s not only the actions of eating and drinking that are central. The Eucharist is more than that. Jesus told us what to “do” as well as what to eat and drink. It’s only when Christ’s words are added to an element that it becomes a sacrament. As I’ve written before, “without Christ’s words, bread and wine in church are just a snack” (The Lord’s Supper: Our Promised Place of Intimacy and Transformation with Jesus, p.108). Lear says the same thing: without Christ’s words, “baptism is just splashing in water ... [and] the cup and bread are merely an in-service snack that can’t feed the body let alone the soul” (Resurrecting Worship, p.37).
So Lear sets out how they celebrate the Supper and what they pray at the Table in Resurrection Assembly. For the Lord’s Supper to be the Lord’s Supper it must be blessed with Christ’s words and prayer, and so that’s exactly what they do. Lear sets out not only the structure, but also the words of their liturgy here, which will be a great help to many Pentecostal churches and leaders.
Lear’s writing from within an American Assemblies of God culture, which hasn’t been used to such regular celebration of the Supper. In the UK, of course, the weekly Breaking of Bread has been our way of worship since the beginning of Pentecostalism, and has only started falling by the wayside in the past two decades. In our context, Lear could help us recover a precious biblical practice that we’ve begun to forget to treasure.
Pentecostal Worship
But is it Pentecostal? That’s the question on many of your minds! All this talk of liturgy and Eucharistic worship and Creeds might sound foreign to more than a few readers. And yet, it’s not foreign to Pentecostalism at all. In the UK and much of Europe, as well as South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and places that Pentecostal missionaries have gone to from those countries, the Breaking of Bread was, for very many decades, the heart of Pentecostal worship. John Bond, the South African Assemblies of God leader, taught that to celebrate the Supper any less frequently than every Sunday would reflect a lack of understanding “of its meaning as the staple of Christian life.” Harry Greenway, the General Superintendent of the Elim Pentecostal Church in the UK insisted that without the Breaking of Bread in our services, we’re “lacking the fundamental basis of all true worship.” George Canty, another widely respected Elim leader, pointed out that “Pentecostals love the communion service beyond all occasions [for] it is then ... that the Lord draws the closest.” (Those are all from sources that are out of print and hard to find today, but you can find those references and more in my chapter on “Why is the Breaking of Bread so Significant for Pentecostals?” in 40 Questions About Pentecostalism.) There is nothing at all non-Pentecostal about Eucharistic worship!
Lear sees this and wants us all to see it too. “Pentecost represents the trinitarian fulfilment of eucharistic worship. In other words, trinitarian and eucharistic worship must result in Pentecostal worship. And to be Pentecostal means to live in the last days in the power of the Holy Spirit” (Resurrecting Worship, p.49).
Pentecost doesn’t mean chaos, for the Holy Spirit brings order. And so liturgy and spiritual gifts aren’t in competition. As one early Apostolic Church leader put it, “Liberty without order is not true freedom, but licence. There is an order of worship for baptised believers.” A Pentecostal liturgy isn’t a rigid resistance to the Lord’s freedom to move by prophetic gifts. Spirit and sacrament go together — just as they did in Troas and Corinth.
But What About Mission?
But isn’t all this talk of liturgy and sacraments detrimental to our mission of reaching the lost? Isn’t it only appealing to old people? Surely it’s much too complicated for our youth, and we should be trying to reach the next generation? Nonsense!
One Sunday morning in a previous church, when I had all the children up at the front to teach them during the service, a four-year old put up her hand. I can’t remember what I had asked, but she proceeded to explain to the whole church the meaning of the Lord’s Supper, and through it the Gospel of who Jesus is and what He’s done for us. Even her parents were astonished at her explanation of the Table. And how was she able to do that? Because week after week she heard the meaning of the Supper as we gathered round the Lord’s Table in church.
Lear gets the power of the liturgy for the children. “The Pentecostal liturgy described in this book was,” he writes, “in a sense constructed for the kids ... We wanted to disciple kids biblically ... And the fire of the Lord of Life, through them, spread to the whole church” (Resurrecting Worship, p.73). Children don’t need a stripped back Christianity, they need to be led again and again into “God’s story that begins with creation and will culminate in the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come” (Resurrecting Worship, p.73).
And not just children. Resurrection Assembly is “an incredibly diverse group of people. People from every walk of life ... The homeless, the disabled, rural white Iowans, the educated so-called ‘elite,’ immigrants and refugees, black Chicagoans and Latinos, and the urban poor all worship the risen Lord side-by-side ... If you welcome kids, you welcome everyone. If you disciple kids, you disciple everyone. Liturgies for kids are liturgies for everyone” (Resurrecting Worship, p.74).
I’ve seen the same in previous places, as British people and people from the other side of the planet, elderly people and little children, poor people and rich people, have lifted up their voices together to proclaim the Lord’s death, say the Lord’s Prayer, cry “Holy, holy, holy” at the Table, or sing the Prayer of Humble Access.
The law of praying is the law of believing — or how we worship ends up determining what we believe and how we live. As Lear puts it, “Liturgy is discipleship. Christian disciples worship and proclaim the risen Lord. So we ought to have patterns of worship that train people to do that very thing” (Resurrecting Worship, p.75).
In Resurrection Assembly they proclaim the mystery of faith with the words “Christ has died; Christ is risen; Christ will come again.” In a previous assembly where I pastored, we did it with the words “Dying, You destroyed our death; Rising, You restored our life; Lord Jesus, come in glory.” And that proclamation played its part in drawing people to eternal life in Jesus. Over the years, I had a few chats with different people that went like this: “Pastor, when I first started coming, I didn’t say those words because I didn’t believe and didn't want to be a hypocrite. But eventually I realised I’d started saying them with everyone else. And then I realised it was because now I believe them. Can I get baptised?” A good liturgy doesn’t only glorify God and disciple the saints, it also evangelises!
Joseph Lear’s book Resurrecting Worship: A Pentecostal Liturgy for Slow Burn Revival is published by Cascade Books (2025). It’s only 80 pages, but these are very rich pages indeed. This is currently the best book there is on Pentecostal worship. So get it and read it!