I Took a Baptist to Church - Catholics & Anglicans Help Me Out

[JustaServant]

Just,

I feel left out. Here I am a Catholic all my life. Here I am not a convert or a revert. Here I am having a great deal of Experience in Protesant thought, evangelized to the extent that I made it a study for the past 30 years. I attended numerous services, Bible studies, stadiums, read, listened and still study…Wow…you just left me hanging in the breezee…could you please create another category for me…

thanks…

I was gonna be a wise guy, but decided not to.

I gotta get back to work, I’ll let you fill it in:

 

[AbideWithMe]

I don’t see how that’s even worth answering.

If he thinks ritual is empty, pray for him and let him go his way.

Either people feel hunger for liturgy or they don’t.

Myself, I find non-liturgical worship terribly “empty”–a lot of well-meaning people babbling away as if their thoughts and feelings were what most mattered. I know that’s rude and uncharitable–there is much value in extemporaneous prayer–but after 14 years of Anglicanism I find it pretty hard to have patience with this kind of anti-ritual rhetoric, when my own prejudices run quite the other way.

You might, just to unsettle him, try citing Matt. 6:7 and pointing out that “thinking they will be heard by their many words” fits the typical evangelical extemporaneous prayer a lot better than an Anglican collect. . . .

Or, more constructively, if you really want to engage this, you could point out the Biblical and theological content of the liturgy. You might also point out that we pray with the Church’s words (in public worship) because we profess the Church’s faith. That is very helpful when we have “crises of faith,” as you say he is. I can say the Creed even if I’m struggling with what I believe, because it’s the faith of the Church and I choose to trust the Church.

But that may not be helpful to him. He just may not be in a place where the liturgy can speak to him.

Edwin

If the OP and his friend are up to the discussion, I think the “Or, more constructively, if you really want to engage this…” paragraph is the way to go. JonNC made a similar suggestion.

As for having a hunger for liturgy or not, I think it’s partly an acquired taste; and if a person is already prejudiced against it by their upbringing, and then introduced to it too abruptly without explanations of the depth underlying it, it’s not surprising if that person says something rude and ignorant as the OP’s friend did to him. That doesn’t excuse the OP’s friend for his rudeness, but I think it does give some hope that this is worth the OP’s time as far as trying to discuss it further with his friend.

 

[manualman]

This very subject came up in a First Things article. The author is a protestant (Lutheran), actually, but articulates what bothers him about anti-liturgical services.

firstthings.com/onthesquare/2012/06/real-liturgical-renewal

Granted, he can’t speak for all protestants or evangelicals either. But you can hardly accuse him of being a ghetto restricted catholic…

 

[Cat_Herder]

What are the general points of a Baptist “Liturgy”?

1. Rock Concert Music
2. Powerpoint Presentations
3. Pastor with Jokes, and comments about scriptures in PPT
4. Questions for the audience
5. Pieces of bread, and grape juice once in a while?

How is this worship? This is an extended bible study, or a social gathering.

Only when they have a MARRIAGE is there a ritual. And that ritual is acknowledged to have POWER, specifically the power to take away the sin of fornication. Marriage is a Sacrament. All Christians, even the most “independent fundamental” ones, must acknowledge that, and once one Sacrament is admitted to exist then the error of rejecting all rituals as powerless is obvious.

More here.

 

[Anna_Scott]

A friend of mine, who is Baptist, is having a sort of crisis of faith so I invited him to attend church with me last Sunday; I thought a different perspective might help him out. I wasn’t trying to convert him, as I firmly believe one’s spiritual journey is their own to travel.

After Mass, we got in the car and I asked him what he thought. He asked me how I could attend a church that was so ritualistic and empty. I empathized with his sentiments because I grew up in an evangelical/fundamentalist church and have heard this criticism many times.

I told him that he couldn’t compare a Baptist service to an Episcopal service; the two are too different. A Baptist service is for praise and worship, and he should think of an Episcopal Mass, from procession to recession, as one long prayer.

I didn’t know what to say; I was speaking off the cuff. What should I have said?

I grew up in the Southern Baptist Church. So, I understand the great difference between a Baptist service and liturgical worship.

Keep in mind that your friend may have been told that Catholics, Anglicans, and Eastern Orthodox are not Christians. That may be a factor in your friend’s response.

Regarding rituals; Baptists sometimes draw upon Matthew 6:7 (KJV): But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking.

Our Rector tells us that in worship, we are not the “audience.” The Holy Trinity is the “audience.” All our worship is directed towards God; and the Holy Eucharist is at the heart of our worship.

In the Baptist Church I left, worship services had become something akin to a spectator sport (12,000 membership). At least, it began to feel that way to me. The first time I visited the Episcopal Church (High Church, Anglo Catholic,) I fell in love with the liturgy. I didn’t know such worship existed.

The prayers in the liturgy are based on Holy Scripture and follow the example of The Lord’s Prayer–which is a testament to corporate prayer. It begins with Our Father, not My Father and so on.

Also, you can point to the substantial reading of Holy Scripture. In the Baptist Church, the minister may base his entire sermon on one passage, sometimes just 2 or 3 verses.

Our Priests deliver a Sermon. Through our liturgy, we pray, read Holy Scripture, worship and praise God, profess our faith, repent and confess our sins, ask for mercy and forgiveness, partake of the Holy Eucharist, and thank our Eternal God for accepting us as living members of His Son our Savior Jesus Christ through the Sacrament of His Body and Blood. We ask to be sent into the world in peace, granting us strength and courage to love and serve God with gladness and singleness of heart through Christ our Lord.

To use Baptist terminology, one will find an expanded and Biblical “Sinner’s Prayer” in our liturgy every time we come together.

Hope this helps.

Peace and blessings,
Anna

 

[Anna_Scott]

Just,

I feel left out. Here I am a Catholic all my life. Here I am not a convert or a revert. Here I am having a great deal of Experience in Protesant thought, evangelized to the extent that I made it a study for the past 30 years. I attended numerous services, Bible studies, stadiums, read, listened and still study…Wow…you just left me hanging in the breezee…could you please create another category for me…

thanks…

Coptic, Coptic, Coptic,

Don’t want you to be hanging in the breeze.

You just defined your category and it is a good one. You are one of my favorite Catholics. :flowers:

Pen

 

[Izdaari]

I think you answered well. I go to a ‘praise and worship’ style church, but I love to visit Anglican or Catholic churches. The ritual is not empty to me. It’s very beautiful and spiritually rich. I think that’s the problem, really. It’s very rich, and very deep. If you are used to a plainer diet, it’s hard to digest. Your friend, if they come along again, may need more help and explanation of what is happening and why. Tell them what about it particularly speaks to you, and how it helps you meet with God. Don’t underestimate the power of personal testimony when it comes to these things. Your own experience is an excellent place to start, because it’s ‘real’. Your friend may never feel 100% at home in your church, but you can help dismantle the myth that the ritual is ‘empty’.

I recently moved from a “praise and worship” style church (Assemblies of God) to a liturgical one (“emergent” Anglo-Catholic). I’m glad for the change, but I wouldn’t say either style is “empty”. God is present in both places, but I find I prefer the liturgical style. I also connect better with this community, possibly because I share it’s cultural and social values more.

 

[Anna_Scott]

I recently moved from a “praise and worship” style church (Assemblies of God) to a liturgical one (“emergent” Anglo-Catholic). I’m glad for the change, but I wouldn’t say either style is “empty”. God is present in both places, but I find I prefer the liturgical style. I also connect better with this community, possibly because I share it’s cultural and social values more.

Hi, Izdaari,

I agree.

Also, I think one can find emptiness in either, depending on one’s spiritual state of mind.

Anna

 

[mackbrislawn]

Speaking as a former Baptist, I can tell you that baptist churches (affiliated with the SBC) are moving toward “info-tainment” on Sundays, with a little bit of God mixed in the message here and there…

I think entertainment is a factor in evangelical services, and they have toe-tapping music and singing. Of course, I can go to the Cowboy Saloon for toe-tapping music as well.

 

[andrewstx]

Most of the fundamental churches do no allow their members to visit night clubs or venues that offer that kind of music.

So they get that at church, lots of churches play blue grass music, and local to here
“cowboy churches” are very popular with country southern music. There’s one nearby and the have services in a barn with hay bales for pews.

Behind the barn are rodeo grounds and the are about to have their annual ranch rodeo and reeevival.

They call themselves “non=denominational”, but they are affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention.

 

[ComeHome2Rome]

“The rituals may have seemed empty to you, but they were actually full of Jesus Christ our Lord and our God! Did you listen to all the Scripture that was read during the Mass? And most especially the ritual of the Eucharist, let me show you a passage in Bible…The Gospel of John Chapter 6.”

A friend of mine, who is Baptist, is having a sort of crisis of faith so I invited him to attend church with me last Sunday; I thought a different perspective might help him out. I wasn’t trying to convert him, as I firmly believe one’s spiritual journey is their own to travel.

After Mass, we got in the car and I asked him what he thought. He asked me how I could attend a church that was so ritualistic and empty. I empathized with his sentiments because I grew up in an evangelical/fundamentalist church and have heard this criticism many times.

I told him that he couldn’t compare a Baptist service to an Episcopal service; the two are too different. A Baptist service is for praise and worship, and he should think of an Episcopal Mass, from procession to recession, as one long prayer.

I didn’t know what to say; I was speaking off the cuff. What should I have said?

 

[pismopal]

A friend of mine, who is Baptist, is having a sort of crisis of faith so I invited him to attend church with me last Sunday; I thought a different perspective might help him out. I wasn’t trying to convert him, as I firmly believe one’s spiritual journey is their own to travel.

After Mass, we got in the car and I asked him what he thought. He asked me how I could attend a church that was so ritualistic and empty. I empathized with his sentiments because I grew up in an evangelical/fundamentalist church and have heard this criticism many times.

I told him that he couldn’t compare a Baptist service to an Episcopal service; the two are too different. A Baptist service is for praise and worship, and he should think of an Episcopal Mass, from procession to recession, as one long prayer.

I didn’t know what to say; I was speaking off the cuff. What should I have said?

Your friend may have thought the Mass felt “empty” because he was not actually present in spirit. One must know what is going on and be there, body and spirit,…just sayin’

 

[TEPO]

A friend of mine, who is Baptist, is having a sort of crisis of faith so I invited him to attend church with me last Sunday; I thought a different perspective might help him out. I wasn’t trying to convert him, as I firmly believe one’s spiritual journey is their own to travel.

After Mass, we got in the car and I asked him what he thought. He asked me how I could attend a church that was so ritualistic and empty. I empathized with his sentiments because I grew up in an evangelical/fundamentalist church and have heard this criticism many times.

I told him that he couldn’t compare a Baptist service to an Episcopal service; the two are too different. A Baptist service is for praise and worship, and he should think of an Episcopal Mass, from procession to recession, as one long prayer.

I didn’t know what to say; I was speaking off the cuff. What should I have said?

I went to a non-Catholic Church once when I was probably nine or ten. I think it was Lutheran -anyways I remember feeling frightened for some reason because all I knew was Catholic… and this wasn’t. All I remember was that it was a small Chapel-type room with a lot of leafy plants. Now just a few years ago I attended my first Latin Mass, which was a High Mass and was completely sung from beginning to end… This was also very strange to me.

…But really I think that the first time at any new Church would always be an extremely strange situation. One might experience that uncomfortable ‘do I belong here’ kind of feeling… I think this must have been the case with your Baptist friend. It’s probably an experience he’ll NEVER forget!

 

[Rabbity]

I would recommend Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic by David Currie. Also, I think the books and CDs by Tim Staples (a CAF apologist) are excellent for evangelical Protestants. Dr. Scott Hahn’s books are probably better for mainline Protestants, or more specifically, those Protestants who have a Calvinist background (which does include many evangelical Protestants, BTW–John Calvin is “trendy” at the moment among evangelical Protestants, especially among the young people.)

I would also recommend No Price too High: A Pentecostal Preacher Becomes Catholic by Alex Jones.

Even though the OP’s friend is baptist and Jones was pentecostal, Jones was starting from scratch. He knew nothing of the catholic church and he described how he started digging into the writings of the early church fathers as part of a project on early christianity and over time it led him and many of his parishioners to the catholic church.

You can recommend it to your friend, not as an attempt to convert, but as an explanation about how a protestant came to understand how the rituals practices of catholics today are tied to and extensions of the practices of the early church.

 

[Gamera]

It’s interesting that your friend assumes all rituals are empty. Let’s hope that if he ever gets married, he doesn’t tell his intended bride that he expects their wedding ceremony to be empty of meaning and impersonal since a wedding is a ritual.

 

[cmodrmac]

I think you answer was pertinent and right-we call our service a “mass” -some just refer to the service as Holy Communion-there is a wide gulf between RC-Epicopalians ,Lutherans and Baptists- suspect he experienced culture shock-perhaps refer him to the Presbyterians or Methodists who are less removed from the Baptists
CM

 

[odile53]

It’s funny, in the sense of being odd, that someone would consider anything smacking of ritual as cold and overly structured.

I am Native American, and although most of my family on Mom’s side have been Roman Catholic since the time of the Blackrobes (we’re Seneca Nation, Bear Clan, of the Haudenossaune, or Iroquois, as is more commonly known,) there are a few relatives who are Longhouse (traditional Haudenossaune religion, which, by the way, is monotheistic. A couple of cousins of my generation have left the Catholic Church to rejoin the Longhouse, probably as a cultural identity statement.

I’ve been to some services at the Longhouse, as I am fluent in Ongegage (the traditional Seneca language.) They are highly ritualistic, even in terms of gesture and posture. For example, a Longhouse chief or speaker never moves around the longhouse in a counterclockwise motion–right to left is the direction of death, except during a council of war, when obviously a nation would want to visit death on its enemies. The usual practice to give thanksgiving to the living God is to move about the room in a clockwise (left to right) movement. There are numerous other features, such as a family always sits with its clan, and men and women enter from different doors in the longhouse. In fact, Longhouse ceremonies are probably more “choreographed” than the Tridentine Mass.

They always have a specific theme in the speaker’s choice of topic. My Lutheran husband wanted to see with his own eyes a Longhouse ceremony. So I took him. He had to enter by the men’s door, but sit behind me, with my clan. I translated for him. I think he was expecting something very nature based, but the speaking of the day turned out to be a lengthy treatise on traditional Iroquois etiquette. Things such as: “If you are a guest at a house you are to eat what is placed before you. You are to take two tastes. If you do not like what you are eating and cannot eat it, you are to tell the cook, ‘You worked very hard to prepare this food.’ You are to be grateful for the food placed before you as it extends your life.” I hadn’t really expected the Iroquois version of Miss Manners as the speaking of the day, and my blond haired, blue-eyed German Lutheran husband was a little taken aback by it.

I guess my point is this: Ritual and ceremony in worship have been around since the dawn of time, even if the deity worshipped is not the Most Holy Trinity. Ritual and ceremony existed in primitive, now aboriginal, cultures. Rituals speak to a need deep in the soul of human beings to timelessness, immutability, and offer reassurance to a link with the divine. That sense of connectedness is the warmest reassurance that I have of being right there with Christ at Calvary, at His tremendous Sacrifice that He would have undergone willingly even if I were the only human that ever existed. The structure and liturgy of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is the greatest guarantee that I can see right now, in 2012 New York State, that Jesus loved me so much that He was willing to die for me, and wants such union with me that He is willing to present Himself in the form of bread and wine that I can consume, actually take into my digestive system and have His Substance united, molecule by molecule, with my own body, in union with Him.

The Mass isn’t about me. I am a retired professional ballerina, and could do a liturgical dance performance better than what I’ve seen described and on YouTube (applying the word “dance” to these displays makes me want to shudder.) During the Liturgy of the Word and the homily, I want to actually learn something rather than what Father has been able to cobble together from his humor repertoire. If I wanted stand up comedy, I’d go to a comedy club. I want to hear the Word of God proclaimed unabashedly and with practical applications to my daily life in the trenches as a member of the Church Militant. I couldn’t care less about the music ministry, if I want to listen to good music, there is always the Philharmonic, NPR, or my iPod. And I want to see precisely why I bothered to get up out of bed on a Sunday morning–the actual re-presentation of the Sacrifice of Jesus on Calvary. Anything else is just fluff, as far as I’m concerned.

Anything less than that, for me, anyways, is like nibbling at the salad bar while there is a tremendous smorgasbord spread out for me to gorge at, spiritually speaking. In all charity, and without any acrimony whatsoever on my part, I truly feel sorry for our separated brethren, particularly those in non-liturgical Protestant churches. I don’t think they have a clue as to what they’re really missing.

 

[pismopal]

Anything less than that, for me, anyways, is like nibbling at the salad bar while there is a tremendous smorgasbord spread out for me to gorge at, spiritually speaking. In all charity, and without any acrimony whatsoever on my part, I truly feel sorry for our separated brethren, particularly those in non-liturgical Protestant churches. I don’t think they have a clue as to what they’re really missing.

---

You have said it!

 

[Rabbity]

One more place to send your friend:

Have him watch the “Word Made Flesh, True Bread of heaven: The Mystery of the Chursh’s Sacrament and Worship, parts I and II” episodes of Fr. Robert Barron’s Catholicism series.

Barron goes through each step of the mass and explains why it’s important.

If you can’t catch the right episodes on EWTN then maybe Youtube has them.

 

[Usbek_de_Perse]

Also, if he is a biblical Christian, how many bible passages are read in his church?

I bet fewer than 4. The typical Catholic Mass or Episcopal Holy Communion has a passage from the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Epistles and the Gospels.

But I appreciate most CarolVP’s answer. The mass is a sacrifice, which is biblical. Also, our non-Eucharistic offices (such as Morning and Evening Prayer) are the survival of non-Temple worship at the time of Jesus, and before. The sacrifices were held in Jerusalem, and when our Lord was in Galilee, he taught in synagogue services where there was no sacrifice.

1. If your friend is a biblical Christian, he may be interested in the Old Testament idea of worship. It largely consisted of sacrifices, and was highly ritualistic. Some converts have noticed the sacrificial elements of the Catholic Mass as being close to the original OT concepts of worship.
2. When we go to worship God, we should be concerned, primarily, in how He wishes to be worshipped. If attending a service makes us feel wonderful, and many of them can do, shouldn’t we ask ourselves if we are making ourselves feel great, or actually giving something of ourselves to God?

God bless.