Why a Liturgical Home Church?

Given that it is so much easier to form a non-liturgical home church, why have we proposed to form Liturgical Home Churches given the far more difficult challenges involved in their formation?

As a first response to that question, it must be remembered that the earliest Churches were liturgical because they were simply trying to obey the Lord's command to do this in remembrance of me. They had no formal liturgy, they had no systematic theology, and they had no Christology on which to base their worshiping response to the Lord, they simply had His command.

As the immediacy of that urge toward obedience faded, it was replace by a formal liturgy that sought to create a ritualized form of worship that inherently incorporated that obedience, incorporated the elements of systematic theology, and the nature of Christology that deepened the essence of what and why we worshipped.

The purpose, the human purpose of the liturgy was to constantly confront us with the reality that what made Christianity the infinitely compelling experience that it is, is that it exists because of the Incarnation, the enfleshment of God! And as Robert Barron in his book Catholicism states, the Incarnation is so seminally important because it informs us that we are destined for divinization. The divine purpose of the liturgy, which is the work of the people, is to extend that realization of the Incarnation and our divinization into all space and all time.

And so, in the Liturgy, in the work of worship, the ritual of worship, the tools of worship, in the music of worship, in the actions of kneeling, making the sign of the cross, in the sharing of the peace, all our senses are harnessed to the work of seeing the enfleshment of God, the Incarnation, manifested in all these things, filling all space and time.

In no way, shape, or form do we suggest the Liturgical Home Church is better than any other home church. We only suggest the obvious, that it is different. And it is different in a very special and important way. And for these reasons, we propose that it is very much worth the difficult work to bring it into being.