Liturgy As Discipleship: How God Makes Disciples Through Word and Sacrament

In this essay, I want to make the case that disciple-making belongs exclusively to the church, because disciples are made by God alone through the liturgy—the ministry of word and sacrament in gathered worship. Liturgy is discipleship; discipleship is liturgical.

By liturgy or liturgical, I’m not referring to a traditional style of worship. That’s looking at liturgy as a religious preference or human contrivance. In reality, liturgy works in the opposite direction—top down, from God to us. The liturgy is first God’s approach to us and only then our approach to God. Liturgy isn’t about a style of worship but a theology of worship, a theology of the Word in action and the Word made manifest. To think about worship theologically is to look at Christianity through the liturgy as the very context in which all the church’s knowledge of God is lived and experienced. It’s the way we objectively hear and experience Christ for us, Christ with us, Christ in us—all mediated by his leitourgia, his “public service” to us. The church’s approach to discipleship, therefore, is the expression and application of its theology of the liturgy.

In the liturgy of God’s self-giving through word and sacrament, we find an expression of God’s divine character as the one who is love and who freely gives himself and his love through tangible means of grace that restore loving union between God and humanity. This is our original design and ultimate destiny;God’s liturgical love affair reshapes and reawakens our desires toward what is truly lovely—the union and love shared between Father, Son, and Spirit, which overflow to humanity and bring us into that same divine love and life. This is the destiny of discipleship, and its domain is the church, gathered as the church. Disciples are made in and by the church as the liturgy both delivers God’s love to us and awakens the love of God within us.

Liturgy Is God’s Self-Giving through Word and Sacrament Exclusively within the Communion of Saints

The word leitourgia appears in the New Testament fourteen times, under various cognates, meaning a public office or service undertaken for the wider community. In the ancient world, liturgy was an act of public service done by a patron or private benefactor for the good of the community. It was a work of the greater for the good of the lesser. In the context of the story of redemption, liturgy refers to the service that God in Christ undertakes on our behalf and from which we benefit as the redeemed and worshiping communion of saints. When describing Christian worship in particular, leitourgia provides a beautiful picture of God as the benefactor who does his gracious work of pouring out his good gifts upon the assembled congregation.

These saving gifts from God are poured out freely and bountifully but exclusively within the worshiping community. Consider Christ’s commissioning of his apostles. In John 20:19–23, he ordains them by breathing his Spirit upon them and charging them with the authoritative administration of absolution: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld” (v. 23). Through the church’s ordained ministers, the gospel of God’s grace is announced, proclaimed, and enacted both corporately and individually as the forgiveness of sins is bestowed. In other words, the ministry is called for the purpose of administering a divine liturgy that saves and sanctifies God’s gathered people. Likewise, in Matthew 28:19–20, we find the Lord’s famous charge to “go therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them into the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. And teach them to observe all that I have commanded you. And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.” Notice the elements of discipleship: Jesus commissions teaching by the church’s ministers (evangelism) that results in sacramental action (baptism) and formation (catechesis), all within the context of the assembled church. What is this but another way of saying “liturgy”? Disciples are made through the liturgical activity of the church and its ministers in which Christ specially promises to be present and to graciously give himself to us.

Put negatively, we could say there is no normative, promise-laden domain for making and maturing disciples outside of the church or beyond its liturgical ministry. The church father Saint Cyprian of Carthage stated it definitively: extra ecclesiam nulla salus, meaning “outside of the church, no salvation.” In other words, Christ justifies, regenerates, and sanctifies the baptized, equipping us for our myriad vocations—all within the church. Nowhere else can we reliably find the disciple-making, disciple-forming liturgical activity of Christ.

Thirteen centuries later, Martin Luther reiterated the same conviction, identifying the location of the church as wherever Christ himself is performatively present to save and sanctify his people:

Therefore he who would find Christ must first find the Church. How should we know where Christ and his faith were, if we did not know where his believers are? And he who would know anything of Christ must not trust himself nor build a bridge to heaven by his own reason; but he must go to the Church, attend and ask her. Now the Church is not wood and stone, but the company of believing people; one must hold to them, and see how they believe, live and teach; they surely have Christ in their midst. For outside of the Christian church there is no truth, no Christ, no salvation.

In his reflections on discipleship, Luther invokes the Augsburg Confession’s definition of the church as “the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is preached in its purity and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel.” Of course, the only one who can preach the gospel in all its purity is Christ himself; he alone renders the sacraments by his Spirit, who is at work in the church’s ministers to steward the mysteries of God by faithfully preaching, absolving, and administering the sacraments. To find Christ and his saving work, one must (as Luther put it) “first find the Church” in which Christ “liturgizes”—that is, gives himself to us and for us. This elucidates why Lutherans have historically employed the term Gottesdienst for Christian worship, meaning “God’s work” or the “Divine Service.” Again, worship’s primary movement is from God to humanity, with God as the main worker and humanity as those being worked on, made, and formed into disciples.

The church is a liturgical sheepfold. The sheep are led into the church’s liturgy by the Good Shepherd himself. We know his voice, and we follow him as he performs the wonders of Psalm 23, making us lie down in green pastures, leading us beside still waters, preparing a table in the presence of our enemies. Nowhere else but within the church does our Good Shepherd promise to provide for his sheep in these ways, which is why William Perkins and others classically identified the church as the sole theatrum salutis (“forum of salvation”). It is only here in Christ’s sheepfold that we truly know our Shepherd and are truly known by him: “I know my sheep and my sheep know me” (John 10:14). This mutual knowing is intimately and exclusively experienced through the church’s liturgical work of word and sacrament ministry.

We Were Made to Love in the Image of the God Who Is Love, and the Liturgy Is the Work by Which God Reshapes Our Love for Him and One Another after the Image of Christ

When we view discipleship in this way—as a deep and intimate knowing experienced through God’s loving liturgical actions for us and in us—then we’ll begin to recognize that discipleship is properly grounded in the nature of God as the one who is love. Discipleship isn’t an optional add-on to Christianity for committed Christians, for those who like theology, or for those who want to live virtuously. It’s not a class you take, an intellectual exercise, or emotional expression. Discipleship is Christ in action—in you and for you.

If discipleship is intimately being known by the God who is love, and knowing him and one another in turn, then love must be the highest and fullest sort of knowing that there is. This knowledge begins with the liturgy gifted to the church because through it we have a collective personal encounter with him who is love as he gives himself to us so that we can also love. “Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34–35).

It’s no wonder that God forms disciples in the church through a liturgical love affair in word and sacrament—human beings are creatures designed to love and adore. In James K. A. Smith’s idiom, man is homo liturgicus. In the beginning, we were created to give ourselves to God from within creation in response to him giving himself to us. Like nonsentient creatures that declare the glory of the Lord (Ps. 19:1; 148), along with the angels (Rev. 4:8–9; 7:11–12), human beings were made for the express purpose of displaying (imaging) his glorious likeness. God dwells in glory, an emanating glory we were designed to reflect (Isaiah 43:7). At heart, then, the image of God must be understood in relational terms. It starts with communion with God and extends to communal relations with others, ourselves, and even the cosmos. Human beings were created for this liturgical end: giving ourselves to God in worship and to one another in selfless service. This was our original dignity and freedom. The fall, however, marred that image, negated our freedom, broke our relationship with God and one another, and set us on a trajectory toward an altogether different end: judgment and condemnation. In this sense, sin is nothing less than liturgical failure.

The story of redemption is one of God building a liturgical bridge to us to restore our imago Dei calling as liturgists. Through that liturgy, God comes to us while drawing us to him in fear and love. “Because God is a Trinitarian community of love,” theologian David Fagerberg says, any “progress toward fuller humanity, fuller imagery of our prototype, means that we must grow in love’s communion.” In other words, discipleship has a liturgical goal: to realign us with God, creation, our neighbor, and ourselves.

Yet there’s more. Justification and regeneration, even sanctification and glorification, are not ends in and of themselves. These are preparatory. These have an ultimate goal in the glorification of God and our restored communion within a resurrected cosmic order enjoying eternal worship. Since this is the goal, that means the primary task of the liturgy is to prepare disciples now to be glorified worshipers then. What we currently experience in part—as God brings heaven to earth in the liturgy—will become the fullness of eternal life, not merely an endless quantity of time but a divine quality of existence. Liturgy is the church’s discipleship program, preparing and practicing for eternity.

“Disciple” (mathetes) means “learner.” The content of our learning isn’t mere data but an engagement with the Word, who is ultimately a Person who makes God known in love. This Word comes to us incarnated and inscripturated and sacramented—that is, altogether in the church’s liturgy. This kind of love eludes definition, other than to say that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). But it doesn’t remain beyond our grasp because this Love is personally encountered in his work of word and sacrament ministry.

Only the liturgy—the means of divine self-giving and other-receiving—makes God’s love manifest and manifold. To know this kind of love is to share in the Christian life (1 John 4:7–12). While small group and youth group settings offer both an opportunity for and instantiation of this love for one another, and should be valued for this contribution as well as promoting study of the word, they are not the church or Christ’s domain to advance discipleship.

Secondary Realms of Christian Activity Can Supplement the Liturgy but Cannot Be the Primary Domain of Disciple Formation

Discipleship is something that happens within the church through its God-ordained means of grace. It is in the church as church that disciples are made—not through parachurch organizations, small groups, book clubs, podcasts, or magazines, as salutary as these supplemental means may be.

To be sure, doctrine is a vital gift of truth, and good small group Bible studies will mine Scripture for these truths. But dogmas cannot be fully comprehended. Instead, they are apprehended, and even then, they are not an end to themselves. The same holds true concerning baptism, holy absolution, and preaching. As we behold the one we love, our dogmas are lifted up into their destiny in the very one who is the way, the truth, and the life, the one who is love. And this is where information-based youth groups, discipleship series, and the like come to the end of their usefulness. They are domains of secondary speech—speech about God derived from but not authoritative as God’s own speaking and acting. Doctrines as data points, be they never so truthful, are guides to God and the knowing of God as experienced in the love affair manifest in the liturgy. During the liturgy, doctrinal information gives way to simple words and primary speech: “Take, eat,” “Take, drink,” “Given for you,” and “Peace be with you.” Within the liturgy of love, the proposition of forgiveness “You are forgiven” overflows into living worship: “I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:38–39). Being brought into the divine life and love through the means of grace awakens within us true love for that which is most lovely: God himself. This love is the only way all our other loves and desires begin to be properly ordered and set right.

The upshot is that if communities of believers desire the salvation of souls and sanctification of their members—which is to say, true discipleship—then let the assembly of believers gather to Christ’s duly called and ordained ambassadors for the liturgy! This is where God delivers the goods. And this is why, traditionally, neither the world of unbelievers nor the people of God have called youth group, VBS, church camp, or small groups “church,” as edifying as these groups may be. The same can be said about Christian publications, podcasts, or programing, albeit without denying their serviceability to the church. While these activities may pragmatically or socially augment the commissioned first-order responsibilities of the church, they are not the designated domain of Jesus’ ongoing kingdom proclamation and kingdom miracles; the church is.

Take as an example the kingdom miracle of baptism. Baptism is not mere secondary speech or object lesson; it is not left up to me or my small group leader to evaluate or perform. Any hint of elitism, works-righteousness, or Gnosticism is done away with in the baptismal waters. Unlike Hill Cumorah (where Joseph Smith claimed to meet with the angel Moroni), in the cave called Hira (where Muhammad claimed to receive his first revelation from the angel Gabriel), or under the Bodhi Tree (where the Buddha claimed to reach enlightenment), the waters of baptism are a public mystery, a historic act given to the apostles and entrusted to ministers throughout the church in which God openly seals all who receive it as belonging to the risen Christ.

The same could be said with respect to preaching—not only the act but the content: “These things were not done in a corner” (Acts 26:26). From the moment anything was recorded by the early church, we see evidence of the ordained ministry administering a public liturgy to save and sanctify. The liturgy thus dampens our natural propensities toward a cult of personality (such that regularly occurs in nonliturgical settings) and instead posits the performed word and sacraments as the church’s cult—from the Latin for “worship”—engendering its culture.

This is so important for the way God fashions and refashions sinners into saints that certain dynamics of the disciple-making responsibility of the church cannot and will not be found outside of the church’s God-given ministry. Theologically speaking, there is no “virtual church”; online attendance is another kind of absence. Contemporary efforts to diffuse discipleship from sanctuary-based, minister-dependent word and sacrament ministry to socially dynamic peripheral or parachurch endeavors overestimate the tangential benefits of small group ministries and the like, be they never so professionalized or credentialed. Removed from the auspices of the ordained clergy of the church, the professionalization and personalization of discipleship is often more indicative of the American spirit than the Holy Spirit. Discipleship inextricably belongs to the institutional, brick-and-mortar complexion of the church where pulpits, fonts, and altars monumentalize the God who is present and active on our behalf.

The Liturgy Is Where Disciples of God Are Formed and Empowered by God’s Own Speaking and Acting within the Community through Its Ministers

The assembled church, gathered around Christ’s word and gifts, is the place where we aren’t just speaking about God. It’s the place where God is speaking and doing through authorized ministers. Indeed, as soon as there was Christ-commissioned preaching from Christ-commissioned apostles on the Day of Pentecost, we see that the baptized “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the communion in the breaking of the bread and to the prayers” (2:42). Believers were baptized, catechized, and attended to the eucharistic liturgy. These means of grace fueled the missional enterprise of a church strengthened by the risen Christ present and active in its midst. There was no such thing as a “self-feeder” or a “church of one”; if a disciple departed from the liturgy like in 1 Corinthians, Christ’s ambassador (Paul in that case) called it back to liturgical devotion amid the assembly of believers (cf. 1 Cor. 11:23–26; Heb. 10:25).

At least three key factors differentiate the church from every extraecclesial group: (1) the unique ministerial presence of God-ordained clergy; (2) the God-given liturgy they administer; and (3) the divine purpose for the disciple, which is not coaching or mentoring but gracious salvation and sanctification that leads to transformation through the means of grace (2 Cor. 5:16–21). In this light, few organizations or activities fall within the scope of holy ministry, despite a cornucopia of well-marketed, self-designated ministries.

Any institution or activity that seeks to come alongside the work of the church must, by divine arrangement, urge and support participation in the liturgy that Christ committed to the church’s ministry. Whatever saving or sanctifying prospects small groups and such may proffer, they must necessarily be oriented toward ordained word and sacrament ministry among the gathered saints in order to be truly effective. Evangelistic endeavors, for example, that result in a decision for Jesus or commitment to Christ from a nonbeliever can never stand on their own; they’re tenuous and subjective if they remain outside the church. Holy baptism, on the other hand, makes objective before the assembled church the gracious posture of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit toward the newly redeemed individual.

It’s not that personal experiences of conversion and faith before coming into the Christian community are inherently invalid; it’s that the liturgical rite administered by Christ’s ambassador (save for emergency circumstances) publicly and officially confers new covenant rights, privileges, discipline, and protection to the baptized. They are justified. They are Christian. They belong. So says Christ to his church, through his church. This is why Luther considered all baptisms to be infant baptisms: only the word of Christ changes the status and standing of sinners, not the sinner’s decision or action. As for “emergency circumstances,” they are the exception. Scriptural authority must be our rule.

Not Mere Knowledge about God, but Intimate Communion with God Is Every Disciple’s Ultimate Goal

Though disciples are indeed learners, our ultimate goal isn’t gaining information about God. Our path leads toward intimate union with God as we are made partakers of the divine nature and conformed to the image of his Son (2 Pet. 1:4; Rom. 8:29). In his threefold office as prophet, priest, and king, Jesus’ liturgical service translates us into the church through word and sacrament (Acts 2:22–42), which in turn transforms us through sanctification and vocation into liturgists—those who serve for the sake of others. To be a Christian, then, is to be a liturgist. There is an ultimate end for which we were made: to glorify and enjoy God. That’s the point of the liturgy—why indeed it is an end in and of itself. To be a liturgist is to be restored through word and sacrament to participation in humanity’s original and final purpose: worship.

Finally, since only Christ’s self-giving engenders conformity to his likeness, embracing liturgy as discipleship also provides a decisive argument for weekly Holy Communion as the regular discipline of the disciple. We must beware lest services that omit the sacrament of the altar become glorified Bible studies. During Holy Communion, the bridegroom becomes one with his bride and weary disciples on this pilgrim journey—if only for a moment—touch and taste the realities of heaven.

Conclusion

Christ’s liturgical work of word and sacrament in the church is discipleship rightly understood. It is here in the church and through its ministers that Christ’s love is made manifest for us and in us. And it is here that disciples are properly formed in intimate love and knowing—participating in the very life and love of the Trinity.

The liturgy cannot be outsourced. It is the exclusive responsibility of the church, of its ministers, to wield it for the purpose of making and forming disciples. There is no God-given liturgy that can be presided over by anyone but a duly called and ordained celebrant.

Whether established from Jesus’ charge to his disciples in John 20:19–23 or the Great Commission of Matthew 28:18–20, disciple-making and formation belong to the church. Jesus made these treasures its possession, with no option to parcel them off to extraneous organizations, be they ever so cost-effective or fun. What would “outsourcing” the liturgy mean other than unchurching the church? This is because the Lord Jesus bequeathed to the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church the stewardship of the word of God and the sacraments. In this way, Jesus committed to the church his speaking, his Spirit, his presence, his self-giving, and his rule—in sum, his leitourgia—for the express purpose of saving and sanctifying humanity. Christ serves us so that human beings may once again “glorify God and enjoy him forever,” as well as serve their neighbor made in the likeness of God. Christ’s liturgical legacy constitutes the essential life of the individual disciple and, collectively, the raison d’être of the church itself.

It is possession of the divine leitourgia that makes the church the kingdom of God. The boundaries and duties of the church, then, are the Divine Service in and through which the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit forge and fashion saints. This is God’s arrangement. We could not make it so. Only the Lord brings the liturgy into being.