Driving home from a rather High-Church Anglican service, I reflected on the many different understandings of worship and the relationship (if any) between our service and the celestial or heavenly realm.
In the High Church context the idea is that heaven is present - it's as if the Book of Revelation itself has come alive in our presence. The candles, incense, vestments, and the choices in everything from music to architecture are meant to convey transcendence and to express spiritual realities in tactile terms. It appeals to the emotions to be sure and stirs feelings of reverence and the presence of holiness. If indeed heaven is present and the Divine is with us in terms of the sacraments (and perhaps priesthood) then it is certainly appropriate that we stand and kneel and so forth. Mystery is also present and this is most poignantly displayed in the Orthodox service with the use of the icons and iconostasis.
In the Evangelical sphere there is another attempt at this 'presence of heaven' approach to worship - though probably less thought out and deliberate. The idea is that the gathering of the Church is akin to 'heaven practice' or a foretaste of heaven in the present. The focus is less on reverence but rather on triumphal emotions such as joy and the desire to praise, even to revel in the goodness of God. These are not bad things in and of themselves but what happens is it takes on an air of festivity, the idea is that you're home - so relax, you're among friends and so forth. In keeping with the sensibilities of modern tech-industrial and consumerist culture, the transcendent is communicated in theatre-like architecture, flashing lights, lasers, fog machines (in some cases) and most important of all, pop music.
For the culture of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (such as I experienced in the Anglican service) the ethos is very different. But once again, the tactile is central to the worship experience. And we might point out that this is being emphasized to a greater degree in recent years as the culture at large is struggling with basic concepts regarding definitions of humanity, gender, and the like. There's been a real push by Evangelical teachers to emphasize the goodness of humanity and the created human body. In their zeal for world affirmation, these teachers often range far beyond the New Testament and it's view of creation through the lens of the Fall.
By way of contrast, in many mainline churches the worship service is akin to a town-meeting or a kind of social club. The rules and rituals are followed but with a loose hand, and casualness and levity are certainly permissible. A form is followed but none of it should be taken too seriously. People can find their own individual meanings in what they experience but apart from the social aspect - there's nothing really spiritual to any of it. Some flirt with 'high' styles of worship but it's increasingly vapid and compromised.
Other Evangelical types treat the meeting as a 'pep rally' meant to motivate. Others approach it in Madison Avenue terms and everything is presented in the form of a sales pitch. God wants you to have a better marriage, better finances, etc... and if you just follow these three steps... This often blends with the therapeutic approach which is so appealing to the unsound and fragmented collective mind that is post-industrial Western culture. For some Fundamentalists, the church is the 'getting saved place' or someplace you go where 'we have a good time'.
In these latter examples (which rarely stand alone but are often blended), there is little sense of the transcendent or heavenly presence in the worship. Often their theologies won't really allow for it anyway. Salvation is a one-time deal and nothing can be added to or taken away from it and so church is a nice enough thing but can't really have any spiritual bearing. Nothing actually happens there apart from individual fulfillment and a kind of homey-folksy fellowship.
And of course the biggest category of all is the people that really have no idea what we're doing on Sunday morning. It's a tradition but they struggle to elaborate on what is happening or why we're even there.
It usually is assumed the High Church is accompanied by High Doctrine. High Worship is paired with a theology that attaches meaning to the rites. The sacraments are efficacious and the Spirit works through these outward forms.
Low Church is usually paired with Low Doctrine in that beyond the basics there's little time spent on doctrinal development and it has little import on people's lives or the life of the Church in terms of what it does and why.
Occasionally in Mainline theologically liberal churches one will find High Church with Low Doctrine but I have found as the doctrine is degraded the High Church forms are held less tightly and as already stated, a lot of silliness creeps in. And there's nothing more absurd than frivolity being paired with High Church trappings.
It should be said at this point that many of the Reformed Confessional bodies (in contrast with New Calvinists who are simply Evangelicals) that there is a mix between High and Low. The doctrine is somewhat High while the worship is often far from High but will often lean that direction.
Of all that has been presented thus far, I must acknowledge that the Confessional model is probably the best option - and yet I still argue for yet another way, one that is patterned from the New Testament itself and testified to in the Ante-Nicene Church as well as the Medieval Underground of the First Reformation.
I advocate for a model that (at present) is not represented - Low Church but with High Doctrine and thus High Worship.
Rather than just view our gathering as a 'meeting', we indeed interact with the Divine. The angels are present, we worship alongside the saints and we are present in the Divine Council - the Throne Room of Heaven itself. But we do not try and re-create Heavenly realities in our meetings. We do not attempt to temporalize them or find our contact with them by means of man-made traditions and meanings attached to rites, relics, means or other trappings that God had not appointed.
We don't bring heaven down into our presence, rather we ascend to heaven by means of the Spirit. In reality there's a kind of tension at work in which we are Already There but Not Yet either.
Rather than seeking aids, New Testament worship is marked by a real simplicity - a lack of distraction. I have long argued that the more things that are 'up front' within an auditorium or 'sanctuary' indicates how far removed from the New Testament their worship is. We access heaven by means of the Word and thus we want no distractions but simplicity. This is why the Early Church and later Medieval Underground could worship in woods and caves, in catacombs, and in homes.
Buildings are permissible but hardly necessary - Paul rented a hall in Acts but most meetings seem to have been in homes. The idea of a 'Church Building' is foreign to the New Testament and usually relies on a Judaized import of Temple thinking and terminology - a type that was fulfilled in Christ and therefore has no contemporary spiritual bearing. The New Covenant Temple is not a building the Church meets in but the Body of Christ. A building can be utilized in theory but it should never be thought of as something more than just that - shelter from the elements.
Low Church is often associated with casualness and laxity - and that's too bad, but it need not be so. This can be remedied by High Doctrine - which in turn produces a kind of High Worship but one wholly different from High Church practice. Apart from the Word, God accommodates us in these Last Days by providing a few simple forms - consecrated bread, wine, and water. These are common and profane things but when the Word is attached to them by invocation they are transformed into holy means. The cup becomes a blessing containing the Blood of Christ, the Bread His Body, spiritual meat, and angel's food. Through them the Spirit unites us in Christ. And through the consecrated waters of baptism our sins are washed away and we are brought into union with Christ - it is the washing of regeneration, the circumcision of Christ, the anointing that saves us.
We are in the heavenly presence and so the kind of reverence engendered by High Church worship is right and proper - though we do not require the unwarranted trappings that have no authority apart from the traditions of men.
And let it be said that High Doctrine need not be equated with High or Elaborated Theology. The Early Church focused on the Scriptures and yet left many doctrines undeveloped. Was this merely because they lacked the proper skills or time to develop the kind of theological systems seen in later centuries? Or rather was this the result of a different theological method that was willing to limit the questions asked and allow for passages to be treated in their context even if it left dynamics and ambiguities, tensions and dualities. The end result is mystery and awe - and a total reliance on revelation. Elevated doctrine need not rely on sophisticated philosophically-driven theologies such as Scholasticism, Confessional dogmatics, or Baconianism.
Low Church worship needs no trappings and no set liturgy apart from the Word. And yet in its simplicity and Word-orientation it can soar into the heavens.
But at present, this model generates no interest. Everything is moving either the Evangelical pop-driven worship dominated by therapy, marketing techniques, and sacramental music (for that's what it is, the music has become a means of grace that overpowers and clearly out-ranks the God-ordained sacraments).
Or (and often in reaction to the former) there is a drive toward High-Church traditionalism. Such people seek reverence and transcendence but in many cases are also motivated by a desire to be grounded in what they see as the larger traditions and categories of Christendom. They feel by turning to the High Church they stand on solid ground. Packed wet sand is more solid than the loose stuff to be sure but it's still sand I'm afraid.
Until Christians understand that we're not trying to reify Heaven on Earth in our worship but instead understand our pilgrim-exile gatherings in Already-Not Yet terms, there's not going to be a change. The social club/town meeting model is but a living corpse that eventually will cease to twitch and history has repeatedly demonstrated this - as are the Madison Avenue and folksy models as well.
There is another way that finds some precedent in the synagogue model - which I believe emerged long before the Babylonian Exile. The synagogue is by definition an assembly that was like a temple but not the Temple and synagogue worship never tried to emulate the Temple with priestly robes, an altar, or ritual-dramatised versions of Temple rites. Word-based, there was a sense of the Divine Presence but this was never confused with the Temple and the Shekinah. The Temple had Levitical instrumentation and a priestly choir - the synagogue did not.
Others have written about this synagogue analogy. It's instructive in demonstrating a specifically non-Temple context for Old Covenant worship and it's clear it was influential in terms of how the Church formed - and yet it is difficult to draw direct parallels, let alone to make doctrinal proclamations about such. There is no clear teaching of appropriation or sanction of the synagogue-assembly model but there are interesting and suggestive parallels. In Acts 11 for example, it could be said that Paul and Barnabas 'synagogued' with the church at Antioch. This is simply to say that the concept is tied to the idea of the assembly or gathering of God's people. But this of course does not necessarily mean the Old Covenant synagogue is in mind as a proto-type for the assembly or gathering of a local church.
I think it worth noting that these realities demonstrate a similar understanding in terms of the Temple's exclusivity and how it could not be appealed to ad hoc in order to create an alternative. The synagogue was a kind of Low Worship and yet High Doctrine situation. Many would be willing to acknowledge this but few are willing to follow through.