If you omit tongues, I think there are many other churches that take a similar approach to worship - prayers, sharing, and even hymns / teachings come from the worshippers, and the elders discern what is good. The Didache shows how this is combined with communion. If I were to start a church, it would probably follow this kind of approach.Valerie wrote:A couple of thoughts- because I can agree with you for the most part- except for one thing- I still don't think that every single thing the NT church did & practiced was written down like a manual or text when it comes to worship. And as I read through 1 Corithians 12-14,, if we use that 'picture' of the Church as a representation of the NT Church, I think the Pentecostals are closest to the NT Church- because they are the only ones I have worshipped with that seem to take those chapters seriously-Bootstrap wrote:I find the Orthodox liturgy beautiful and worshipful, but I also find it quite unlike what we see in New Testament worship or in the earliest writings of the church such as the Didache.
Most Mennonite churches I have been a member of include an extended time of prayer and sharing. Not quite what you see in 1 Corinthians, but it contains a lot of these elements. There is simply no place for that in many high church liturgies, and the more formal the liturgy, the more everything is prescribed and top-down, and the more central the liturgy itself is to what the church is.
In general, the high churches are run by the clergy for the people. Mennonite churches are based on a brotherhood model - ideally, even the pastor is just one of the brethren, though we too can sometimes exalt our pastor beyond what I see as biblical.
So we really do have a very different idea of what a church should look like.