Step into a worship service at Epiphany Church in Lower Greenville on a Sunday morning and you'll smell incense, see candles and hear ancient prayers read in unison. Sermons align with the Revised Common Lectionary, and church activities are planned around the liturgical year.

All of these are trappings of a liturgical church, but Epiphany is not Catholic, Anglican or Eastern Orthodox. Epiphany is a start-up planted by an evangelical megachurch and its pastor, Kurtley Knight, a graduate of George Fox Evangelical Seminary. Epiphany is a new kind of hybrid: an evangelical church that orders its services around liturgical practices.

Liturgical practice is a growing trend among evangelical churches. Last month, one of the largest evangelical megachurches in Texas, The Village Church where more than 10,000 people attend every week, announced it would order worship around the church calendar, observing Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter and Pentecost.

Pastors and professors see the trend as a response to other trends, both inside and outside church, and as an opportunity to overcome barriers that have divided Christians for centuries.

"I think it speaks to a lack of rootedness in our culture," Knight said. "It ties you into something that is lasting, trustworthy. And that touches a nerve in our culture."

In decades past, most evangelical churches eschewed formal liturgies as rote, empty ritual. The emphasis on a personal relationship with God allowed church leaders to focus on free and personalized expressions of prayer and worship. That sentiment has been strong among Southern Baptists, so it is significant that The Village Church, a congregation with ties to that denomination (it was previously named Highland Village First Baptist Church) has adopted these practices.

David Roark, communications and resources director at The Village Church in Flower Mound, was integral to the decision to embrace the church calendar. He echoed Knight's point about rootedness.

"In a culture that is asking, 'What is orthodoxy? What is Christianity?' In a culture where 'evangelical' has lost all its meaning, we feel a sense of needing to be rooted in church history and our tradition," Roark said.

But there were other factors driving the decision. Matt Chandler, lead teaching pastor, is an evangelical rock star. His sermons, podcasts and conference speeches draw thousands of listeners every week.

"We're not blind to the fact that a lot of people come to The Village to hear Matt," Roark said. "So we were really drawn to the idea of liturgy being the work of the people. These sorts of things call our people to be more involved and take more ownership. It creates less of an atmosphere where you can just come be a spectator. It pushes back on that entertainment culture which is easy to fall into, especially here in the Bible Belt."

John Dyer is executive director of communications and educational technology and an adjunct professor in media arts and worship at Dallas Theological Seminary. He sees a link between this trend and Spotify.

"There was a book last year called The Revenge of Analog pointing out that people are reacting to digital music by buying vinyl records, or reacting to Budweiser by drinking craft beer. There's a desire to connect with something authentic and real, not manufactured. A reaction against big-box consumerism, but also against big-box Christianity," he said.

Roark and Dyer both cite author James K.A. Smith as an influential voice in the conversation about modern ritual.

"Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know or believe," Smith said in a 2013 interview with Christianity Today. "We are ritual, liturgical creatures whose loves are shaped and aimed by the fundamentally forming practices that we are immersed in."

Dyer pointed out that those practices aren't necessary religious.

"Modern life is structured around American consumerism and holidays where we buy cards and gifts," Dyer said. "We have a secular liturgical calendar of Super Bowl and Valentine's Day and the like. Those rituals shape us. The liturgical year provides an alternative structure."

Smith's more pithy take: "The devil has all the best liturgies."

So what about the dangers of empty ritual? And what about the American tradition of the simple white clapboard frontier church without high-church frills?

Kurt Klement is the director of evangelization for St. Ann Catholic Church in Coppell. As a leader from a highly liturgical tradition, he acknowledges a danger in ritual done wrong.

"There is always the temptation with ritual for it to become rote, to lose the deeper meaning," Klement said. "So we have to ask, 'How do we bring people along to experience the richness of our faith in signs and symbols that have been passed down to us through the centuries?'"

In this, the 500th year since the Protestant Reformation, church leaders see an opportunity for greater harmony among the faithful. Liturgy has been one of the defining denominational characteristics that have divided church traditions for centuries.

"The reality is that we need both," Klement said. "These are big movements -- like tectonic plates -- and there seems to be a movement of the Holy Spirit to bring those plates back again, uniting churches."

Ryan Sanders is a pastor at Irving Bible Church and a author of the book "Unbelievable: Examining the Unlikely Beauty of the Christian Story." He wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News. Email: rsanders@irvingbible.org

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