As a regular visitor from the UK to the United States over the last forty years, visits which have often involved preaching and worshipping in Presbyterian churches, my appraisal of the American main-line churches has moved from envious admiration during the sixties, triggered by the large numbers then attending worship, to an alarmed present-day concern at what can only be described as the dumbing down of Reformed worship and an accompanying low-church perception of the role of the Ministry of Word and Sacraments. In Britain we are faced with similar manifestations, albeit on a smaller scale. This book seeks to address these, and other, issues and does so with gusto and expertise.

As is to be expected in a book comprising a collection of essays written over the past seven years, there is a certain amount of repetition but we are none the worse off for that. One such recurring theme challenges the notion that Reformed and evangelical pieties are fundamentally similar, but Dr Hart has some scathing things to say about evangelical worship as such. “Worship is not designed for evangelism” he writes (pp. 73-74), whereas the praise service which is at the heart of much evangelical worship can never free itself from this concern. He is quite devastating in his dismissal of the “Praise and Worship” phenomenon which has swept through the American church in recent years, (“Four words, three notes, and two hours”), while recognising that these are the churches which are winning the numbers game by a long way. He is calling those of us who are suspicious of the techniques used in this process to keep our nerve, to have more babies, and to baptize—the major way to fulfil the Great Commission (p. 47).

Perhaps he is a little too hard on our evangelical brothers and sisters. For some of my friends, the Billy Graham campaign in the Britain of the fifties provided the only opportunity available to the outsider to come within range of the Gospel message and to be excited by it. Graham himself stressed the need for converts to link up back home with their local churches. My friends did exactly that and two of them were eventually ordained. The paradox is that, over a period of time, many of these churches came to mistake this initial stage as something they too should imitate and truncated worship has been on offer ever since.  So Hart is right to stress that it is time for Presbyterians to start undoing their past and relearning their tradition, and warns: “to make worship accessible to persons for whom informality is as common as the air they breathe is to gut Reformed worship of its reverence, dignity, and simplicity.” (p199).

But what constitutes Reformed worship? Hart rightly stresses the importance of Calvin as our mentor in this respect but one of the main wishes of the great reformer to see a weekly conjoining of Word and Sacrament looks as far away as ever it was. Calvin, we must also remember, had his defects. It is quite surprising how he, who had a wonderful (if flawed) eucharistic theology, could produce such mediocre liturgies. But overall, Hart’s argument for the place of the Reformed tradition in the Church and for due deference to Calvin, is a powerful and timely one. Whether he is pleading for the recovery of a high view of the Ministry of Word and Sacraments, or giving a controversial slant on the issues of gender and egalitarianism, or a perceptive reminder that Christians have worshipped in a Spirit-filled manner long before the rise of Pentecostalism or the charismatic movement, he always argues cogently and persuasively. He hopes that ”high-church Calvinism may prove a welcome antidote to some of the coarseness and sentimentality that have prompted some evangelicals to look at Canterbury, Rome, or Constantinople for relief” and that he has succeeded in showing that “Geneva should be another option for Protestants seeking a corporate and liturgical expression of their faith.” (p. 16). I think he has succeeded admirably.

Rev. Ernest C. Marvin
The United Reformed Church in the UK
Formerly minister of St. Columba's Church, Cambridge, UK
And Church of Scotland Chaplain in the University