Transcript

You often hear about well-known Protestants and evangelicals becoming Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, but you rarely hear about well-known Catholics or Orthodox becoming Protestant, and I'm not the only one who's noticed this.

This 2024 article in Christianity Today says, A number of high profile Christians have converted to Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

What is driving them away?

And this video from a YouTuber named Dylan Baker asks the question, Is the Protestant church dying?

In today's episode, we're gonna focus on one element behind some of these conversions that I call the Protestant worship problem.

Before we do that, though, if you like content like this and wanna help us share it with others for free, then please hit the subscribe button to boost our presence on YouTube and head over to trenthornpodcast.com to help us make even more great content.

First, I'll share some of Dylan's video where he talks about being disenchanted with Protestant worship services.

But I'm not sure that that's the response, that if someone who never came to Christianity was to step in one of these megachurches, if they would say, Man, I felt Jesus.

I felt the Spirit there.

There's something different about that place.

They're probably saying, Man, that was, like, a kinda cheap concert with a TED Talk, um, and I would have guessed this was, like, a conference rather than a Christian service.

And that sucks.

That really sucks.

And what people truly want is actually simplicity.

Now to be fair to Protestants, what Dylan is describing isn't indicative of Protestantism as much as it's a common element of evangelicalism, especially so-called non-denominational Christianity.

This is still a fair thing to point out because if non-denominational Christians belonged to a single denomination, it would be the largest one among American Protestants.

But there are Lutheran, Anglican, Presbyterian, and other mainline Protestant denominations that have reverent services that don't resemble rock concerts.

However, even these services are missing something that lies at the heart of the Protestant worship problem, which is this.

Protestant worship is of the highest degree, whereas Catholic and Orthodox worship is of the highest kind.

To see the difference, we need to ask, what is worship, and what kind of worship do Protestants offer to God?

Worship comes from an Old English word that means to give someone their worths-ship, to give a person what he is worth or due.

Worship was given to God, but lesser forms of it could also be given to human beings based on their worths-ship.

For example, the Old English prayer book instructs a groom to tell his bride on his wedding day, With my body, I thee worship.

And he gives his body to her because she is worth receiving that gift in virtue of being his wife.

The Protestant scholar D.A. Carson agrees that the word worship has changed in meaning over time, but historically, quote, In all such usages, one is concerned with the worthiness or the worths-ship, Old English worship, of the person or thing that is reverenced.

So what is God worth, or what is God worthy of receiving from us?

Well, we might give God praise through a spoken prayer or a song that gives thanks and praise to God, or we might make a petition to Him.

Psalm 145 says, Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised.

His greatness is unsearchable.

God deserves our praise.

But human beings also deserve praise when they do good things, just not the same degree of praise we give to God.

The Blessed Virgin Mary said, All generations will call me blessed, for he who is mighty has done great things for me, and holy is his name.

Protestant worship takes good things we already do, like giving praise, and gives the best of those good things to God, or as the title of Baptist author Oswald Chambers' 1924 devotional puts it, My Utmost For His Highest.

And don't get me wrong.

All of this is good and holy.

Colossians 3:16 says, Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another in all wisdom and as you sing psalms and hymns and spiritual songs with thankfulness in your hearts to God.

Our worship should give God praise and honor that is reserved for Him alone.

For example, we don't praise Mary for creating the universe, but we do praise God for that, as can be seen in Revelation 4:11, where the elders in heaven exclaim, Worthy art thou, our Lord and God, to receive glory and honor and power, for thou didst create all things.

But Catholic and Orthodox liturgies give God not just the highest degree of goods we give to other creatures, like praise, but the highest kind of thing we can give to God, specifically sacrifice.

All cultures around the world recognize the deep desire in human beings to offer what they love as an act of love to God.

These sacrifices might involve food or money or animals, or in more grim circumstances, human beings.

Christianity teaches that all of our worship is sacrificial in some way.

Romans 12:1 says, I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

Hebrews 13:15-16 says, Let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge His name.

Do not neglect to do good and to share what you have, for such sacrifices are pleasing to God.

However, in the mass, or the divine liturgy as it's called in the East, the priest leads the faithful in worship that is not just of the highest degree.

We don't just give God the best of what creatures possess.

Remember, worship means to give someone his worths-ship.And God is infinite being itself, so what is God worth?

There's only one thing we can give God that truly satisfies what God is worth as an offering to His majesty.

We offer God the Father the exact same offering God the Son made to Him in atonement for the sins of the world on the Cross at Calvary.

We give God what God gave us, Himself, under the form of bread and wine, as He taught us to do.

And that is the only thing we finite creatures can give to God that honors God's infinite worth.

Catholic theology is clear that while honor and respect can be given to Mary and the saints and other creatures, sacrifice is another kind of worship and this can only be given to God.

In the 4th century, Saint Epiphanius condemned the Collyridian heretics, who offered sacrificial cakes to Mary, because sacrifice can only be given to God.

Saint Augustine said the following: Putting aside for the present the other religious services with which God is worshipped, certainly no man would dare to say that sacrifice is due to any but God.

Whoever thought of sacrificing save to one whom he knew, supposed, or feigned to be a god?

The mass is described as a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving, because we offer ourselves to God through our corporate worship.

But the mass isn't just a sacrifice of praise.

The Catechism says the following: The Eucharist is also the sacrifice of praise by which the Church sings the glory of God and the name of all creation.

This sacrifice of praise is possible only through Christ.

He unites the faithful to His person, to His praise, and to His intercession, so that the sacrifice of praise to the Father is offered through Christ and with Him to be accepted in Him.

The Catechism also calls the Eucharist, The source and summit of our faith, because the Eucharist re-presents, not re-sacrifices, but the Eucharist re-presents Christ's one perfect sacrifice under the form of bread and wine for us to be able to receive.

The Catechism says, The Eucharist is the memorial of Christ's Passover, the making present and the sacramental offering of His unique sacrifice.

In the liturgy of the Church, which is His body, in all the Eucharistic prayers we find after the words of institution a prayer called the Anamnesis or Memorial.

In the sense of Sacred Scripture, the memorial is not merely the recollection of past events, but the proclamation of the mighty works wrought by God for men.

In the liturgical celebration of these events they become in a certain way present and real.

This is how Israel understands its liberation from Egypt.

Every time Passover is celebrated, the Exodus events are made present to the memory of believers so that they may conform their lives to them.

In the New Testament, the memorial takes on a new meaning.

When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, she commemorates Christ's Passover and it is made present.

The sacrifice Christ offered once for all on the cross remains ever present.

However, when you attend many evangelical services, the focal point of the service is not the Eucharist or what they usually call the Lord's Supper.

Instead, the focal point of the entire service is the pastor's sermon.

Church is about what God can give us through the reading of His word and the teaching of His ministers in this Protestant context, what Dylan called a TED Talk in his video.

The Baptist author O.S. Hawkins puts it more bluntly: The sermon is the central dynamic in the worship experience.

It is the fulcrum upon which the entire service of worship hinges.

Everything that comes before it should point to it, and everything that comes after it should issue out of it.

Because of this, the pastor is the worship leader of the church.

In too many places and in too many circumstances, worship is only identified with something we do before the sermon.

That is, we think the worship leader is one who leads choruses or spiritual songs.

The dynamic of the worship experience is a complete package and it is the sermon, the preaching of the Gospel that must be central to it.

By the way, a hat tip to Joe Heschmeyer for pointing out that quote.

He has a great video on Protestant worship I'll link to in the description below.

Historically, the sermon was not the focal point in worship.

Compare Hawkins' emphasis on the sermon in Protestantism to how Justin Martyr described the mass in his Apology to the Roman Emperor or Defense of the Christian Faith that was written in the year 165: And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read as long as time permits.

Then when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs and exhorts to the imitation of these good things.

Then we all rise together and pray, and as we said before, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings according to his ability, and the people assent saying, 'Amen,' and there is a distribution to each and a participation of that over which thanks have been given.

And to those who are absent, a portion is sent by the deacons.

Justin also explains at length not the importance of the priestly presider's exhortation, but the importance of the Eucharist.

He writes: And this food is called among us Eucharistia, of which no one is allowed to partake but the man who believes that the things which we teach are true and who has been washed with the washing that is for the remission of sins and unto regeneration, baptism, and who is so living as Christ has enjoined.

For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these, but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.

For nearly 1,500 years, Christian churches did not have pews because the reverend posture was standing or even lying prostrate before the Blessed Eucharist on the altar.

Instead, as this article in Christianity Today notes, they became popular around the Protestant Reformation to accommodate longer sermons, and Catholic and some Eastern Orthodox churches eventually copied the style.

But while hearing a sermon every week became obligatory .

offering the Eucharist did not, or as I said before, what Protestants call The Lord's Supper.

In the early church, several fathers advocated for daily reception of the Eucharist, as can be seen in St. Cyprian, who wrote in the third century, We ask that this bread should be given to us daily, that we who are in Christ and daily receive the Eucharist for the food of salvation may not, by the interposition of some heinous sin, by being prevented as withheld and not communicating, from partaking of the heavenly bread.

But reception of the Eucharist did vary in places.

St. Augustine wrote, Some receive the body and blood of the Lord every day, others on certain days.

In some places there is no day on which the sacrifice is not offered, in others on Saturday and Sunday only, in others on Sunday alone.

During the Middle Ages, pious reverence for Christ's presence in the Eucharist sometimes led to bad practices, like failing to receive the Eucharist out of fear of offending God with one's sins.

This is why the church eventually required Catholics to receive the Eucharist at least once a year, and many saints pushed for more common reception.

St. Francis de Sales wrote, The Savior instituted the most holy sacrament of the Eucharist, really containing His body and His blood, in order that they who eat it might live forever.

With respect to communicating every Sunday, I counsel and exhort everyone to do so.

And the Council of Trent, held in the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation, said, At each mass, the faithful who are present should communicate not only in spiritual desire, but also by sacramental participation of the Eucharist, that thereby a more abundant fruit might be derived to them from this most holy sacrifice.

Mm-hmm.

But today, some evangelical denominations only celebrate The Lord's Supper monthly or even quarterly, since the Bible doesn't say how often it should be celebrated.

This attitude gives rise to practices like evangelical denominations that cancel Christmas services if they happen to fall on a Sunday, because pastors believe that people would rather be home on Christmas morning than at church listening to, well, a TED Talk.

This has led evangelicals like Francis Chan to try and discover a more ancient view of the Eucharist.

And I began to question, like, why did I believe what I believed-

Mm-hmm.

about sacrament?

Why did I think it was just a symbol that you take once a month or-

Mm-hmm.

y- you know, whatever, and, ah.

And I realized, 'cause it's what I was taught-

Right.

I never really studied church history, especially early church history.

I mean, really, it's the first 1,500 years of church history-

Yeah.

where communion, the, the Eucharist was always at the center, and everyone believed, everyone believed in the real presence of Christ.

Yeah.

What was interesting is, communion was at the center of the room every time they gathered, and it wasn't a pulpit where a guy preached after studying in his office by himself for 20 hours.

See, right now, we've got guys like me that go in a room, study, you know?

Th- That's what I was doing for years.

Meanwhile, other guys went in their rooms and studied, and then we started all giving different messages, so many contradicting each other.

And pretty soon it's, well, I follow Piper, I follow Chan, I follow You know, it's just like everyone's following different guys.

I'm just saying, I, I believe there was something about taking communion out of the center of the church and replace it with a gifted speaker.

Not that that gifted speaker is not a part of the body of Christ and a gift to the body of Christ, but the body itself needs to be back in the center of the church.

You guys, I've been dreaming about this.

I've been praying about this.

Man, I would love it if one day in our country here in the US, people understood the body of Christ, that they were just a part of it, and they got excited to gather and partake of the body and blood of Christ.

And while mainline high church Protestantism has a more reverent liturgical sense, and usually a deeper theology of the Eucharist than evangelicals, even these denominations lack the highest kind of worship, because they lack the one sacrifice of Christ to the Father that is represented under the form of bread and wine so that we can partake of what St. Paul calls the Paschal Lamb, the new paschal sacrifice in Christ.

That's why these Protestant denominations do not support adoring the Eucharist as one would adore Christ in heaven.

Now, as I said, there's nothing wrong with hearing scripture, or a homily, or praising God in word and song.

Catholic and Orthodox liturgies have all of that, but these liturgies also have God physically dwelling in our midst, and the liturgy, at least when it's celebrated properly, reflects that sublime truth in a way that's not seen in Protestant liturgies.

You can even see this in the architecture of classic churches.

Older Catholic churches are built to resemble temples where a divine sacrifice is offered to God, whereas older Protestant churches that rejected this theology made their buildings resemble meeting halls where God is received through hearing scripture.

The Protestant author Matthew Barrett explains the thematic change.

If you were alive in the 16th century, the first thing you would have noticed as you walked into the church was the architecture.

You know, today in the 21st century, architecture is not as big of a deal as it was then.

Our churches, well, they take all kinds of shapes and sizes.

Some look traditional with steeples.

Others meet in shopping malls or movie theaters.

But in the 16th century, architecture actually said something.

It had a message behind it.

If you were to walk into a Roman church, that is, the Church of Rome, in the 16th century, what you would have seen would have looked very different than today.

Uh, front and center would have been the altar, uh, on which the elements, the, the wine and the bread were, uh, lifted up by the priest as r- um, really a, a type of grace that then was to be infused in, in, in you who were th- the recipient.

In other words, the altar was the central focus in many ways, and the priest himself, who is given a type of authority to absolve and forgive your sins.

Well, when the reformers returned to the word of God, they realized, not only was the gospel being taught wrongly or distorted, but that if this gospel is true, the church must look very differently.

Uh, and so if you look at, say, a 16th century painting of a Protestant church, you will discover that front and center is the pulpit.

Why?

Because there, the word of God is preached.

This change became more pronounced in the 19th century when urban revivals promoted churches being built as kind of inverted cones, where pastors would preach up to a large gathered assembly, as chronicled in Gene Kildes' book, When Church Became Theater: The Transformation of Evangelical Architecture and Worship in Nineteenth-Century America.

This phenomenon gives rise to modern evangelical churches, including so-called mega churches.

But this increasing modernization has now triggered a backlash and a desire for a return to Christianity's more reverent, stable, sacrificial foundation.

The 2024 Christianity Today article I referenced earlier says, Those who find Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy appealing also share in common a longing for the deeper reverence of liturgy and the sacraments, which is often far more mystical, reflective, and reverent than in Protestantism.

Aside from the debates around transubstantiation, we can all appreciate this deep reverence for the Eucharist and other biblical mandates.

Yet most Protestants don't realize that many of the early reformers, like Luther and Calvin, had a similarly high regard for the Lord's Supper and baptism, and that these historic views could be easily recovered within the tradition.

But why is it that these disenchanted evangelicals don't just go to Protestant denominations rooted in the early reformers like Luther or Calvin?

Part of it may be ignorance of those traditions, but it may also be that people hunger not just for sturdy liturgical foundations, but for sturdy theological foundations as well.

The article continues, Overall, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy have done a better job of staying connected to the rich heritage of Christendom, and the more ancient catechisms and wider theological retrievals can be appealing to those jumping from the Protestant ship.

Among the mainline denominations, there's a sense of unease that can develop when you wonder if you've got the right denomination or how long it will stay the right denomination.

Earlier, I noted that high profile Protestants becoming Catholic or Orthodox is more common than the reverse.

But when the reverse does happen, liberalism is often to blame, not Orthodoxy.

Consider the sad case of Michael Coren, the author of the book, Why Catholics Are Right, who unfortunately left the Catholic Church and is now an Anglican priest in the Church of Canada, where he can safely advocate for homosexuality and abortion in his book, The Rebel Christ.

The Methodist Church has also split over homosexuality, and the largest self-described Lutheran body, the ELCA, supports homosexuality and abortion.

This is why Protestants like Redeemed Zimmer have given up trying to convince Catholics to become Protestant, and instead are focusing on a Reconquista to bring the mainline churches back to Orthodoxy.

He says as much in his response to Dylan's video on Protestantism dying.

Redeemed Zimmer says that non-denominationalism is dying and it cannot be saved.

He hopes to save mainline Protestantism from liberalism, but I'm pessimistic about this endeavor.

Liberal ideology has infected even conservative Protestant elements, as can be seen in Christopher and Richard Haigh's new book, The Widening of God's Mercy.

Richard Haigh was once a c- solid conservative thinker opposing so-called same-sex marriage, but now he and his son are leading academic figures trying to radically alter conservative Protestant sexual ethics.

Granted, we have these same voices spouting liberalism in Catholicism, but the church's universal jurisdiction gives it the ability to suppress at least the obvious kind of heresy rooted in this area, even if that ability isn't always exercised against more insidious, less obvious forms of heresy, like so-called Pride Masses.

At the very least, you see this functionality present in the fact that even the most liberal, whack-a-doodle Catholic parishes don't celebrate the sacrament of matrimony for two men or two women.

And it's no surprise that liberal Catholics who push for LGBT ideology and other errors also devalue the Eucharist as much as possible.

I covered this in previous episodes about Father Tom Reese, who says the church needs to, quote, surrender to the LGBT movement.

He also peddles nonsense like, I believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

I just don't believe in transubstantiation, or, The mass is more about us becoming the body of Christ than it is about the bread becoming the body of Christ.

Father Richard McBrien, a notorious liberal priest, says, Eucharistic adoration, perpetual or not, is a doctrinal, theological, and spiritual step backward, not forward.

Regardless of the church or denomination, when the Eucharist becomes merely a symbol or a memorial, the reverence begins to erode and the church just becomes a hollow gathering place.

But when the Eucharist is treated as the Son dwelling in our midst to be offered to the Father in thanksgiving- the reverence returns.

And this ancient solemn practice is attractive to jaded people, especially young people, trudging through life in a technocratic, materialistic world where nothing is really sacred.

So let's tie all this together.

If you wanna rescue your church from liberalism, promote the highest view of the Eucharist that you possibly can.

If you're Protestant, at the very least, please reject the idea that the Eucharist is just a memorial symbol.

Even the reformers like Luther and Calvin knew Christ was especially present in the Eucharist, even if they denied that the bread and wine become the actual body and blood of Christ.

This would be a start at least, but it's not an end because Protestantism does not give God the highest kind of worship, since it does not give God sacrifice.

Specifically, it does not give Him that one sacrifice that atones for the sins of the world that He commanded us to give.

Early Christians believed that the mass was a sacrifice, and it fulfilled the prophecy found in Malachi 1:11, which says, 'In every place, incenses offered to my name, and a pure offering, for my name is great among the nations,' says the Lord of Hosts.

Justin Martyr said that this Old Testament prophecy was fulfilled when Christians, quote, In every place, offer sacrifices to Him, the bread of the Eucharist, and also the cup of the Eucharist.

But Martin Luther specifically rejected the idea that the mass is the representation of Christ's one sacrifice.

He wrote, What shall we say then about the canon of the mass and the sayings of the fathers?

It would yet be the safer course to reject them all, rather than admit that the mass is a work or a sacrifice.

Or maybe it would be safer to trust what has been received in the church for 1,500 years before the Protestant Reformation and follow Jesus's command to eat His flesh and drink His blood in order to have eternal life, and to follow St. Paul's command to not receive from demonic sacrificial tables, or demonic altars, but to receive only from the true sacrificial table, or the altar of Jesus Christ.

If you'd like to learn more about the evidence for the mass and the Eucharist, check out my book, The Case for Catholicism, and my colleague Joe Hoeshmeyer's book, The Eucharist is Really Jesus.

Thank you so much for watching, and I hope you have a very blessed day.