Liturgy initially appears to be a fancy word. Some would call it a fifty-cent word. Of course, one might expect scholarly, high-brow language such as liturgy to be used at a Classical Christian school. Liturgy sounds a bit obscure and esoteric, doesn’t it? But don’t be fooled. Liturgy simply means a repertoire of customary sayings, phrases, and actions. Liturgy comes from the transliteration of a compound Greek word combining people and work. A literal translation might be “work of the people.” Habit is perhaps a more familiar word to us, a close cousin to liturgy.
As parents, we all have liturgies and habits in our homes. There are sayings, phrases, and actions repeatedly taking place. Over time, our habits and liturgies form and cement the culture of our households. The repeated practice of liturgies in our homes builds what our children consider to be normal. Justin Earley, in Habits of the Household, writes that as parents “we become our habits, and our children become us.” If we are becoming our habits, and if our children are becoming us, then our habits and liturgies are significant indeed.
Find a moment to ask your children what things you say or do over and over again. Ask your most animated child to impersonate you. The responses will reveal some of your liturgy. As a fair warning, this exercise may be humorous and humbling.
At The Habersham School we have chosen to be intentional with our liturgy and habits. Our prayer is that daily practices of liturgy will create space and time to aid in the spiritual formation of our students. We begin each day with what we call Morning Liturgy. When you hear the words “Morning Liturgy” at Habersham, it means that a group is gathering for a responsive reading through a Psalm, silent prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, a hymn, and a closing prayer.
Our liturgy books at The Habersham School are not sacred texts. They were not discovered lying just under the Dead Sea Scrolls and they aren’t an appendix to the Book of Common Prayer. Instead, a group of Habersham faculty and staff including Jacquie Miller, Brent Beaumont, Sharon Mays, Patrick Mitchell, and Lillis Weeks, architected our liturgy plans. They selected an order for the Psalms, they carefully chose beautiful hymns, and they collected poignant prayers from the past. All of these have been placed in a four-year master plan, meaning that our children will read through every Psalm after four years of being a Habersham middle or high school student.
This year’s Morning Liturgy books, the fourth year of the master cycle as it happens to be, have been placed on our website for your use at home. Click here (Parent Resources / Recommended Reading section) to access the Morning Liturgy books. You can follow along each day, week, or month to know exactly which Psalm, hymn, and prayer your students are experiencing. You can sing the hymns and even play them if you have a piano or guitar at home. Or if you have Spotify you can find a version of each hymn and listen along here. If you’re on family vacation and you aren’t able to visit a local church, then utilize the liturgy as the bare bones framework of a family worship service.
We hope the online version of our liturgy books will be a helpful resource for you. More importantly, we humbly ask God to use this daily habit as a way of enriching our student’s prayer life and spiritual growth.
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