ABSTRACT
Churches in the Calvinist and Reformed tradition covered a much wider swathe of Europe than those of the Lutherans by the late sixteenth century. This chapter explains the general approach of these churches to the conduct of public worship and looks at how this developed in detail in the different groups of these churches across Europe. It would be fair to say that the Reformed churches had a great suspicion of the sort of rigid liturgical structure that the Lutheran churches were happy to preserve from the pre-Reformation church, or any liturgical practices that could not be justified from scripture. The liturgical changes of the nineteenth century – the abandonment of sitting communion and precentors, the introduction of organs – have meant that very few Scottish Presbyterian churches retain pre-1850 liturgical arrangements intact. The Free Church tradition in England and Wales stemmed from those who were dissatisfied with the religious settlement of 1559.
