The Church Service Society was formed by three young ministers in 1865 – a time when worship in the Church of Scotland was often rambling and verbose. Their object was “the study of the liturgies – ancient and modern – of the Christian church, with a view to the preparation and publication of forms of prayer for Public Worship and services for the administration of the Sacraments, the celebration of marriage, the burial of the dead etc.”

In their day, the concern of those founding members was thought to be eccentric, even suspect. Nowadays, the situation is quite different. In all major branches of the western Church there is a new and creative interest in forms of worship, in architecture, music and hymnody. Many congregations have worship committees. When the Church Service Society published Euchologion in 1867, this was the first corporately produced service book available to the Kirk since John Knox’s Book of Common Order.

Now there is a huge range of material, including much from the General Assembly’s Panel on Worship. It might seem as if the vision of the founders had been amply fulfilled. Yet the sheer diversity of contemporary worship makes it as important now as in the 1860s to distinguish between the permanent and the transient, between the authentic and the artificial, between what is helpful and what is merely novel. The search is no longer for what is liturgically correct, as if there were some fixed way of worshipping that applied to all places and times. The current quest is for worship that is catholic and continually reforming, that is scriptural and topical – big enough to let our congregations glimpse eternal truths and mysteries, yet earthed in their experience and their resources.

The Church Service Society contributes to that search – through meetings, study days, lectures and its magazine The Record. The Society is not part of the Assembly structure, nor is it a party or a lobby, but a fellowship of ministers, elders, organists, church members who are all convinced that worship is the Church’s fundamental task and privilege and wish more fully to explore its possibilities.