<P> The Liturgical Movement began as a 19th - century movement of scholarship for the reform of worship within the Roman Catholic Church . It has developed over the last century and a half and has affected many other Christian churches, including the Church of England and other churches of the Anglican Communion, and some Protestant churches . A similar reform in the Church of England and Anglican Communion, known as the Oxford Movement, began to change theology and liturgy in the United Kingdom and United States in the mid-nineteenth century . The Liturgical Movement has been one of the major influences on the process of the Ecumenical Movement, in favor of reversing the divisions which began at the Reformation . </P> <P> The movement has a number of facets . First, it was an attempt to rediscover the worship practices of the Middle Ages, which in the 19th century was held to be the ideal form of worship and expression of faith . Second, it developed as scholarship to study and analyze the history of worship . Third, it broadened into an examination of the nature of worship as an organic human activity . Fourth, it attempted to renew worship in order that it could be more expressive for worshippers and as an instrument of teaching and mission . Fifth, it has been a movement attempting to bring about reconciliation among the churches on both sides of the Protestant Reformation . </P>

The name for the medieval christian worhsip service is the