Advocates of what I will term “high liturgical worship” increasingly contend that formal Reformed and Free Church worship constitutes a departure from the church catholic, especially from the fathers. (I use “high liturgical worship” to distinguish the liturgical practices characteristic of high church Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and some Lutheranism from formal Reformed and Free Church worship.) This essay will consist of a fresh examination of the relationship of Reformed worship to the ancient church. It will argue that the broad spectrum of early modern Reformed liturgical thought and practice, with its rigorous emphasis on the sufficiency of Scripture, finds precedent in the liturgical theology and praxis of the ante-Nicene fathers but even much of that of the later fathers. Revisiting Hughes Old’s research on the patristic roots of Reformed worship and drawing on recent patristics scholarship by liturgiologists such as Paul Bradshaw and William Maxwell, the essay will argue that many of the features of high liturgical worship that its practitioners find most compelling are products not of the ancient but of the early medieval church. It will show that the insistence of Calvin and other early Reformed writers–that the worship they advocated was a recovery of ante-Nicene worship and the practices on which the fathers expressed a consensus–was largely accurate. Thus the charge that Reformed and Free Church worship is necessarily out of keeping with the fathers and the church catholic is unconvincing.