liturgy

The first part of bringing people in a more actively participating role in worship is to bring them to a place of understanding the what and why of liturgy. This can go a long ways in helping people engage more fruitfully and deeply with liturgical worship.

The second part involves how the liturgy is done. Things get fuzzy here. There are different degrees of participation, affected by the understanding, attitude, and discipline of different people. How leaders perform affects the ways the congregation responds, and vice versa. A ritual that is meaningful for one person may not be for another. But still, there are some broad principles that can help foster active participation in the liturgy, even though any liturgy will need to be adapted to a congregation’s needs, understanding, and gifts.

[Read more…] about Liturgical Theology 12 | Active participation: doing it well

One of the persistent objections to liturgical worship is that it doesn’t actively involve the congregation enough in worship.

Sometimes people who are adverse to liturgy came from liturgical backgrounds where the meaning of the liturgy wasn’t adequately taught (or possibly adequately learned…). Thus these people have come to associate liturgy with the “meaningless repetitions” of the Gentiles. Indeed anything spoken without understanding can turn into an empty phrase. But that’s not the liturgy’s fault.

As an aside, sometimes liturgical prayer can help us avoid another kind of meaningless repetition; the kind one hears when some people try to pray spontaneously and end up saying “Lord” every other word (“Lord thank you Lord that you said Lord that Lord you’re a good God Lord hallelujah praise Jesus”). Or the kind you hear when people pile up religious-sounding phrases they’ve heard other people pray (“Oh, dear God, thank you, you are such a good God to us. A kind and gentle and accommodating God, and we thank You oh sweet, sweet Lord of hosts for the smörgåsbord You have so aptly laid at our table this day, and each day, by day, day by day, by day oh dear Lord three things we pray to love Thee more dearly, to see Thee more clearly, to follow Thee more nearly, day, by day, by day. Amen.” – bonus points for knowing what movie that is from). There are all kinds of ways to “keep babbling like the pagans do” (Matt 6:7).

When done properly (with understanding, consistently, appreciatively), liturgical worship actually provides more opportunities for active participation than does a service dominated by a sermon. Many people are leaving the church in droves because they long for participation but find that unless they can perform music or speak publicly, there’s not much for them to do. “One of the most frequently heard complaints in Protestant churches is that leaders do all the ‘real’ work while the people are reduced to passive observers… modern liturgical worship actually allows for far more congregational expressions and in many more ways.” The congregation actively involved in responsive readings, in prayers and physical gestures, in eating and drinking and blessing and touching.

Another resistance to liturgical worship is that the prayers and words of the liturgy don’t reflect my feelings about God. “I’m looking for something that reflects how I see God.” A theologian named Philip Phatteicher sets us straight here, though:

The purpose of the liturgy is not to express our thoughts and feelings but to develop them, and like any good school the liturgy expands our horizon, liberating us from captivity to the moment and to the familiar. . . Because the liturgy does not always express what we think or feel it has the potential to transform those who share in it.

Joyce Ann Zimmerman can chime in here, too:

When we celebrate the liturgy and experience emptiness or boredom, we might see this as a critique of our life. Pastorally, we generally assume there is a problem with the ritual itself or the way we celebrate liturgy (and often there is). But there is another possible explanation: If the thrust of our Christian living is not response to the Paschal Mystery, then no matter what we do the ritual, its depth meaning will still escape us. We worship neither to be entertained nor to feel good but to be transformed into the Body of Christ.

The point is that we have some responsibility when we come to worship. We cannot always blame the ritual when we are not transformed, like a schoolchild who keeps blaming his teachers for his failing grades. So how can we foster active participation in worship, the kind of participation that leads to real transformation? Chan gives some pretty good advice.

The first part is to begin with some understanding of the what and why of liturgy. Chan says that “without meaningful participation, a liturgical practice is quickly turned into mere ritualism.” Understanding produces active participation.

The second part is to examine how the liturgy is to be done. More on that in a few days…

We’ve looked at how there is room in liturgical worship for spontaneous and charismatic worship elements, and how liturgical worship can be greatly beneficial and formative for church communities. But let’s get down to some nuts and bolts issues: What kind of a liturgy is Simon Chan talking about in his Liturgical Theology?

In addition to the “deep order” of Word and Sacrament, Chan adds the Entrance and the Dismissal. I’ll provide Chan’s full example liturgy at the end of the post, for those interested. Four points are salient first:

First, he strongly advocates celebrating the Eucharist every Sunday, because as mentioned earlier in this series, the Eucharist completes and fulfills and is the fitting response to the proclamation of the Word. Word and Sacrament form a dialectic that is incomplete unless both elements are present. We’ve been celebrating Holy Communion at every service at Heartland for a few years now, and it’s hard to imagine a service without it now, frankly. Actually in recent months we’ve taken to celebrating it after the sermon, as a response to the Word preached, which lines up very much with what Chan says about the order of things. It “feels” right, and it’s something that has formed our church community in deep ways over the years.

Second, he also says evangelicals ought to be a lot more intentional with how they worship (this is where liturgical worship comes in). The words that are spoken before the Eucharistic meal, the responses of the people, etc, all need to be thought through and done in an appropriate spirit.

Third, just like performing the Eucharist every Sunday, Chan argues for doing the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed every Sunday. Not because we forgot the words, and not necessarily to only “teach” us something, but because such proclamations are “performative acts” – they are sacramental in that sense. They are words that do stuff when spoken with understanding and faith, both in the speakers and in the cosmos. (Kind of like when lovers say “I love you!” to one another – they are not gathering new information from one another; rather, the words perform a function – they have transforming power.)

Fourth, a practice conspicuously missing from most “Bible-believing” evangelical churches is the actual public reading of the Bible (without commentary). If we are people who are formed by the story of Scripture, then reading our story publicly ought to be a much more prominent part of our worship. Scripture reading should not by relegated to the private spirituality of “quiet times”. Both the sermon and the reading of Scripture are part of the proclamation of the Word. Right now we’re working on how to work more Bible reading into our services at Heartland.

Here is the liturgy Chan outlines in the book, for those interested in how this might be fleshed out:

[Read more…] about Liturgical Theology 10 | Elements of a liturgy

A friend of mine saw that I was reading a book called Liturgical Theology by Simon Chan, looked at me curiously and said, “Why in the world are you reading that?”

“You don’t approve?” I asked. “Don’t you use liturgy in your church?”

“No.”

“So the basic elements of worship change radically from week to week? Like this Sunday you aren’t sure if there’ll be any singing, or if there will be a sermon, or an offering, or anything?”

“Well, we always sing, and we always have a sermon…”

“It sounds like you have a liturgy, then. The question is how well it functions. That’s why I’m reading this book.”

“I still don’t think I like liturgical worship.”

My friend’s reservations about liturgy are somewhat widespread among evangelicals, it seems, especially among Boomers and those who attend “free” or charismatic churches.

It’s a fair question, though: Is there enough room in liturgical worship for the spontaneous movements of the Spirit? If we’re going to think more deeply about our forms of worship and seek to mold them into more effective and biblical liturgies, are we going to sacrifice the ability to “flow with the Spirit?”

A couple points here: Like I pointed out above to my friend, even the most “unstructured” services have a basic form that rarely varies from week to week. To simply acknowledge this is to come a long way toward seeing the legitimacy of liturgical worship. The real issue is whether that form conforms to the biblical norm of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Chan says that “The church’s liturgy, far from being an attempt to domesticate the Spirit, is simply an attempt to be faithful to the christologically and pneumatically shaped revelation” and “a normative liturgy is large enough to incorporate the charismatic dimensions of worship.”

Practicing a normative liturgy can be a good way of assuring that worship doesn’t simply become swayed by the whims or “pet doctrines” of leaders, or worse, simply the most recent “fashions” in music and pop culture. A liturgy can ground us the full spectrum of biblical revelation so we aren’t unbalanced in our spiritual growth.

But leaders will have to be patient and resist the temptation to look for immediate results. The liturgy forms us deeply, but it takes consistent, regular practice over a long period of time to do its work. I’m reminded of a story my colleague Ron tells about getting impatient with some carrots he planted as a child. One by one, he’d pull them up to see if they were “done yet.” He didn’t end up with any carrots that summer. Leaders are in the same boat when it comes to implementing a normative liturgy in their services. You probably won’t see “results” for a few months or years. You’ll also need to give people an adequate understanding of what is going on so they can participate actively.

“If the normative liturgy is to have formative effect, it needs to be correctly understood, deeply appreciated and consistently practiced.”