simon chan

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.”

Simon Chan writes in his Liturgical Theology that one of the reasons evangelicals have become suspicious of the liturgy, and of sacraments in general, is because they are actually children of the Enlightenment. British evangelical scholar Philip Seddon has noted that evangelicals have “a deep-seated suspicion of references to ‘mystery’ or to anything that is not explicable,” and he sees this as “the triumph of the Enlightenment at the heart of Evangelical readings of the sacrament.”

So modern evangelicals tend not to like to think of something actually happening in baptism or Eucharist. They tend more toward Zwingli’s “memorial” theology of the sacraments, since, as Chan says, “it does not require them to associate transcendence with anything so mundane as water, bread, and wine.”

I also see a kind of gnostic dualism here, that locates spirituality in the immaterial. It says the “real” thing happened “in my heart” and my being baptized or taking communion is just a “reminder” or perfunctory ritual that I go through for no apparent reason.

But for the early Christians, the sign and the spiritual reality were not separated. Not that the sign did something in and of itself, like a magical charm, but that the spiritual reality was not complete without the sign, and that something spiritual and important really happened in the performance of the sign, when it is performed with faith and understanding. Chan says: “Baptism was not a ‘mere sign’ of a prior spiritual work effected by the Holy Spirit in the human heart; rather baptism is effective because it is the Spirit who effects the reality in and by the sign” (emphasis mine).

So baptism is not merely concerned with the indvidual’s sin and redemption, as though it was just a signifier of forgiveness. It is a cosmic event. The early church’s baptismal rites show this kind of understanding when they ask candidates to renounce the world the flesh and the devil (and then they would signal such renunciation with exorcisms!). In some rituals the baptismal candidates would first turn toward the west (the symbolic realm of darkness, where the devil was thought to originate from) and curse and spit on the devil (!). Then he or she would turn toward the east to welcome the coming of the Sun (Son) of Righteousness. Baptism announces not just an individual’s forgiveness, but God’s power over a vanquished enemy. The Eucharist does the same, and is likewise a cosmic event. The sign and the spiritual reality cannot be separated.

Even though modern evangelicals don’t have a lot of experience with or
understanding of sacramental reality, the process of falling in love
and getting married is a good parallel. Marriage is the sign and seal of two persons’ lifelong commitment to love each other. It isn’t merely a perfunctory act that signifies something that happened before, but rather something actually happens in marriage that doesn’t happen if they don’t perform the sign. Before the wedding, they were two separate persons; after the wedding, they are one. The early church had much the same “process” understanding of conversion: one truly and fully becomes a Christian in baptism.

Chan argues that baptism should be seen as the culmination of a “process of conversion”, where the Christian is weaned off the world, the flesh and the devil through a catechumenal process. “Just as love between a man and a woman culminates in marriage, the catechumenal process culminates in baptism, when one renounces the world, vows lifelong commitment to follow Christ and enters into full communion with the church.”

I’ve been chugging through Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology and blogging about it. Chan has some important things to say to the evangelical/charismatic church, I think.

According to Chan, worship is what makes the church the church. For the missional church to gain any traction and sustain energy it must be fueled by worship. Like Matt Redman wrote (I find I quote him a lot as I think through these things):

“Let worship be the fuel for mission’s flame [and] let worship be the heart of mission’s aim.”

Well said, Matt.

But worship is more than just singing some songs. Chan says the charismatic church has tended to reduce worship to simply praise. Worship is more fully realized as the entire liturgy of the church (Word and sacrament). So if worship is what makes the church the church, and the church’s worship is most fully embodied in the liturgy (culminating in the Eucharist), then the church meeting to participate in the liturgy isn’t just some optional exercise for Christians. It becomes, in fact, the defining practice of the church. And the church’s liturgy then provides the definition and framework for other Christian practices, including the missional ones. The church can’t be reduced to simply a bunch of people talking about trade justice.

Other organizations do relief work. Other groups work for justice. Other religions help the poor and needy. But only the church worships the Triune God.

Chan says that the church, then, ought to be more intentional about its worship practice, and also in training people in the meaning of the church’s practice of worship. He makes a strong argument for churches adopting some kind of catechetical training process that is integrally tied to the church’s worship, focusing on the creed, Ten Commandments, and Lord’s prayer (Christian belief, ethics, and spirituality). This training period would culminate in baptism, where the candidate renounces the world, the flesh, and the devil and pledges lifelong faithfulness to Jesus Christ. This would be the candidates full acceptance into the communion of the church (participating in the liturgy, including the Eucharist).

Some people might be suspicious: this sounds a lot like what the church has done in the past, doesn’t it? Did it work well? Well, yes and no. But Chan seems to be simply arguing for not throwing the baby of cathechetical training and liturgy out with the bathwater of religiosity and superstition. The correction to abuse (or ignorance) is correct use, not disuse. The evangelical church could use a stronger theology of the church, and also a more well-realized liturgy. In subsequent posts, I’ll be reflecting on Chan’s specific suggestions on what the Sunday liturgy should look like in a local church.

My interaction with Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology continues…

Worship can be ideally described as the response of the church to the revelation of God in Christ. But there has to be a way for that to be actualized. The abstract concepts must take concrete form. This is where the church’s liturgy comes in (liturgy = the way the church worships). Liturgy could be said to be embodied worship.

Chan says that the church throughout history has recognized that the basic, fundamental structure and underlying foundation of the church’s liturgy consists in two parts, Word and sacrament. Calvin: “Whenever we see the Word of God purely preached and heard, and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s institution, there . . . a church of God exists.” Lutheran liturgiologist Frank Senn: “The church is visible only where the people assemble to do those things that constitute them as the people of God–proclaim the word of God and celebrate the sacraments of Christ.”

I wondered if this recognition has come mainly from something we see in Scripture, or perhaps more from the experience of church tradition. It’s one of those tricky doctrine-experience dialectics. Chan says Word and sacrament relate to one another in a number of ways. We do see a church organized around those things in Acts 2:42, however: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.”

So Chan sees the basic structure of the church’s liturgy consisting of Word and sacrament (and he seems to be in pretty good company, historically). He sees Word and sacrament relating to one another in a number of different ways.

[Read more…] about Liturgical Theology 6 | Word and sacrament

Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology, in chapter two, reiterates (as many have done before) that true worship is always a response to God’s initiative. God moves first in revealing his divine glory (which is simply disclosing who he is), and we respond by “glorifying” God, that is, acknowledging him for who he is. God’s revelation; our response. Three implications follow:

Worship can never be something we do for God.
True worship begins with recognizing that everything we have and are is a pure gift from God. We can never come to worship in a semi-pagan stance of offering “our” gifts in an effort to “placate” our God. Instead we realize that even the gifts we offer have been given to us first by God himself. Matt Redman’s excellent song “Breathing the Breath” is worth quoting in its entirety here:

[Read more…] about Liturgical Theology 5 | Revelation and response