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Okay, I really do have a day job, but here goes. Thread. :-)
I sometimes see people say, “Worship isn’t for us anyway. It’s for God.”
I sometimes see people say, “Worship isn’t for us anyway. It’s for God.”
People usually leave it there but I gather that the implication is to shut down pro-revisionist arguments that some of our current liturgies and liturgical practices don’t connect with people’s hearts and lives very well.
As an anti-revision argument, “worship is for God, not us” fails pretty immediately unless you hold that God is **uniquely** willing to accept worship according to the currently authorized liturgies of The Episcopal Church. Which seems like… a tough position to maintain.
Worship is **oriented towards** God, of course. We forget that at our peril. But our pattern of worship was made for us, not us for our pattern of worship.
God’s people have worshiped God in many, many different ways, languages, and rites. It seems fairly obvious to me that what God wants from us is an orientation of heart and life, and a mutual commitment to growth in love as Christ’s body the church, ....
... rather than any very specific form or verbiage of worship.
(There are other reasons to take seriously our accountability to shared and authorized texts. I’m aware of them. I’m just talking about the God bit, here.)
(There are other reasons to take seriously our accountability to shared and authorized texts. I’m aware of them. I’m just talking about the God bit, here.)
If what God wants from us is is an orientation of heart and life towards God and God’s intentions for us, and a mutual commitment to growth in love as Christ’s body the church, then it seems to me that our best liturgy is liturgy that helps those things happen.
Liturgy is formative. That’s a bedrock principal of the Anglican way of faith, and I’ll go to bat for it any day (though I’m often surprised that I have to).
Side note: My training before entering the priesthood was in cultural anthropology. Maybe that makes me take liturgy more seriously as our core formative shared action that both tells us and makes us who we are.
But that *shouldn’t* be something I am uniquely qualified to understand because of my anthropology background - it’s fairly commonplace liturgical/ritual theory.
Every eighth self-help blog post on the Internet tells you to form habits that help you become the person you mean to be. That’s ritual. It’s not just a thing you do. It’s a thing that does stuff to you.
Liturgy is supposed to form us, day by day, Sunday by Sunday, season by season, year by year, decade by decade, into God’s people.
Here’s where I wish I could just link to Juan Oliver’s great, thought-provoking essay in Worship-Shaped Life. He gives us so much to think about. There’s a lot in there but two big take-aways are:
Liturgy can fail to form us because it just doesn’t connect. Its vocabulary and symbols and assumptions just don’t match our lives, hearts, and minds in a way that gets traction. The gears don’t mesh.
1. It just happens around us without ever fully engaging us, let alone changing us or connecting us to God, neighbor, or deep self.
If you don’t think that ever happens for people worshipping at your church, **you are lying to yourself.**
If you don’t think that ever happens for people worshipping at your church, **you are lying to yourself.**
Liturgy can also actively *mis*-form us when its message or impact don’t match our beliefs and intentions. There could be a lot of examples of this but one that comes to mind is the way, for the voice of the ’79 Prayer Book, the “poor” is definitely a “them” and not an “us.”
For someone living on food stamps or anxious about next months’ rent, worshiping in one of our churches, to hear those prayers tells them they are not fully part of this body. They’re outside the Us of the Episcopal Church.
That’s not our intention or our belief (though it may in fact be our inherited cultural ethos… sigh). Praying that way is a distortion that matters.
When we craft liturgy that speaks the language of people’s hearts, that removes some of the friction of words we don’t understand or that distance or distress us, that doesn’t distort our teaching and witness, then that liturgy can form us as God’s people more effectively. AND:
It also really might feel more worth showing up for.
I’m actually quite cautious about linking the revision conversation to the decline conversation. I don’t think either revising, or not revising, should be driven by the idea that it will mean more butts in pews.
I’m actually quite cautious about linking the revision conversation to the decline conversation. I don’t think either revising, or not revising, should be driven by the idea that it will mean more butts in pews.
BUT I submit that the “church is like broccoli: just eat it even if you don’t like it” position actually HAS probably cost us a lot of members. Regular church attendance is a big commitment to sustain if you really don’t enjoy what happens when you’re there.
