A Protestant Worship Manifesto

A new reformation of word and sacrament is occurring in North American Protestantism. Yet so unnoticed has this movement been that it lacks a name. This inconspicuousness contrasts with the highly publicized liturgical reforms within Roman Catholicism since Vatican II. My purpose in this article is to delineate the contours of the movement -- in the conviction that, although they are unpublicized, the goals for the reform of Protestant worship have reached a stage of consensus.

In the absence of a document such as the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy of Vatican II, this Protestant consensus is elusive. Indeed, it could be argued that the Constitution itself has provided the agenda for Protestant as well as Roman Catholic reform. But the Constitution dealt with a number of problems endemic to Roman Catholicism; many recent reforms go far beyond what that 1963 document envisioned.

My chief concern is with changes under way in churches at the center of the liturgical spectrum. Changes within the Episcopal and Lutheran churches (the liturgical right) are well known. Significant changes are also occurring on the liturgical left (Quakers, Pentecostals and, especially, the free-church tradition), but it is difficult to generalize about such disparate groups. My present concern is the liturgical center: the Reformed churches, Presbyterians, United Methodists, United Church of Canada and portions of the free-church tradition (United Church of Christ and Christian Church [Disciples of Christ]). A rough but convenient way of defining the liturgical center in North American Protestantism is those churches that consider a service book normative for sacraments but never mandatory for the usual Sunday services.

I intend to articulate a consensus, increasingly evident but as yet unformulated, among such a diverse group of pastors and scholars as William Willimon and Laurence Stookey, Horace Allen and Arlo Duba, Doug Adams and Keith Watkins, to mention only a few pre-eminent leaders. A smaller group consists of people of various neo-Reformation or neo-Wesleyan persuasions. But these divergences are slight compared to the broad support that exists for the reform of Protestant worship.

One does not necessarily do people a favor by changing the ways in which they worship. Yet polls indicate that more than 66 per cent of Roman Catholics approve recent liturgical changes. Change in worship, as in any other human activity, is inevitable. But deliberate and carefully planned change in worship is a new phenomenon in U.S. Protestantism, just as it was unprecedented for Roman Catholics before Vatican II.

For change to be desirable, it has to be based on sound pastoral, theological and historical reasons. Only then can one act in confidence that the changes will be beneficial to the Christian people for whom they are designed. Criteria to judge changes are necessary so as to ensure that something more than personal preference is being promoted. Yet on major matters there seems to be remarkable agreement among those working for liturgical change.

One could designate the present movement as a “reformation of Word and sacrament.” It is certainly an effort at reforming current practice in almost every aspect of worship. Or one might speak of it as the “renewal of worship” in the sense of efforts to infuse new vigor into it. Yet another dimension is represented by the phrase “recovery of worship.” Much of the new is also very old. Many practices long dormant in Christian worship now seem relevant and useful. Greater knowledge of the first four Christian centuries has provided much impetus for recent reforms. Other possible terms could be revitalization of worship, or restructuring of worship.

The present movement is all that these terms indicate and more. I shall try to delineate as concisely as possible 12 reforms generally advocated by almost all those working in this crusade, however it is labeled. Each reform will be presented in normative rather than descriptive terms. There seems to be sufficient agreement to state what should be done.

1. Worship should be shaped in the light of understanding it as the church’s unique contribution to the struggle for justice. Protestantism has often identified preaching with prophetic ministry and relegated the rest of worship to a priestly role, as if there were some distinction between these two aspects of ministry. Yet the weekly reiteration of the entire service (including the sermon) is the church’s most-used method of shaping people for attitudes and acts of ecclesial and social justice. Although it is a byproduct of worship, which exists for its own sake, constant exposure to words, actions and roles within the worshiping community does more to reinforce a Christian’s attitudes about justice than anything else the church does (see my articles “The Words of Worship: Beyond Liturgical Sexism,” Dec. 13, 1978, and “The Actions of Worship: Beyond Liturgical Sexism,” May 7, 1980). Unfortunately, these same words, actions and roles can promote injustice as well as justice. Worship is a potent, possibly dangerous act -- when it fails to do justice to all by being inclusive of all ages and races and both sexes.

Frequently the sacraments are more prophetic than preaching is. Baptism has long been recognized as the sacrament of equality (Gal. 3:27-28). Ordination of women is essentially a question of baptismal theology. Can one be baptized into Jesus Christ and not into his priesthood? Much has been made of the koinonia or fellowship of the Lord’s Supper (I Cor. 10:16-17); more ought to be said about the Eucharist’s exclusion of compromise with evil: “You cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons” (I Cor. 10:21). The eschatological vision of the just reign of God which the Eucharist provides is far more, radical than any human social program.

The chief contribution of worship to justice is persistence, the ability to “hang in there.” The need to worship, which we never outgrow or outlive, is recurring just as the struggle against evil is. As one who weekly receives God’s self-giving through Word and sacrament, the Christian is enabled to give himself or herself for others in a struggle that outlasts each of us.

2. The paschal nature of Christian worship should resound throughout all services. Baptism, grounded in the Easter event, starts the Christian life, and the same paschal joy echoes even in the service of Christian burial. Above all, Christian worship is rejoicing in what Christ has done for us, a form of God’s self-giving in which the historical events are again offered to us. In worship, we experience anew the events of salvation history in terms of our own lives.

The penitential cloud of late medieval-Reformation worship continued to build in the neo-orthodox decades. Too often people go to church to be scolded rather than to experience the liberation of the divine. An opening prayer of confession sometimes does little more than suggest that worship is primarily about our failures rather than God’s triumphs. An individualistic, introspective, subjective approach to worship makes it easy to forget that we have something far more important to focus on than our peccadilloes; we have the joyous Easter faith to proclaim. The proclamation and re-enactment of resurrection goes on week after week throughout the entire year.

3. The centrality of the Bible in Protestant worship must be recovered. A curious link unites the worship of many liberal and fundamentalist congregations. Their use of Scripture in worship falls into the “when convenient” category. Scripture functions in the worship of thousands of Protestant congregations only as a means of reinforcing what the preacher wants to say. This use makes the Bible an optional resource rather than the source of Christian worship. It is forgotten that Scripture is read in worship not as a sermon text but as God’s word to God’s people. The sermon follows as a faithful exposition of what the Scriptures mean for our time. The new reforms encourage the reading of three lessons plus the singing of a psalm each week.

Reforms in this area have been the most successful, largely because of widespread use of the ecumenical lectionary. Unprecedented numbers of Protestant ministers have made the lectionary their organizing basis for the Sunday service. This is all the more striking in that, prior to 1970, such use was virtually nil to the liturgical left of Lutherans and Episcopalians. I was invited recently to speak to a ministerial association in a rural county in Indiana and was told not to mention the lectionary because most of those present would be Nazarene or Church of the Brethren preachers. But when I got there, the lectionary was all they wanted to talk about!

The discovery of the lectionary has had a major impact on preaching. A subtle form of oppression has been the subjection of the congregation to the preacher’s own private canon of Scripture, which frequently excluded most of the Old Testament and much of the New. Conscientization has resulted in confrontation with all of Scripture. Use of the lectionary has meant a return to exegetical rather than topical or thematic preaching. And its use has surprised many preachers by making their preaching far more relevant than their own favorite thoughts, good advice, and Reader’s Digest illustrations.

4. The importance of time as a major structure in Christian worship must be rediscovered. Many congregations are moving to a richer calendar as an unexpected by-product of the ecumenical lectionary. The calendar is the basic document of Christian worship since it determines everything we do on a given Sunday. Those who use the ecumenical lectionary have discovered themselves following a common calendar shared by 80 million American Christians. For most churches, it has almost doubled the festivals by adding occasions such as Baptism of the Lord, Transfiguration and All Saints’ Day. The new festivals are all christological events rather than human programs. At the same time, World Communion Sunday and Reformation Day are downplayed, along with promotional events.

Very important has been discovery of the most dramatic part of Christian worship, Holy Week. Drama is intrinsic in Christian worship, not something added to it, and Holy Week is the climax of Christian drama. Holy Week is being celebrated in thousands of churches with an excitement unknown for centuries. Countless parishes have found popular a calendar that breaks the usual 11:00 A.M. Sunday structure with night services on special occasions:

Christmas Eve, Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday and Easter Eve. For millions, the liturgical year has become a major vehicle for living with Christ.

5. All reforms in worship must be shaped ecumenically. The widespread use of the lectionary and common calendar are the most important ecumenical developments of recent years. No one organized a national office or set up a committee to bring this about; pastors in towns and cities all over America simply began meeting to study the texts prescribed for worship. And laity learned of our oneness as they heard neighbors discuss sermons they had heard the previous Sunday. This is true grass-roots ecumenism.

Less obvious is the convergence of liturgical rites. Yet there are fewer and fewer distinctions between them as different churches publish new versions. Bernard Cooke, the Roman Catholic theologian, is said to have remarked that he could use the new United Methodist eucharistic rite “without qualms.” And Methodists certainly help themselves to much that is Roman Catholic.

The theological problems that have separated us in worship have been eliminated. A monk teaches worship at Yale; students in some Roman Catholic seminaries study worship from a Protestant textbook. I often wonder: “Why teach ecumenism when you can teach worship?” Differences, if they occur, are more apt to appear within churches. For example, a leading Roman Catholic liturgist refers to infant baptism as a “benign abnormality,” while an Instruction from Rome defends the practice. But it is quite possible to teach liturgical theology today, making use of sources from every tradition -- Orthodox to Quaker. Much that has occurred is the result of borrowing with discernment. Even oriental rites and the practices and concepts of the Greek Orthodox have touched Western Christianity in crucial ways -- the more reason for us to affirm and study the values of our own traditions so that we can offer them to others. An unexamined tradition often disappears simply because there is no one to expound it in the presence of one that is highly researched and articulated.

6. Drastic changes are needed in the process of Christian initiation. This point is basic to current developments in worship and evangelization. Certain common themes seem to be emerging: initiation is an integral process that ought to be complete at one time in a person’s life; God does not act to incorporate us into the body of Christ in halfway fashion; what is done ought to be full and complete in itself.

Unfortunately, liturgical leaders have been forced to compromise in this area. Probably all of them would like to end present practices of confirmation and certainly to eliminate the term “confirmation.” But there is a vast confirmation industry in the churches that is threatened by such suggestions. And so United Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians were forced to compromise and retain the use of the term even though many now practice confirmation and communion of babies and children of any age. No longer do these acts seem contingent on us, but on God alone. A subtle form of ageism -- the prejudice that children do not count until they think abstractly -- is being assaulted from a theological basis.

The same churches also recognize the importance of human development and affirm that growth in Christian understanding is lifelong. Accordingly, rites for “affirmation,” “reaffirmation” or “renewal” of what God has done for us in baptism have been published. The new Roman Catholic “Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults” has also attracted attention as a means of making the conversion of an adult an experience shared in community rather than an individual matter.

7. High on the list of reforms is the need to recover the Eucharist as the chief Sunday service. This is the most dramatic reform needed, as well as one of the most difficult to achieve, except where already present, as in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Even many Lutherans and Episcopalians still experience resistance at this point. So desacralized has much of American Protestantism become that anything employing the physical and visible is suspect. The vast majority of Christian experience, past and present, witnesses to the value of weekly Eucharist, and study of our biblical and historical roots underscores this importance.

Yet to replicate the Lord’s Supper on a weekly basis just as it is now celebrated monthly would be to court disaster. Until we develop genuine concern about the quality of celebration, greater frequency will reform little. Pastors need special sensitivity about the sign value of every aspect of the rites, not as a fussy rubrical matter, but as genuine pastoral concern that people better perceive and express what is ultimately real for them.

Two items need particular care. The eucharistic prayer, the central Christian doctrinal statement, must be rediscovered as prayerful proclamation. The pre-Vatican II rites of Roman Catholic and Protestant alike were woefully inadequate in this regard. And much work must be done to improve the method of distribution so that people gather to stand, kneel or sit about the Lord’s table, rather than remain in pews. We must discover how to act out fully the act of giving.

8. Recovery of the sense of God’s action in other “commonly called sacraments” is essential. There is no Protestant consensus on just which sign-acts ought to be called sacraments other than baptism-confirmation and the Eucharist. This is as it should be, and was, for most of the church’s history. But certain sign-acts provide the community the clearest experience of God’s activity in its midst.

Reconciliation, once called “confession” or “penance,” is an important part of the ministry of the sacraments. Eventually we may see quarterly or monthly public services of reconciliation. Public services of healing may also become common as we minister to whole persons rather than to disembodied souls. Ordination might as well be seen as a sacrament; it has kept sacramental characteristics in most churches.

Marriage and burial for Christians are special events of witness to God’s self-giving in the midst of community. It is time to emphasize the special character of Christian marriage and Christian burial as these crucial passages are celebrated in the context of God’s acts in the church.

9. Music must be seen in its pastoral context as fundamentally an enabler of fuller congregational participation. It is frightening to analyze honestly how music functions in most Protestant churches. Usually it ranges from entertainment calculated to make palatable an otherwise bland service to innocuous Muzak used to fill in gaps and awkward moments. Gradually we are moving beyond a sense of “liturgical music” to a sense of “musical liturgy.” Music thus used is seen as an integral part of the service rather than as gems of choral or instrumental music dropped into it. The problem with most choral music in Protestant worship is not that it is good or bad but that it is simply irrelevant. When it is not an integral part of the service, it cannot help being entertainment or background Muzak. The new lectionary benefits musicians as much as preachers by making integration of sung and spoken word much more readily achieved.

“Pastoral music,” in contrast to “sacred music,” is focused on helping the whole congregation express its worship with the fullest involvement. This means not that choral music should be eliminated but that such music is always a supplement to congregational song. Occasional sacred concerts, of course, are desirable, but they are never the model for the Sunday service. Musician and author Carlton Young said it well: “We tend to treat the choir as if it were the congregation; we should, instead, treat the congregation as if it were the choir.” Renewed emphasis on hymnody, psalmody and service music is encouraging.

One of the present frontiers is rediscovery of the Psalter. In most of our churches, responsive reading has vied with the pastoral prayer for being the dullest part of the service. One of the church’s greatest treasures, the Psalter, is being rediscovered as song. Only the singing of it can do it justice. New methods of singing the Psalms themselves, rather than mangled paraphrases, have developed. These involve participation of choir or cantors and congregation. Suddenly we realize that choirs have been underused, relegated to anthem singing. Responsorial or antiphonal singing of the Psalms contributes far more to an integrated service than anthems used to camouflage the offering. The witness of the Psalms to God’s saving actions in the context of the Psalms’ fervent personal prayer adds an important dimension of participation.

10. The space and furnishings for worship need substantial change in most churches. If the quality of celebration is to be improved, frequently the very first step must be rearrangement of space. There are no possibilities for increasing the sign value of various acts if they cannot be seen. British theologian J. A. T. Robinson’s pessimistic dictum that “the building will always win” may not be entirely true, but it tends to be so. We still see churches being designed as if nothing had happened in worship in the past 20 years -- and in such churches, nothing is likely to happen in the next 20. For worship of the incarnate God, space is a most important instrument.

To improve the quality of celebration, one must acknowledge people’s visual, aural and kinetic senses. Simplicity, utility, flexibility and intimacy must characterize space designed for worship. This means, above all, careful examination of what the church does in each act of worship so as to provide the optimum physical setting for it.

Not much can be done for reforming baptism until candy-dish fonts are discarded in favor of those that make the washing audible and visible for the whole congregation. The font is our most feminine symbol; maybe that is why so many fonts are kept inconspicuous. The Lord’s table in many Protestant churches still must be pried loose from a wall and raised so that it can be used. Learning to use the altar-table would be a big step forward for many. When one sees an open Bible on the altar-table, one can almost be certain that neither is used in worship.

11. No reform of worship will progress far until much more effort is invested in teaching seminarians and clergy to think through the functions of Christian worship. It is amazing how many clergy got through seminary without any serious reflection on and study of the church’s most distinctive activity, its corporate worship. Those who need this help most are those least likely to realize it and seek it. Protestant seminaries have made major strides in teaching worship in the past decade. Nevertheless, in almost a fifth of our seminaries such instruction reaches only a meager number of students or none. Perhaps it is time to warn people planning to study for ordained ministry that if they are seriously interested in preparing for pastoral ministry they would do better to apply to Yale than to Harvard, to Wesley than to Garrett-Evangelical. It is not difficult to determine in which seminaries worship instruction is presented to a significant number of students: lists of faculty are revealing.

For many pastors, educational gaps remain to be filled. Most denominations now offer workshops and various continuing education programs. Much is available in printed materials. The market for books about worship has grown remarkably in recent years. Unfortunately, audiovisual materials are practically nonexistent. We still have not had the imagination or the resources to produce films, videotapes, discs, etc., to educate in this field in which audiovisual presentations would seem so natural.

Strangely enough, clergy frequently have to catch up with the laity in this area. Courses on worship are now becoming common in undergraduate religion departments. Such courses provide one of the best ways of introducing Christianity -- better than presenting it as an abstract system of doctrines. Laity frequently outnumber clergy at worship workshops. An uninformed minister is threatened by such people and often becomes even more resistant to liturgical change. Only by learning can these insecurities be overcome.

12. Finally, it must be realized that liturgical renewal is not just a changing of worship but is part of a reshaping of American Christianity root and branch. Liturgical renewal is not just window dressing, but a major force for justice, ecumenism and rethinking of the whole Christian message and mission. It relates to and affects every part of the church’s life. Liturgical renewal cannot coexist with the status quo in most of these areas. It fits just as ill with liberals’ negations as with conservatives’ affirmations. Both seem to be inadequate reflections of the biblical and historical faith.

The “liturgical circle” begins by observing and listening to what the church does and says when it gathers for worship as the primary witness to what Christians believe, moves on to theological reflection on the meaning of these data, and then proceeds to reform worship so as to express these meanings more effectively. This liturgical circle provides methodology for a liturgical theology in which practice and theory are united.

Thus liturgical renewal is an important agent of change in American Protestantism. Although future historians will be able to isolate its most distinctive features with more precision and detachment than we can, we have the thrill of passionate engagement with the present as we reshape the church.

Our Apostasy in Worship

“Apostasy” is a strong word. I do not use it lightly. But it is, I think, not too strong a term to characterize worship in many Protestant churches in this country. In worship both conservatives and liberals tend to reshape Scripture in their own images, and both consistently humanize the sacraments. One finds little difference between conservative and liberal congregations in these matters. To be sure, the apostasy is never deliberate and the style varies tremendously, but the results are remarkably similar.

Sins of Omission

In thousands of churches, games are played with the use of Scripture in worship. No one purposely sets out to reshape Scripture, but in subtle and insidious ways it happens in our worship. And it is all the more dangerous since it happens unconsciously. In selecting Scripture for use in worship, choice always means elimination. What we eliminate tells as much about our concepts of the Bible as the portions we retain. Indeed, the passages we avoid account for the greater part of Scripture.

As we select passages, we can hardly help choosing those we find most congenial to our own views. Social activists tend to lean heavily on the prophets and certain parables. Some who resist change find themselves more attuned to portions of the Pauline and pastoral epistles with their fixed standards of conduct. There is nothing strange in our choosing those passages with which we find ourselves most in accord; it is inevitable. The problem is that this practice amounts to rewriting Scripture in our own image. It means choosing what we like and rejecting what we find uncomfortable.

And what about those portions we eliminate? They account in many cases for most of the Old Testament and a hefty portion of books such as Revelation. The former we find abstruse; the latter may not conform with our way of thinking unless we belong to a millenarian group. Unconsciously we have eliminated from public worship major portions of God’s Word so that the people never hear them read in church.

In some denominations there are historical reasons for such omissions. The Methodist Episcopal Church included in its 1905 hymnal an order of worship that has had a most pervasive influence. Without realizing it, many United Methodist churches, especially in the south, are still following this 1905 order of worship -- a service that begins with an affirmation of faith. Unfortunately, the order included the infamous Rubric VI, which speaks of the “lesson from the Old Testament, which if from the Psalms, may be read responsively” and then adds insult to injury with a footnote explaining that “in the afternoon or evening the Lesson from the Old Testament may be omitted.” What Marcion tried to do in the second century, Methodists accomplished in the 20th. The effect of Rubric VI was virtually to eliminate 38 books of God’s Word from Methodist worship. The Psalms survived only by being confused with the Old Testament lesson. One still hears Methodists who ought to know better referring to the responsive reading as “the” Old Testament lesson.

This is not to say that Methodists were any more guilty than other denominations. Before Vatican II, Roman Catholics left the Old Covenant relatively inconspicuous at mass, and Episcopalians did the same until recently. Only when people attended the breviary offices or morning and evening prayer did they find the existence of both covenants recognized. The free churches, left to their own devices, did little better. In short, our compass of Scripture was severely limited either by our denomination’s standards or by our own selective process.

Springboard to a Sermon

In many congregations the Bible is read not for its own sake, primarily as the proclamation of God’s Word to his assembled people, but chiefly as source of the sermon text. I recently attended a large church where only three verses of Scripture were read in the entire service. That was all the preacher needed to get his sermon going, so why bother to read more? With that approach, whatever Scripture passages are read tend to be snippets -- just enough for a springboard into the sermon. One lesson usually serves the purpose, and that often a short one.

Most orders of worship would be improved by careful analysis. What function does each item perform in the Service? If we think this question through, we might be embarrassed into the realization that God’s Word is read for a greater purpose than simply to provide the preacher a sermon text or pretext. I would argue that Scripture is read because God speaks to his people assembled to hear his Word through the readings as well as through the sermon. This means that the lections, though similar in function to preaching, also have a distinctive role as the written record of the community of faith’s common memories. It also means that the lessons deserve sufficient time that several passages of some length and not only brief snippets can be read. One cannot squeeze the prodigal son into ten verses or less, and that lesson ought not be the only one read.

How can we use Scripture in its wholeness over a span of time and use it sufficiently each Sunday? During the Reformation, Thomas Cranmer wrote a beautiful collect based on Romans 15:4: “For all the ancient scriptures were written for our own instruction, in order that through the encouragement they give us we may maintain our hope with fortitude.” That would be a good guideline to follow as we realize how important it is to be faithful to all of Scripture and not just to our favorite portions.

The New Lectionaries

Over the centuries Christians have used two disciplines for covering Scripture in a systematic way. Both are imperfect, but they do have real advantages over random selection of popular passages. The first of these is a lectionary based on the church year; the second is lectio continua, by which one reads through entire books in order as written. Catholicism inclined to the former; the Reformers to the latter. One method tended to skip around and miss much; the other, in its dogged persistence, was pretty wooden at times.

Fortunately, in our own time these problems have been largely resolved. It is perhaps ironic but nevertheless delightful that the Roman Catholic Church has done more to restore a balanced approach to the use of Scripture in worship than any other church since the Reformation. The new Catholic Sunday lectionary, which went into effect in 1969, is certainly the most carefully prepared in the history of Christianity. More than 800 consultants -- Catholic, Protestant and Jewish -- were involved in the process. The result is a three-year lectionary covering most of the New Testament and a major portion of the Old. More Scripture is being read at Roman Catholic masses these days than in most Protestant services. If one can hear three full lessons at mass each week, it is scandalous that only one short passage is read in some Protestant worship.

The new lectionary combines the traditional use of readings organized around the church year for the Old Testament and Gospel lessons, and the Reformation insistence on lectio continua in the Epistle lections. A workable compromise, this means that each year we rehearse the ministry of Jesus according to the structure of the church year. We read Gospel passages and related Old Testament lections except during the season of Easter, when Acts is read as the new Israel continues the history of the old. At the same time, the Pauline books and other epistles are read through in a systematic way. Each of the synoptic Gospels requires a year, with bits filled out each year from John’s Gospel. In this way a well-rounded survey of the entire body of Scripture is presented to each congregation within a period of three years.

It is most encouraging to realize that major segments of American Christianity have adopted this system. Episcopalians, Lutherans, Presbyterians, the United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, United Methodists, and the Consultation on Church Union have adopted virtually identical schemes of biblical readings. This development has made financially feasible the publication of excellent study aids in the form of biblical commentaries, such as Reginald Fuller’s Preaching the New Lectionary, Gerard Sloyan’s Commentary on the New Lectionary, and Fortress Press’s Proclamation series of 26 paperback volumes. Sales of these materials have been very high; one publisher called his sales figures “astronomical.” I trust that this trend reflects a massive return to exegetical preaching. Let us hope it also indicates a greater concern for the use of a balanced diet of God’s Word in worship. There are signs that Scripture is beginning to be used more responsibly in worship by a wide segment of American Christianity. This is clearly cause for rejoicing, though we certainly have far to go before God’s Word is always read in a balanced and full way as an important component of our worship.

Memory Exercises

If we have been delinquent in the use of God’s Word in worship, we have been equally careless with God’s sacraments. Just as we have often succumbed to the danger of recasting the Scriptures in our own images through selective use of them, so we have also humanized the sacraments by making them our own acts rather than God’s.

Here we are struck by a bit of historical irony. For most American Protestants, the Enlightenment of the 8th century seems to have more appeal than the Reformation of the 16th. The Enlightenment’s distrust of miracle and mystery has in many ways overcome the Reformation’s insistence on God’s use of the sacraments in his own mysterious way to fulfill his purposes. Conservatives and liberals alike seem blind to any sense that God acts in the sacraments to give himself to us. Both seem to have imbibed the Enlightenment’s desacralizing tendencies so thoroughly that any notion that God “imparts spiritual things under visible ones” (Calvin) scandalizes them. Instead, the sacraments have become for vast segments of American Protestantism simply memory exercises whereby we try to remember what God has done. But the sense of the sacraments as sign-acts through which God acts here and now to accomplish his own purposes seems strangely absent in most baptisms and celebrations of the Lords Supper. In short, the sacraments have come to depend on human agency -- our ability to remember God -- rather than on what God out of his grace does. Unfortunately, much recent experimentation in worship has only encouraged this humanistic approach, though such an attitude was certainly prevalent long before experimentation began.

It is strange indeed that many segments of Protestantism should thus prefer the Enlightenment to the Reformation. Most of the Reformers of the 16th century and John Wesley in the 18th were prone to speak of the sacraments as “means of grace” in which the agency is divine. God uses them in his own mysterious way in order to give himself to us according to his own will. In the words of Charles Wesley: “Sure and real is the grace,/The manner be unknown; / . . . Thine to bless, ‘tis only ours/To wonder and adore.” Most Methodists seem now to have reversed that to read: “Sure and clear is our recall; /The manner obvious;/ . . Ours to remember it all;/What Christ did long ago.” We seem to echo the words of an 18th century Anglican bishop who spoke of Christ “who was once present with his disciples, and is now absent.” If Christ is absent, then the burden is on us to remember him, not to respond to his present action or “to wonder and adore.”

Out-spiritualizing God

The sacraments, as Luther, Calvin and Wesley knew, are what God makes of them. And Calvin’s assertion that the Creator understands his creatures better than we do ourselves punctures the false spiritualism of the Enlightenment which tried to out-spiritualize God by avoiding the physical. The Scriptures, after all, speak constantly of a God who uses objects, yokes, pots, bread, wine and water to do his purposes. There certainly is nothing disincarnate about the Good News. Yet many congregations seem so afraid of their senses that baptism often seems like a dry run, and it takes great faith to believe that it is a real loaf of bread that is broken and eaten by God’s people. We have done our best to out-spiritualize God.

There are hopeful signs that this tendency to humanize the sacraments is beginning to change. I see two indications: recent developments in sacramental theology have helped us to understand the sacraments more clearly as divine actions, and the new sacramental services of the major denominations have made this understanding much more explicit for all to grasp.

In recent years there has been a significant development in sacramental theology which takes seriously the ways in which different sign-acts function between persons and between people and God. It stresses the analogy between a sign-act, such as a kiss between humans, and the sign-acts by which God chooses to communicate his meaning to us. This theology has led to a deeper understanding of what Calvin knew and rejoiced in -- God’s use of signs to accommodate himself to our capacities. Indeed, Calvin anticipated recent theological developments more than 400 years ago.

One way of expressing the new concepts is to say that God employs the sacraments as a means of giving himself to us just as he uses preaching. In the sacraments he uses actions and things instead of words alone to make his love known. He uses sign-acts to establish and maintain relationships of love in and through the community of faith. This theology takes seriously the ways in which human beings relate to each other through various sign-acts. It submits that God knows his creatures best and uses our senses to help us perceive his love. Such concepts recognize our social nature and our need to “discern the Body” within the Christian assembly.

New Rites of Baptism and Communion

The recent sacramental rites published by Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, Lutherans, the United Church of Christ, Presbyterians and United Methodists have a much richer and deeper theology of God acting in and through the sacraments to give himself to us.

Methodists, Lutherans and Episcopalians have taken a whole new look at the process of Christian initiation and have come up with new approaches much more in keeping with the practices of the early church. Two points are crucial in these new approaches: they assume that Christian initiation is complete at one occasion, and they assume that the renewal of this experience is a lifelong process. The United Methodist rite stresses the direct action of God; this is articulated strongly in the central prayer, a basic part of the service lost two generations ago in American Methodism. No longer does the service resemble a pious memory exercise. It is clear that God is present, acting here and now through the Holy Spirit to give himself to us by fulfilling the New Testament effects of baptism: washing; dying and rising with Christ; and incorporating us into his body.

The new communion services are equally firm in their clear articulation of God whose work the sacrament is. Here there has been a major recovery in the sense of proclamation of God’s saving acts from creation to judgment as we give thanks in the great eucharistic prayer. We have rediscovered the fervent joy of the early church in the telling forth of God’s mighty deeds in both covenants. We offer these memories as the community’s most precious gift. A new approach to sacrifice recognizes the prevalence of this language in the eucharistic passages of the New Testament and refuses to be frightened by medieval aberrations. Equally important is the frank recognition of the community’s dependence on the present action of the Holy Spirit, and the invocation of the Spirit that “we might be made one with the goodness of God himself.”

Reasons for Hope

There are, then, most encouraging signs that we are rediscovering that the sacraments belong to God and depend on his agency and not on us. On the whole, the new rites seem to have been widely accepted, though a tremendous amount of teaching needs to accompany them, and many ministers do not find themselves well equipped to perform this work. But if the basic biblical images of baptism and the Lord’s Supper are carefully studied, it will be seen how much more faithfully the newer rites echo them then did those services to which we have been accustomed.

On the whole, we have many reasons for hope that our “apostasy” in worship is being tempered if not eradicated. I think there is within American Protestantism a growing awareness that God sets the agenda in our worship -- not by prescribing particular forms but by creating the content of these forms. I sense a greater willingness to take the hard parts of Scripture as well as the soft spots as efforts are being made to deal with the full breadth of God’s word in our worship. And I discover a growing openness to the sacraments as God’s chosen way of giving himself to us by means that far surpass our own efforts simply to remember his past actions. We can all give thanks for these new-developments.

A Liturgical Stategy: Four Lines of Attack

The church militant seems to relish military terms. We are constantly besieged by fund-raising campaigns; we are groggy from serving on so many task forces; we are daily informed of new evangelistic strategies. Maybe the time has come to apply the same language to thinking about the revitalization of, worship and to outline a national liturgical strategy, dealing with local problems and the national resources available to cope with them.

The Centrality of Worship

The importance of worship revitalization lies in the centrality of public .worship for the life of any Christian congregation. Most of our pastoral counseling is done from the pulpit. In Lambert Beauduin’s words, “Liturgy is theology, . . . the theology of the people,” the only religious education most adults receive. It is difficult to envision any long term Christian commitment to social justice that is not sustained by common worship. Evangelism falls flat if the worship life of a community is not exciting. We might accomplish some church administration without a thriving life of worshiping together, but even that is questionable.

Ironically, we have developed superb resources, and strategies for employing those resources, in most of these other areas of ministry. Pastoral care and counseling are so well done these days that many students enter and leave seminary convinced that a congregation’s basic job is to pay the rent and utility bills for the pastor while he or she performs this vital ministry on a one-to-one basis. Religious education is fortified by superb national staffs, enormous publishing resources and skilled researchers. Social action, it must be admitted, has seen better days, though there are encouraging signs from the right wing, of all places. Many denominations provide tremendous budgets and staffs for evangelism. We are, of course, grateful for the national resources available to support these aspects of ministry.

It is time, though, to take stock with regard to resources supporting the ministry of worship. What factors impede revitalization of worship in American churches, and what resources can, be brought to bear on changing the situation. Frank recognition of the problems and examination of the logistics for fighting them can be helpful. The problems of Catholics and Protestants in English-speaking North America seem reasonably similar, and the resources ought to be utilized in unison.

I do not doubt that my evaluation of the situation is affected by my position as a seminary professor. I can only argue that very few other people in American Christianity have had the opportunity to work full-time for 18 years on Christian worship -- a privilege I owe to a dean and seminary community who have steadfastly considered this an important priority.

Obstacles to Revitalization

The chief problems inhibiting revitalization of worship in American churches are ignorance and indifference. Ignorance of the possibilities available leaves the average congregation captive to the familiar. Churchgoers really have few options in worship because they do not know of any. Ignorance produces insecurity; insecurity resists change. A pastor who feels insecure in this area will be the last one to risk any innovations that might not prove popular.

Lest this observation be dismissed as just a superficial matter of techniques, let me immediately say that such ignorance applies most emphatically on the level of sacramental theology and liturgical theology in general. It amazes me that the break-throughs in Roman Catholic sacramental theology of the early 1960s remain almost unknown among American Protestants. The most recent Protestant book on the subject ignores the contributions of Edward Schillebeeckx, Piet Schoonenberg, Joseph M. Powers and others.

I see little hope, for a revitalized use of the sacraments without some basic reflection on how and why they function. Liturgical theology is a newer term, reflecting the sense that the words and actions of worship are a vital locus theologicus, one which ought to mirror the church’s understanding of its faith at various times and places; past and present. This approach enables us to ask how adequately our worship reflects the faith we profess. The results (cf. my article “Our Apostasy in Worship,” The Christian Century, September 28, 1977) are frequently discouraging.

Ignorance, then, is a real obstacle to worship revitalization. But equally foreboding is indifference. Renewal of worship is not given a high priority in most Protestant churches in this country. When one does workshops on worship, one soon discovers that pastors over 40 years of age or serving congregations of more than 1,000 members either have more important things to do than attend such confabs or else do not need any help. Another observation from such workshops: the number of laypeople in attendance slowly but surely is overtaking the number of clergy. One hears all too often such statements as “I wish our pastor were here” or “How can we get our pastor interested in worship?” If we could answer that question adequately, we could change a lot of things. The problem is how to spark interest instead of allowing pastors to remain indifferent,

The Seminaries’ Role

What resources must we marshal for overcoming ignorance and indifference about public worship? Our first, line of attack, it seems to me, ought to come from the seminaries. Unfortunately, most are weak in this area themselves and poorly equipped to lead the charge. How many seminaries still claim to equip for church ministry students who are not forced to wrestle in a systematic way with what and how the church communicates when it assembles for worship?

It is fine to teach students how to baptize a baby, but we are not accomplishing much unless we require them to think through why a baby ought (or ought not) to be baptized. It is not a good idea to pick babies up by the ears or to drop them, but the history and theology of infant baptism are far more important than the technique, though not unrelated to the method used. I find it ironic that most seminaries require a course in homiletics to help the student get through 20 minutes of the service (the sermon), but the same schools assume that he or she can wing it through the other 40 minutes without serious study and reflection.

Liturgical studies, or Christian worship, is a discipline that brings together theological, historical and practical data. As one studies the constitutive elements of a classical eucharistic prayer, for example; Christian doctrine, church history and one’s knowledge of people are fused. One might even say that when a student is capable of writing a good eucharistic prayer, he or she may be ready to graduate. But most people leave seminary these days without the slightest notion as to what is essential and what is fluff in a eucharistic prayer, even though the church has no older form of proclamation of its faith.

Most seminaries are still sadly derelict in providing rigorous instruction in Christian worship for those preparing for church ministry. One can, however, point with some joy to the fact that almost half of the United Methodist seminaries now engage fulltime staff in the area of Christian worship, not jus. people with time left over from teaching church music, church history, or homiletics. But what about therest of the United Methodist seminaries? And what about scores of other ecumenical and denominational seminaries in this country and in Canada?

Obviously one of the problems is finding qualified people to teach liturgical studies. The North American Academy of Liturgy, the professional organization for the field, has about 225 members, of whom ‘80 per cent are Roman Catholic. Most of these Catholic liturgy professors are products of paragraph 15 of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, which inaugurated a crash program some 15 years ago. Men were trained at Trier, Paris and Rome to fill seminary posts. Now men and women are being trained in liturgical studies at Notre Dame and at the Catholic University of America.

The Notre Dame graduate program has attracted a few Protestant students. A graduate program in liturgical studies has been launched at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, with special strengths in liturgy and the arts and in liturgy and Christian spirituality. Another program has been assembled at Drew University and neighboring institutions which is particularly strong in Reformation and modern church history;

These programs are important resources, and it is to be hoped that they will attract sufficient students, especially women. It will be at least two years before we can produce our first Protestant woman with a Ph.D. in the field; ironically, the Roman Catholics are considerably ahead. But the first Catholic woman graduate will not be able to celebrate mass, even though she will know more about the mass than most priests do.

Denominational Resources and Workshops

Our second line of attack must be mounted by denominational worship agencies. I “call these the “liturgical establishment.” They provide extremely valuable services in marshaling resources, producing new service books, and holding workshops. Yet it is amazing how many denominations operate without such support services. If one stops to think how severely handicapped denominational efforts in, say, Christian education and missions would be without national staff, then one gets an idea of just how vital staff is in the area of worship.

Yet somehow the United. Church of Christ, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the Baptists do without national staff in worship, though not in other areas of ministry. Lutherans took the lead in this field (back in 1955), but have since been joined by American Roman Catholics, Presbyterians. United Methodists and Episcopalians. The amount of volunteer work that such staffs can coordinate is extraordinary; the Lutherans are doing 750 workshops around the country to introduce their new service book.

Workshops themselves form our third line of attack on ignorance and indifference. Those of us who conduct them have come to expect that about a hundred people -- clergy and laity -- will show up for a one- or two-day regional workshop on worship. We need more trained personnel to augment the efforts of the few experienced leaders. But it is essential for everyone in the liturgical apostolate to get out in the field and do workshops. One learns much from the questions that are asked, and even more from those not asked. Three years or so ago, people stopped asking me about new ways to do weddings. But three years ago few Protestants had had experience with using a lectionary. Now, everyone has questions about the lectionary, and they are good questions.

More advantage should be taken of the workshops offered through the two centers for pastoral liturgy, one at Notre Dame and the other at the Catholic University of America. For 30 years the Liturgical Conference has been holding liturgical weeks, and these should attract thousands more participants. The annual Institute of Liturgical Studies at Valparaiso University, Indiana, is almost as old and takes place just before Lent each year. Perhaps Protestant funding might be developed to establish an ecumenical center for pastoral liturgy or, preferably, to help strengthen the existing Roman Catholic centers. Continuing education programs of various types could be developed in this area. It would be essential to keep them current.

One of the best-organized constituencies is that of church musicians. In several denominations they have professional societies with membership in the thousands. For years. they have been quietly doing significant work to upgrade church music. Though many of these efforts have had little contact with liturgical scholarship, there is indication that, in the past few years, musicians and liturgists have reached a level of talking to and learning from each

Other that is unprecedented. We are hearing less about “performing” liturgical music and more about the importance of ensuring musical liturgy -- a happy omen indeed.

Several organizations concerned with church architecture have now combined into the new Interfaith Forum on Religion, Art and Architecture. Discourse between design professionals and liturgists has been lengthy and cordial. National and regional conventions and publications have been excellent. But frequently this cooperation fails to carry over into the local situation. A congregation builds without thinking to hire a liturgical consultant, though it is certain to employ a heating consultant. One wonders which is more important -- the basic function of the building or its temperature. As a result, we produce more unplanned obsolescence in church architecture than in American car manufacturing.

New Service Materials

Our fourth line of attack on the impediments to worship revitalization is through the medium of print. This approach takes many forms, in particular the production of service materials, catechetical materials, articles and books.

We are, in 1979, coming to the end of a Period that has seen the production of new service materials. The post-Vatican II explosion in liturgical revision is drawing to a close. For a few denominations there may be second-generation services yet to come, but that is unlikely in most instances. The United Methodist Church is the one major exception.

For the most part, the revisions of Roman Catholic liturgical books mandated by Vatican II have been completed, save small portions of the Ritual and Pontifical. English translations have been completed and approved on most items. The prospect that second-generation revisions of these will be made seems rather remote at this point, though much of the work of the past decade appears blatantly sexist to present-day eyes. Surveys show that the great majority of Catholics approve the changes. That fact may make major revisions even less likely than strong disapproval would have.

This year will undoubtedly bring final approval by the Episcopal General Convention of the Book of Common Prayer on the basis of the Proposed Book of 1976. A few minor changes in the lectionary may ensue, but liturgical revision among Episcopalians is probably finished for another generation or more. (The prayer book was last revised in 1928). Last year saw the culmination of many years of labor in the publication of the new Lutheran Book of Worship, prepared by all the major Lutheran churches in this country and Canada. The interval since publication of the last major service book for most Lutherans has been 20 years.

The United Church of Christ produced Services of the Church as eight pamphlets in a ring-bound cover in 1969 and included much of the material in the Hymnal of the United Church of Christ in 1974. The major Presbyterian bodies brought forth the new Worshipbook in 1970 and (with hymns) in 1972. My general impression is that the UCC and Presbyterian materials have not had widespread use as pew books. This underutilization seems to have been due largely to the lack of much catechesis -- clergy that is interpretation to clergy and laity of the hymnbook committees’ decisions and of how to use the books. Their low use is a reflection not of their quality but of the tactics with which they were introduced. Careful interpretation of new service books is, it seems, almost as important as the preparation of their contents.

The United Methodist Church is the only major. denomination still in the process of producing new services. Though the new Supplemental Worship Resources (SWR) do not abolish existing materials, they provide quality alternatives, as well as offering new resources where none existed previously. Of the Supplemental Worship Resources, four have been published with great success: The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper; A Service of Baptism, Confirmation, and Renewel; Word and Table; and Ritual in a New Day. SWR books on the Christian year, weddings, funerals, and Lent and Easter will follow this fall. With the United Methodist Church currently the only major denomination involved in the field of liturgical revision, there is evidence that some congregations in other denominations are using SWR materials in place of or in addition to their own.

I have already mentioned the importance of workshops and catechetical publications. Instruction for the use of new rites demands massive efforts. The Episcopalians have used the so-odd-volume Prayer Book Studies series as a means of informing clergy and laypeople as to the reasons for changes and of instructing them on how to make the most effective use of the revised liturgies. The Lutheran Contemporary Worship series has functioned in a similar way.

For years, Catholic liturgists have waged impressive campaigns to inform their constituents of impending changes. The 1977 permission for communion in the hand brought forth several well-written leaflets, distributed by the millions. It was only the latest instance of a major assault on ignorance -- one that relied on audiovisual technology, the use of commentators at mass, and constant recourse to the Catholic press to prevent changes from coming as surprises and ambushes. No wonder popular approval has been so widespread; it was no accident. And no wonder the Presbyterian revisions, far less radical in character, but with little catechesis, never got off the ground! Forewarned, Methodists are being careful to publish nothing without full introduction and commentary.

Periodicals and Books

Other forms of publication are vital resources too. Liturgy, issued bimonthly by the Liturgical Conference (810 Rhode Island Avenue, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20018), is scarcely known among American Protestants, though both publication and conference are fully ecumenical. Worship magazine, a bit more scholarly, is also a fully ecumenical bimonthly (St. John’s Abbey Collegeville, Minnesota 56321) and could be used with much profit by any pastor. Modern Liturgy is still heavily Roman Catholic (Box 444, Saratoga, California 95070) but contains many sprightly ideas. Beyond these are substantial periodicals for church musicians, such as the bimonthly Pastoral Music (1029 Vermont Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005) or, for architects, the biannual Faith, 6’ Form (1777 Church Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 2006).

None of these magazines has even begun to tap its potential audience. Liturgy, the most broadly practical of them all, ought to have ten times its present circulation of 4,500. When people ask me what they can do to keep up with the field or to sustain the interest generated by a good workshop, my answer is: subscribe, read and use the appropriate periodicals.

Only within recent years have book publishers learned that they can make money with solid books on worship. I remember, a dozen years ago, being told by an editor with the best list on worship in the business that his firm had never made money on any of these books. Now there demonstrably is a market, though it still has a long way to go. Look at any pastor’s professional library: you will see recent books on pastoral care, possibly a few on preaching, and maybe a couple on church administration. How many pastors keep up with a field as rapidly changing as worship? Many have never established this habit, though they would be embarrassed to be so far behind in other areas of ministry. They do not seem to know how restricted and insecure they remain if they have not recently done any deep probing beneath the surface in worship. We can hope that this situation is changing; my denomination has mailed out (by request) thousands of copies of a basic bibliography on worship.

There is a vital need for quality scholarship as we reallocate more of our intellectual resources to liturgical studies. Now that all the major U.S. churches which follow a lectionary are using basically the same one, we can expect that the contributions from biblical studies will continue to increase. Since such a large part of most services is built around the lectionary, the finest biblical scholarship can have a great impact on the totality of the service through new commentaries and other resources. Studies in cultural anthropology have, become most useful to us in understanding ritual behavior, and theologians in the past decade have been discussing these studies more than ever before. The value of historical studies, of course, remains basic, particularly those of the pre-Nicene church. Surely our campaigns will never be stronger than our intelligent efforts.

We have, then, four lines of attack: seminaries, denominational agencies, workshops and publications. At present none of these is fully mobilized, and none is likely to be until worship receives a higher priority in the allocation of personnel and finances in the denominations and institutions of American Christianity. In a few cases there is a slight duplication of efforts; one might argue for fewer organizations and publications, though both are near minimal now. Not much coalescence is possible without serious damage to existing efforts. There are no significant ecumenical efforts to fill in for denominational failures to undergird local churches with national staff and resources. Those denominations will have to make political decisions as to whether to give their troops out in the field the logistical support they need to succeed in working for worship revitalization or to let them flounder on their own.

Finally, the source of worship revitalization, as in all aspects of our ministry, is in the hands of God. But God gives us the means to serve God and others. It is up to us to make the fullest use of the polity, the money and the people we have so that the praise of God by assembled congregations may be the summit and source of the church’s life.

Moving Christian Worship Toward Social Justice

Christian public worship is an important form of social control -- a way to influence people. That may sound paradoxical or even evil, but until we admit that worship involves control, we cannot easily discuss worship's relation to justice.

Social control does not necessarily apply to private worship or personal devotion, although it can, because such worship is often heavily shaped by community practice. Whether in spontaneous or structured prayer, an individual worships privately -- in isolation from others -- more or less at his or her own pace and convenience.

Public worship is different. Because it is a social act, certain constraints are necessary. Social control in worship is not intentional or deliberate; worship leaders do not have a sinister desire to manipulate people. It is simply that in order for people to celebrate and work together, certain conventions are necessary, even if they may frequently limit or restrain individual self-expression.

In this context of inevitable social control, its effectiveness and use must be examined in light of Christian concepts of social justice. Justice within the church's worshiping community ascribes full human worth to all members of the body of Christ. Or, defined in still older terms, justice accords to each member of the body that which is his or her due. Paul indicates that by baptism, all participate in the one body with "no sense of division in the body, but that all its organs might feel the same concern for one another. If one organ suffers, they all suffer together. If one flourishes, they all rejoice together" (I Cor. 12:25-26).

Worship enforces social control in several inevitable ways. First, the basis for most Christian worship is orderly repetition; Sunday morning services are highly predictable. Most churches' order of worship rarely changes: the lessons are familiar, people prefer hymns they know, and even the sermon is usually quite predictable.

Second, Christian worship is based on the rehearsal of familiar, common memories that the community cherishes. These memories are structured on weekly and yearly cycles perpetuating recurring commemorations. Part of worship's power is precisely this ability to reinforce familiar patterns of belief and activity. But herein lies a danger: when something unjust occurs, it is likewise reinforced by constant repetition. Injustices, then, are rarely single occurrences because worship's repetitive nature usually guarantees that perpetuation.

An important dimension of worship is its divine context. Worship is not an indifferently or casually performed activity such as going to a movie or concert; the worshiper attends a service in expectation of being in the presence of the Living God. Thus, what is done in church occurs in a different context from that of the rest of life -- namely, in deliberate consciousness of God's presence.

This means that consciously or, more often, unconsciously, what we experience in church gains a sanction unequaled in the other aspects of our lives. This can actually lead to social injustices. I am reminded of a wedding in a large Presbyterian church in Dallas where the minister, in the course of prayer, informed the Almighty that it was the duty of the bride to stay home and provide a comfortable environment for her husband, who in turn must provide "shelter and raiment" for his wife. This type of act (which Henry Sloane Coffin once called "bouncing it off the Almighty") involves sanctifying by context a social pattern that is, to say the least, highly questionable in terms of justice.

Social patterns from everyday life tend to be taken for granted in worship; i.e., what is normal in daily life becomes normal in worship. But what is normal in worship has a way of becoming, in the course of time, normative. Thus it is not surprising that until recently, it was simply assumed that ushers had to be middle-aged men just because they had always been. And this norm still has not been seriously challenged in many congregations.

Those marginalized by society are likely to be marginalized in worship. Until recently this situation included women, and it still includes children. Those whose full human worth is likely to be denied outside of worship are almost certain to be similarly marginalized within worship. Quite frequently, this happens despite the community's own rhetoric . It is common in most churches to baptize infants and children and then immediately to "excommunicate" them. The churches justify this practice by implying that one has to be able to think like an adult -- i.e., conceptually -- in order to commune. Even though children perceive relationships, especially inclusion and exclusion, at very early ages, this fact is disregarded. The refusal to mean what we say about baptism's inclusiveness is a reflection of a society that denies children full citizenship.

Many of the actions of worship both reflect and reinforce social values. Again, children provide an apt example. Frequently, with good intentions, we exploit children for their cuteness -- witness the children's sermon, evoking chuckles from the adults but blushes of humiliation and confusion from the children. Also, what we wear in worship is an important form of conveying values. For example, by dressing clergy in robes with padded shoulders, we make athletic appearance important to ministry.

Roles are an equally important means of stressing control. Who does the important things in worship? A very good way to distinguish a minister who presides from one who dominates is to observe how often he or she sits down; sitting, in effect, delegates leadership to others. A minister who is on his or her feet for the entire service is probably dominating the entire service. Leadership style suggests how the minister relates to the community in general.

We have seen in recent years how seriously spoken words suggest whom we value in society. But there is much more to this tendency than critiques of gender-exclusive language. Those qualities and actions of God which we choose to praise are indicative of our attitudes. It is no accident that the most heated quarrel in editing the new United Methodist Hymnal revolved around the use or rejection of "Onward, Christian Soldiers," a hymn deemed too militaristic for some. Words said and sung week after week shape the ways in which we perceive reality, showing whether -- and how -- we try to create solutions for the world's problems.

As a human activity, worship is not, then, immune as a source of injustice, but it can also be a source for justice. What it cannot be is neutral. We cannot deal with these matters in abstraction, as if worship were practiced everywhere in exactly the same ways. Rather, we can look at what happens in any particular congregation and propose ways for working toward more just forms of worship. We might do this through a four-stage process involving observation, analysis, normative judgment and reform, which moves from practice to theology and back to practice dialogically.

The first step is observation. This is not as simple as it sounds; most worshipers and worship leaders are so anesthetized by familiarity that they perceive little of what others do during worship. To be a competent observer, one has to cast aside all assumptions and attend worship as if unfamiliar with its conventions. Assuming this attitude may be difficult even for a nonchurchgoer.

One soon learns that many different dynamics are going on in worship according to age, interest level and role. The ways people arrive, leave and interact with each other are important dynamics. The process of observation examines whether the community does what it means. However, the meaning of what it does is not always clear even to itself. Observation involves learning to see and hear the way the community is expressing its faith.

Observation leads to analysis. We must look at the actions, roles and words we have observed in terms of faith and ethics; i.e., search for the hidden message. This process involves checking for self-contradictory statements, because our actions often contradict our words. For example, if we proclaim that everyone is welcome to worship with us in a church approached by 21 steps, we are ignoring the disabled and the elderly.

There are other, more subtle messages in worship. The choice of Scripture readings. hymns and prayers is important. Presbyterians found in a survey that the average minister has 65 favorite texts that are imposed on congregations year after year. No minister deliberately limits it congregation to his or her own grasp of Scripture, but most do so unintentionally. It is necessary to analyze every segment of the congregation to see if all are given full due.

Analysis gives way to formulating normative judgments. This is the stage at which we must ask. "Is it just? " Are we engaging in practices that marginalize some or elevate a few at the expense of others? If so, we need to look for just alternatives. It is one thing to flag an unjust practice; it is quite another to find a just alternative. (It is all too easy to substitute one injustice for another, such as changing all male pronouns for God to female forms.)

Bringing about change in worship patterns threatens many people. Some older people were offended by the latest effort at revision of the Book of Common Prayer, feeling that because they would not live to use the new prayer book, their opinions were likely to be discounted. Even in producing changes that lead to more just practices, there is a danger of unjust methods; ingrained patterns must be changed without discounting their adherents. This often involves careful consultation so that these people are heard and respected. One does not change his or her way of addressing God after 70 years without feeling threatened. Therefore, normative judgments have to take into account where people are, not where they should be or where we wish them to be.

Finally comes the stage of reform of actual practice. Here we use what we have observed, analyzed and judged in order to shape a more just approach. In every case, there is a spiral of ongoing action and theory, for we shall discover tomorrow what we missed today. Thus there is no guarantee of finding completely just forms of worship; we can simply hope that reformed practices bring about more justice than those they replace.

Fundamentally, all change needs to follow teaching. Only when people see reasons for change are they likely to endorse and participate in it rather than yield to it as yet another form of coercion. This means that ministers have no right to surprise people, even if to correct obvious injustices, for worshipers have a right to understand why they are being asked to change and then to assimilate such reasons fully. This means that worship reform moves slowly, but if worship is for all the people, this reality is inevitable.

Because of its nature, worship cannot escape being a form of social control. But it can avoid promoting injustice in the community and help to move both church and society toward justice. This goal requires diligent effort and constant vigilance. By observation, analysis, judgment and reform, worship can become a force for shaping a community based on justice.

Washed in the Blood? A Search for Relevant Symbols of Salvation

THE DILEMMA

Have you ever found yourself in difficulty when you tried to explain to someone why being "washed in the blood of the Lamb" (Rev. 7:14 ) should make one "whiter than snow" as that old gospel hymn puts it? A Japanese church member once complained to me that not only was the concept confusing, but that all this talk about blood was repugnant to the Japanese mind. Even for one who has been brought up "in the faith" a bit of reflection makes one admit that the shades of difference between propitiation and expiation or between redemption and ransom are rather vague in one's mind. In fact, most of these symbols of salvation, growing out of a different time in history seem rather distant or even irrelevant to us today.

This has bothered me through the years because when we try to communicate the experience of salvation we can only use analogies, symbols and poetic images. Unfortunately, most of the traditional ones come from another era, another culture, a time a place and a context which seem only distantly related to us in these modern days whether we have been brought up in the West or the East. How can we find more relevant ways to communicate the Gospel?

Perhaps the best way to start is to look at the symbols of salvation used in the Bible. I have noted many of them and tried to categorize them under various themes and patterns in the following chart. You will note the Dramatic Stories are like little vignettes with fairly clear plots. The Metaphorical Statements are shorter word pictures, and the Direct Sayings are simple statements of witness to the experience of being saved by God through Jesus Christ.

There is talk about a slain lamb, freed slaves, a high priest offering himself as a sacrifice on the altar, the canceling of a bond and nailing it to a cross in public, - - all of this and more can seem quite bizarre today. And yet these are obviously the efforts of people who have found themselves so caught up in a "happening" that they have searched all areas of their personal experience and their religious and cultural background to find ways to somehow communicate this great event in their lives to others.

Look at the following chart and then we can analyze it further:

SOME SOTERIOLOGICAL SYMBOLS IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

Peyton L Palmore, III, February, 1999

I. DRAMATIC STORIES

A. Symbol Used	B. Man’s Condition	C. God’s Work	D. Result: Man’s New Condition	E. References
1. Jewish Temple Cultus	a) We have offended against God and cannot approach him without a sacrifice or offering being made for us.	a) Christ, the High Priest offers the perfect sacrifice on our behalf.	a) We are enabled to approach, praise and serve God.	a) Heb. 2:17 4:14 - 16
	b) Same as above.	b) Christ becomes the spotless lamb and gives Himself as our expiation or guilt offering.	b) Our offence is taken away by the propitiation of the blood of the lamb.	b) Rom. 3:25 Eph. 1:7 I Pet. 1:18–19 Rev. 1:5; 5:9
	c) We are unclean in our sin and cannot come into the pure holy of holies before the Lord.	c) We and our garments are "washed in the blood of the lamb."	c) We are made clean, our robes are made white, and we can come before the throne of the Lord.	c) I Cor. 6:11 Rev. 7:14

2. Jewish Law and God’s Judgement	As sinners we are condemned under the Law. The wages of sin are death.	Christ is punished in our stead and our sins are vicariously expiated or atoned for.	Through this expiation, we are justified and freed from the condemnation of the Law, and redeemed from evil ways. We are "put right with God."	Rom. 3:24; 4:25 7:21; 8:2 I Cor. 15:3 II Cor. 5:21 Gal. 3:13; Col. 2:14 Tit. 2:14 I Pet. 3:18 I Jn. 2:2; 4:10

3. The Slave System	We are slaves to sin and slaves to the Law. No slave is able to free himself by himself.	We are freed from the condition of slavery by being bought back, ransomed or redeemed through the payment of the life of Christ.	Since we are freed from our slavery, we are free to serve our new master, our redeemer.	Mark 10:45 Rom. 7:21; I Tim. 2:6 I Cor. 6:20; 7:23 I Pet. 1:18f Rev. 5:9

4. Legal Document	There is a bond which stands against us.	God marks out or cancels this bond against us and then nails it to the cross for public view.	We are free from the bond against us.	Col. 2:14

5. Demonology	We are under the influence and domination of the Devil, death, evil spirits and darkness.	Christ battles with the powers of darkness and conquers. Thus He becomes Lord of all the powers and king of all lords. He is "Christus Victor."	Through Christ’s victory we are freed from the power of the devil and can live a life of victory and power in Christ.	Jn. 12:31; 16:11 Acts 26:18 I Cor. 15:24f II Cor. 2:14 Eph. 6:12; Col. 2:15 Heb. 2:14f

6. Historic Eons	In the old eon because of the fall of Adam, all men were under the sway of sin and death.	God sent Christ, the new Adam through whose perfect obedience the new age is ushered in.	Through the new Adam, we are welcomed into the new age in which we can obey God.	Rom. 5:12-19 I Cor. 15:21f

7. Father-son	a) We leave the house of our Father.	a) God loves us and patiently and eagerly awaits our return.	a) We remember the love of God, come to ourselves, we repent and return to God.	a) Lk. 14:11 ff
	b) We are prisoners of the Law which is our custodian.	b) By "putting on Christ" in faith, we are made one with Him and thus become true sons of God and freed from the custodian.	b) As fellow heirs, we are freed from distinctions between Greek and Jew, slave and free.	b) Gal. 3:23-29
	c) As minors we are under guardians and are no better than slaves to the elemental spirits of the universe.	c) In the fullness of time God sends His Son who redeems us from the law and we are adopted as sons.	c) Since we are sons of the true God, we can cry "Abba! Father!"	c) Rom. 8:14-15, 23, 29 Gal. 4:1-7

8. Lost and Found	a) We are like sheep which are lost from the fold.	a) The shepherd finds the sheep.	a) We are once more safely enfolded with the other sheep.	a) Mt. 18:12-14 Lk. 15:3-7 I Pet. 2:25
	b) We are like a lost coin.	b) The woman looks for and finds the coin.	b) We are found and picked up by God.	b) Lk. 15:8-10

II. METAPHORICAL STATEMENTS

A. Symbol Used	B. Man’s Condition	C. God’s Work	D. Result: Man’s New Condition	E. References
1. From Death to Life	We are dead in sin.	Through God’s act of raising Christ from the dead, He raises us also.	Since we are "in Christ" we are given new life.	Rom. 6:11 Eph. 2:1-6, Col. 2:13 James 5:20

2. New Creation	We are of the old creation.	Through Christ, the New being; we are made new.	The old being has passed away and we are made new "in Christ."	II Cor. 5:17 Eph. 2:10

3. Becoming one with Christ	We have no connection with God. We are estranged.	Through Christ, God comes to dwell in us and we dwell in God. We are reconciled.	Through being "In Christ" we are made one with Him.	Jn. 15:1-10, 17:21,23 I Cor. 6:15,17 I Jn. 4:13

4. Grafting a Branch onto a Tree	We are shoots from a wild olive tree	God in his kindness has grafted us into a cultivated olive tree.	We share in the nourishing sap from the cultivated olive tree: Israel.	Rom. 11:17-24

5. Flesh and Spirit	As natural man, we are of the flesh and we cannot have fellowship with God who is Spirit.	God sends His Son in the likeness of our own sinful flesh in order to deal with sin.	We are freed and empowered to put to death the works of the flesh, and live directed by the Spirit.	Rom. 8:1-14 I Cor. 2:14; 3:3 Gal. 5:16-25

III. DIRECT SAYINGS

A. Symbol Used. God’s WorkE. References
1. Moral Example	We are self centered and turn our backs on God.	Christ give us the example of perfect obedience to God.	We are enabled to follow this example of perfect obedience to God	Rom. 5:19; 6:10-11 Phil. 2:8

2. From Idols to the Worship of God	We serve false gods in our daily natural life.	God shows us His true self through the revelation of the Incarnation in Christ.	We can serve the true and living God.	I Thes. 1:9

3. Estrangement and Reconciliation	We are separated from God through estrangement.	We are drawn close to God through the sacrifice of His Son.	We are reconciled to God, and made to be His ambassadors.	Rom. 5:10-11 II Cor. 5:18-20 Eph. 2:12-16

4. Forgiveness	We have sinned against God.	a) God forgives us.	a) We are completely forgiven.	a) Mt. 6:13-14 Lk. 15:1-16; Col. 1:14
		b) Christ gives us the power to have faith that we are forgiven.	b) Through believing that we are forgiven, we are saved.	b) Lk. 7:36-50 Col. 2:12

5. Disciple and Master	We are without a Master and wander in confusion.	Christ died and lived, that He might be Lord of the dead and the living.	Whether we live or we die, we are the Lord’s.	Mt. 9:36 Rom. 14:7-9

THE THEOLOGY OF SOTERIOLOGY

As people wrestled with these stories and symbols down through the years, key theological terms have developed to describe the different concepts. These terms are not ordinarily used these days but they can be helpful to clarify our own thinking.

Propitiation puts the emphasis on what happens to God. It is based on the Old Testament concept that a sacrifice must be made to appease the anger of God before we can approach Him. In Hebrews 2:17 and 4:14-16 the Jewish cultus of the temple is brought to mind and Christ is seen as the supreme sacrifice which assuages God's anger and enables us to come before Him.

Expiation puts the focus on what happens with us in a legal context. As sinners, we have violated God's law and must pay a penalty before we can come before Him. The many passages listed under I-2 in the chart show that this is one of the most used soteriological symbols in the scriptures. Christ has been punished instead of us, an atonement has been made, a reconciliation with God has been achieved for us and we can once more come before Him.

Ransom and Redemption describes the process by which we have been saved within the context of the slave system so prevalent for so long in most societies. A price has been paid on our behalf and we have been freed from our bonds of slavery and can now walk as new men. (see Chart I, 3-4)

Reconciliation is best illustrated by the poignant story of the returning Prodigal Son. (see Chart I, 7 and Chart III, 3)

SOTERIOLOGICAL SYMBOLS FOR TODAY

Each of us within our own personal context find a language to express our relationship with God in existential terms. This may involve the creation of new words and phrases such as Paul Tillich who originated and popularized the term for God as "The Ground of Our Being" in this ever shifting and unstable life in which we find ourselves. But even this is rooted in the many Old Testament references to God as being the rock of our salvation and evokes memories of the words in that old Gospel hymn: "On Christ the solid Rock I stand, all other ground is shifting sand..."

At-One-Ment: For myself, a reinterpretation of the term "atonement" has come to be the most helpful metaphor. Although it originated from the context of the Jewish Temple Cultus (see Chart I, 1 above) the term can also be used as a symbol for the story of the Prodigal Son if it is broken up into its constituent parts: At-One-Ment: the state of being at one with the father. Many of us find ourselves estranged from others or the society around us, drifting rootlessly through life. But through the recognition that God is the Lord of all life who awaits my return to this "ground of my being" and who relates me in a reconciling way to the world around me, I am made whole again. I feel "at one" with myself and with the world.

Thus, although some of these old soteriological symbols can seem confusing, it can be helpful to look at them once more with an eye to finding more relevant metaphors for ourselves and for communicating the Good News to others today.

The Case for Catechism

Paula is 19 and a sophomore at a well-respected private university. She lives in an apartment several miles from the main campus. On this particular day, she splashes on a bit of French perfume after putting on her grunge clothes, jumps in her Toyota, and turns on a tape of reggae music as she drives to school. After attending classes in Eastern religion and the 19^th-century English novel, she walks down the main street of this small university town with her new friend, Helen Kim to one of their favorite eating spots, Hoagie Haven, which is owned by Greek immigrants and run by Guatemalans.

While raised in her Presbyterian church back home and confirmed just four years ago, Paula no longer believes that Christianity is the only way to God. She is not even sure that it is the best way to God. As she puts it: "What you believe is a matter of what part of the world you happen to be born in and where your life journey takes you. You have to be open to what life teaches you. I don’t believe the same things I did when I was still living at home, and I don’t imagine I’ll believe the things I do now in ten years."

While we do not know where Paula’s journey will take her, we do know that as she enters young adulthood the church does not mean much to her. She lives in a world of intellectual relativism and cultural eclecticism.

Paula’s context is the church’s context. There is overwhelming evidence that mainline Protestant churches have been slow to respond to the challenges this context presents. Research repeatedly has found a mass exodus of young people like Paula from the church during late adolescence and young adulthood. As Dean Hoge, Benton Johnson and Donald Luidens have documented in Vanishing Boundaries: The Religion of Mainline Protestant Baby Boomers, many young church members have departed, never to return. Based on a study of 500 Presbyterians confirmed in their youth, who at the time of the research were between the ages of 33 and 42, the book documents that nearly 50 percent had become firmly ensconced among the religiously "unaffiliated." These were not people still struggling with personal identity issues and zigzagging their way through young adulthood. They had established a permanent life structure, one in which their childhood faith and confirmation vows had been left far behind.

Somewhere along the way, the church failed these people. It failed to provide them with the intellectual and spiritual resources needed in a postmodern world. Of particular importance was its failure to teach the Paulas in its midst the most elementary beliefs and practices of the faith. Research by the George Gallup organization has found an appalling deficit of basic knowledge of the Bible. In one national survey of teenagers, only 35 percent could name all four Gospels, 44 percent did not know how many disciples Jesus had, and 29 percent did not even know what religious event is celebrated at Easter. The future of mainline Protestantism may well depend on its ability to correct the failure this represents.

In light of this reality, I want to make a case for the place of catechism in Paula’s postmodern world. I will not argue that catechism alone will solve the church’s problems. But it is a symbolic point of reform.

The practice of catechetical instruction that emerged out of the Reformation of the 16^th century was shaped by two different strands of thought. One was theological and rested on the Reformers’ convictions about the nature and purpose of the church. The other was educational and grew out of the reforms being instituted by the Renaissance humanists of that era.

The influence of the humanistic educational program on the Reformers is not always recognized. Even a cursory glance, however, at the curriculums of John Calvin’s academy in Geneva and Johannes Sturm’s in Strasbourg reveals its impact. In today’s language, we would call this a "great books" or classical approach to education. Education focused on the study of classic texts that represent authoritative models of good speech and writing. Students internalized these models through imitation and practice. Recitation, for example. was widely used, placing emphasis on memorization and imitation and not on personal creativity.

Drawing on the humanists’ assumptions about teaching and learning, the Reformers viewed the catechism as a kind of classic text to be internalized through imitation and practice. The close association of catechetical instruction with humanistic education has led many educators to question the value of this practice throughout the modern period. At a later point we will take up the continuing validity of this critique.

The Reformers’ theological convictions about the nature and purpose of the church led them to stress the importance of baptismal catechesis in congregational life. Baptismal catechesis had been an important part of the adult catechumenate in the first centuries of the church’s life but had fallen on hard times during the Middle Ages. Martin Luther aimed to rectify this situation.

Luther created a new genre, the catechism, which brought together in a single book the traditional material covered by baptismal catechesis: the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed and the Lord’s Prayer, plus teaching on the sacraments. He ordered this material in a manner that reflected his convictions about the Christian life: first the law (Ten Commandments), then the gospel (Apostles’ Creed), and finally the life of gratitude and dependence on God (Lord’s Prayer). Luther also inaugurated a program of catechetical instruction which he located between the baptism of infants and their later admission to the Lord’s Supper. Teaching of the catechism was to take place in a number of settings: home, school, university and congregation. Teaching in the congregation often included preaching on the catechism during Lent and special catechism classes for children offered by the minister. Following successful mastery of the catechism, children confessed for themselves the faith it represented as part of a special service in which they were admitted to the Lord’s Supper.

The other Reformers followed Luther’s lead, writing their own catechisms and making catechetical instruction an important part of congregational life in virtually every part of the reform movement. Why did they believe this practice was so important? There were three reasons. First, they believed that persons baptized as infants should be given the opportunity to confess the baptismal faith for themselves. They rejected any notion of an "implicit faith"—the acceptance of beliefs on the authority of the church hierarchy. Second, their commitment to Luther’s theological concept of the priesthood of all believers (or its equivalent) led them to view catechetical instruction as a way of equipping the laity to take up the ministries that were properly theirs, providing them with the biblical and theological knowledge necessary to this task.

Finally, the Reformers viewed catechetical instruction as a prerequisite to the mature exercise of individual conscience in pursuit of Christian vocation in the world. By loosening the hold of the medieval penitential system, the Reformers created a space in which Christians were free to follow the dictates of their own conscience. The church’s task was to nurture the conscience of its members in ways that taught them how to seek the mind of Christ in the concrete circumstances of their lives.

The sequence of infant baptism, catechetical instruction and then admission to the Lord’s Table provided a structure for education that dominated most Protestant churches from the Reformation period through the 19^th century. It was gradually weakened, however, by a series of challenges in the modern period. The earliest of these was the Enlightenment’s critique of dogmatic authority. In some corners, teaching of the catechism came to be viewed as the epitome of authoritarian indoctrination. More important in the U.S. was the challenge of the Sunday school movement. Lay-led and evangelical in its theology, this parachurch movement came to shape congregational life over the course of the 19^th century and pushed. catechetical instruction into a secondary position.

By the turn of the 20^th century, moreover, the language of the catechisms seemed increasingly archaic; and questions were being raised about the viability of the theology expressed in the catechisms. Many Presbyterians, for example, no longer found the standard Calvinist teachings on double predestination and limited atonement compelling, and efforts were made to alter the Westminster Shorter Catechism to reflect a "modern" point of view.

Despite these challenges, the pattern of infant baptism/catechetical instruction/admission to the Lord’s Table remained intact through the first two decades of the 20^th century by way of "communicants’ classes" or confirmation programs. But these programs were undermined by two further developments. The first was the rise of modern educational and psychological theory that attacked the basic assumptions of the humanistic education program with which catechetical instruction had long been associated. Briefly put, these emerging fields placed far more emphasis on the active role of the learner in the construction of knowledge and advocated a teaching style that was oriented toward the emerging experience of the child. The text-based methods of humanistic education, which stressed internalizing classic modes of speaking and writing, were portrayed as antichild and authoritarian. Leading voices of the Religious Education Association, established in 1903, were deeply influenced by this critique and began to assail catechetical instruction on exactly these grounds.

A second, more recent development was the decision by most Protestant denominations practicing infant baptism to admit children to the Lord’s Table by virtue of their baptism. This decision disrupted the logic of the older paradigm in which special classes to introduce baptized children to the basic beliefs of the baptismal faith were viewed as a prerequisite to admission.

While some denominations, most notably the Lutheran, continued to offer catechetical instruction as part of their confirmation program, there has been a steady decline in this practice. Annual sales of the Westminster Shorter Catechism, for example, was 130,000 in 1892 but declined to 22,200 by 1938. The decline has continued over the course of this century.

How, in the face of this sustained critique of catechetical instruction, can I advocate its revival? I have three reasons, each of which is directly related to the context faced by Paula and other young people growing up in a postmodern world.

The Reformers’ vision of the church, which led them to establish the practice of catechetical instruction, remains valid in our context. The three theological convictions informing the Reformers’ commitment to catechetical instruction are more important than ever to our efforts to preach and teach the gospel to the Paulas in our midst.

We, too, need to make sure those baptized as infants are given the opportunity to claim the baptismal faith at some point in their lives. Two factors have made this more difficult in our postmodern world: the emergence of a new stage in the lifecycle, adolescence, which focuses on issues of identity formation; and the reality of massive cultural pluralism. Paula faces the task of choosing the faith as never before. She stands in need of an intellectually challenging presentation of the gospel that requires her to think about the faith in a rigorous manner.

We, too, need to empower the laity to view themselves as engaged in ministry and provide them with an adequate biblical and theological vocabulary to envision what this entails. Paula is growing up in a world in which she must master multiple vocabularies and roles located in many different life spheres: the business world, science, the political arena, therapeutic relationships and leisure activities. It is common for the language and values of one sphere to "colonize" others. How can we bemoan the fact that Paula is likely to draw on the expressive values of youth culture or on the languages of therapy and the marketplace to construe the role of religion in her life when we have not given her the opportunity to build an equally powerful theological vocabulary?

We, too, need to nurture and support maturity of individual conscience in the pursuit of worldly vocation. It will not be obvious to Paula that the church has anything to do with her life at school, her political commitments and her career aspirations. The church needs to provide Paula with theological and ethical concepts that stretch beyond the private sphere and provide her with real support in linking faith to life in a postmodern world.

The Reformers’ vision of the nature and purpose of life remains as valid today as ever. In order for it to become a reality in congregations, it may well be that new forms of catechetical instruction will have to be devised. It is not difficult to imagine a catechism for children teaching them the biblical narrative and helping them construct a sense of the whole that goes beyond the bits and pieces of scripture which they typically are taught. Nor is it difficult to imagine new forms of catechetical instruction in conjunction with confirmation, new members classes and officer training. There is no reason that the internalization approaches of humanistic education cannot be replaced by forms of teaching consistent with the best contemporary research on human development and learning.

The massive shift in the ecology of education in the 20^th century has made it more important than ever for congregations to teach their members the basic theological and ethical concepts of the Christian faith. It is useful to recall a simple fact: in years past, much Christian education, including the teaching of the catechism, took place in a wide range of institutions: the home, common school, congregation and university. This is no longer the case.

The church can no longer take it for granted that many institutions are working together to teach the faith to persons like Paula. Indeed, the opposite is often the case. If Paula follows the pattern of the average American child, she will watch 30 hours of television a week and, by the age of 12, will have viewed on TV approximately 100,000 violent episodes and 13,000 people violently destroyed. At her public school, she will receive no Christian education and little moral education. If she follows trends found in every major study of higher education since the 1950s, Paula’s experience of college will have a secularizing impact on her faith, mediating the intellectual relativism and cultural eclecticism that is so much a part of her postmodern world.

Not only must churches assume more of the teaching once performed by other institutions, but they must do so in the face of an increasingly hostile and seductive environment. How can they compete with MTV? Perhaps they should not try. Perhaps the shallowness of the surrounding culture is best exposed by a faith community of moral, spiritual and intellectual depth. Teaching people to think out of a theological tradition, which catechetical instruction at its best should do, is only one small step toward this kind of community. But it is a starting point, especially if viewed as part of a broader effort by the church to establish disciplines and practices which foster a clearer sense of its identity and mission.

We have good reason to rethink the criticism of catechetical instruction issued by early 20^th-century education theorists. The critique of catechisms, as noted above, went hand in hand with a critique of the humanistic educational program with which it was closely associated. Modern educational theory advocated experiential, interactive forms of education. This theoretical turn was widely accepted by the leading figures of the mainline’s teaching ministry—academics, denominational leaders and curriculum writers alike. How well has the church fared under this modern approach? After almost a century of experiential religious education, with its heavy emphasis on process over content, personal creativity over communal identity, and emergent experience over biblical-theological knowledge, it is safe to say that the members of mainline Protestant churches know less about the faith, are more tenuously committed to the church, and are less equipped to make an impact on the surrounding world than they were at the turn of the century.

Recent research in cognitive psychology and communication studies have called into question many of the assumptions on which modern education has been based. It has made it clear, for example, that an emphasis on process over content is grounded in a false dichotomy. Internalizing the language, concepts and communicative norms of a particular field is crucial to the development of competencies in that field (see, for example, P. N. Johnson-Laird, Mental Models: Towards a Cognitive Science of Language, Inference, and Consciousness [Harvard University Press, 19831 and George Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind [University of Chicago Press, 1987]). To put it simply, you cannot think, speak or act unless you have something to think, speak and act with. Unless explicit attention is given to the acquisition of biblical and theological knowledge, the members of the church will not be capable of using the faith to interpret their lives or their world. They will employ concepts from other areas of life in which they do have competence.

Moreover, recent research by Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner has devastated the optimistic assumptions of modern developmental psychology which has set the terms for much modern educational theory (see Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences [Basic Books, 1983] and The Unschooled Mind: How Children Think and How Schools Should Teach [Basic Books, 1991]). Drawing on metaphors of organic growth, modern educational theory has tended to portray development as something that unfolds naturally if the environment provides the right nurture. In the theories of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg, for example, the "higher" stages of cognitive and moral reasoning are thought to provide the human organism with greater adaptive competence.

Gardner, in contrast, has found that development is not a natural process. His research has shown the continuing power of the "unschooled mind" of the five-to-seven-year-old child. People who have achieved a high degree of cognitive sophistication in one domain may make use of relatively simple cognitive strategies in other areas or may resort to such strategies when taken out of contexts with which they are familiar. Students who are capable of writing highly complex papers about World War I, for example, may resort to the level of a Star Wars script when describing the 0. J. Simpson trials. Development does not come naturally or easily. It requires the ongoing support of communities that encourage rigorous, complex thinking in order to offset the continuing lure of the unschooled mind.

This is as true of the theological thinking of faith communities as it is of the thinking of political and scientific communities. Without exposure to practices that help people develop a solid biblical and theological foundation and which encourage them to develop their capacities to think ethically and theologically, the unschooled mind of the child will pull Christian communities and individuals toward simplistic understandings of the faith. Our postmodern world has more than enough of this sort of thinking. It needs mainline Protestantism to provide an alternative.

Such is the case for catechism. This is not a call for a repristinization of past practice. Rather, it is a call for mainline Protestantism to be self-critical about the present state of its teaching ministry and to retrieve what is usable from the past while drawing on the best of contemporary research. Teaching of the catechism is not a cure for the ills currently besetting the church, but it can represent the starting point of a movement toward reforms that are desperately needed.

Community as a Way Of Life

In July 1995 Chicago was wrapped in a deadly heat wave. For days the mercury hovered in the three-digit zone, with heat indices reaching 120 degrees. In that period 739 Chicagoans died of heat-related causes.

Emergency teams reported finding inadequate or nonexistent ventilation in the residences of the dead. Persons living with cardiac or pulmonary weaknesses were the most susceptible. Of course, the elderly were the most susceptible.

What major media accounts failed to report was another deadly killer; the absence of community. The majority of people who died in the heat wave died alone. They had no one checking in on their attic apartments or their windowless lives. No family, friend or neighbor showed up to discover the severity of their plight. Sixty-eight of these individuals died so anonymously that Cook County officials buried them in a mass grave.

The absence of community does not require a heat wave or a cold spell, much less hundreds of deaths, to make its presence known. It surrounds us in a daily way -- in our neighborhoods, our work lives and the anguish of our own souls. We may not always be aware of this void. But the scarcity of a deep sense of community can wreak havoc below the surface of outwardly busy lives, just as it occasionally makes the ultimate claim on an elderly individual living alone. From the ethos of economic life to the chatter of talk radio, our society is busy promoting the appetites and fantasies of the individual more than it is encouraging an investment in the larger aspirations of a community.

"What life have you if you have not life together?" Words of T. S. Eliot from his 1934 play The Rock point to the power of receiving life and nurturing life within the context of relating to other human beings. "There is no life that is not in community. And no community not lived in praise to God," wrote Eliot. When people become aware of the limitations of individualistic thinking and the drawbacks of disengagement from their neighbors, they hunger for alternatives. They yearn for something beyond themselves.

Those with Christian leanings commonly turn to the church, and more specifically, the local congregation. Week by week, individuals gather together voluntarily in congregations, often with high expectations for experiencing what they cannot locate in their solitary lives. The church’s business, after all, has everything to do with relationship, putting people in touch with each other and with God. So who wouldn’t expect to find a profound sense of community there?

Surprisingly, a richly textured communal spirit is absent in many congregations. There may be experiences aplenty of social togetherness. And friendliness may be an abundant part of all these experiences. But this is not the same as participating in and being deeply entwined with a spiritually grounded community. The two should not be confused. Inhabiting the same ecclesiastical space for an hour on Sunday morning is not the same as belonging to a community where your presence truly matters to others and their presence truly matters to you.

The difference is often detectable in the very way that a church member may express her congregational affiliation; "I go to that church on Brady Street" is very different from "I belong to a great community of people, and we call ourselves St. Paul Lutheran Church."

A communal spirit blooms where people are deeply in touch with one another, thriving because of the faithful interaction with one another. Outwardly, members of a congregation may have little in common. Inwardly, they can be touched by the possibility that they have something to learn from each other. Broad friendship, mutuality of purpose and an abiding care for one another are all by-products of a spiritually grounded community that is working together. The way in which members of a congregation reproduce the love of God through genuine hospitality and a love for one another will indicate whether they are indeed the body of Christ or simply a religious club.

Every congregation has its supply of believers who would love nothing more than to cultivate their own private spirituality by taking home that beloved hymn refrain or sermon quip to benefit their personal life. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this private eagerness for spiritual nurture. But as soon as personal edification becomes the primary focus for "attending" church, individualism begins to infect the health of the congregation and the possibility of a grander sense of true community.

Holiness is born out of communities not solitary lives. Nothing in a pastor’s portfolio compares with the responsibility of molding a communal identity. Helping people invest their lives and confidence in one another for the sake of a common dream and a shared mission is a tall order. But the gospel itself provides continuous cues for demonstrating how people who are very different can be drawn together to appreciate one another.

Given all of the popular understandings of what a church is supposed to provide in an age of options, a pastor who delights in creating a shared sense of meaning is a pastor worth following. When he or she grasps the difference between a richly textured communal spirit and mere social togetherness that is the result of sharing the same street address, the possibilities for that congregation’s service to the world rise exponentially.

John Courtney Murray once described the early church as a ‘conspiracy." By that he meant that ancient believers "breathed together" (con: "with," and spire: "breath"). It wasn’t sinister behavior, of course, that held these Christians together. It was their shared sense of grace, their breathing together as the people of God. The contemporary church has exactly this same potential and same requirement. Effective pastoral leaders will have God’s people breathing together, modeling a common way of life that is good for the world. They will walk people into what Will Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas have referred to as "a community capable of sustaining Christian virtue." Such a community of togetherness, they reason, will "enable us to be better people than we could have been if left to our own devices."

A people who breathe together can afford to be diverse. Uniformity does not constitute biblical community. If anything, it threatens it. Henri Nouwen coined the all-important definition of community as "that place where the person you least want to live with always lives." A resurrection-minded community will not emerge so long as individuals are busy surrounding themselves with only those people with whom they wish to live. Great congregations form where people with a dizzying variety of backgrounds and experiences take an interest in the mystery and the mess of each other’s lives. The pastoral challenge is to give shape to this particularly diverse body.

One of the apostle Paul’s determinative moves was to take the diversity of the church and, through hard work and grace, form a spirited community. This was how he believed the wisdom of God would get through to the world: "That through the church," he noted, "the wisdom of God in its rich variety might now be made known" (Eph. 3:10). It is the rareness of such a body that captures the attention of the world. The manner with which this body or organism begins to move together has more than eye-catching appeal. It is also happens to be the church’s most effective way for transforming the world.

William H. Whyte, a leader in the study of modern urban street life, spent decades studying the patterns of diverse people on the move. His fascinating analyses of crowd behavior on New York City streets, using time-lapse photography and extensive notes and graphs, are published in his 1988 book City: Rediscovering the Center. Whyte discovered that pedestrians walking on busy sidewalks have a natural way of avoiding collisions with one another. Without even realizing it, they form a mass or a crowd that is both smooth and efficient. "They give and they take, at once aggressive and accommodating." The sidewalk scene comes alive with movement and color -- people walking quickly, walking slowly, skipping up steps, weaving in and out in crossing patterns, accelerating and retarding to match the moves of others. There is a beauty," Whyte said of this sight, "that is beguiling to watch."

The beauty that Whyte saw in these coordinated crowd movements is not totally unlike the beauty of a congregation that understands itself as a community moving forward together. There are obvious differences, of course. Most notably, a congregation is not a mass of people lumped together by default. People make a conscious decision to join a church. Unlike their urban pedestrian counterparts, who glob themselves together quite arbitrarily to cross a street, church members do realize that they are creating some form of togetherness. They understand at least the theory of a congregation being a cohesive community -- the "body of Christ" in New Testament terms -- even if they have little sense of what they must let go of to contribute to the shape of this community.

This is where pastoral leadership figures in. A pastor has the daily privilege and responsibility of giving form to an unformed mass, and selflessness to people capable of selfishness. No one tells a New York City pedestrian how to pick up the pace or stutter a step to avoid smashing the heel of the next pedestrian. Every walker on Fifth Avenue has to decide for himself or herself when and how to walk on the basis of his or her best guess of what everyone else will do. In a congregation that is led thoughtfully, members are not left simply to guess at what everyone else will do. They do not merely decide for themselves how to press forward. They are led. They are guided to discover a sense of their place in the whole because they have been shown how to believe in the significance of the whole. They become captivated by a vision and get wrapped up in engaging their faith alongside the strength of others’ faith.

Finding one’s place in the fullness of this kind of spiritual community is a matter of what Whyte labeled for another realm "give and take . . . movement and color . . . walking quickly [and] walking slowly." Congregational life is a colorful and complex walk of togetherness, led by a pastoral hand that appreciates the worth inherent in a well-formed community.

Establishing this togetherness is not a small or quick task. It is a continuous and sometimes strenuous one. But pastors are uniquely positioned to help individuals relinquish their grip on personal preference. They get to shape a community around the inspiration of Jesus, intentionally walking people into each other’s lives, teaching them how to admire and appreciate fellow members who may often think and live quite differently. The motivation for this pastoral practice is clear: it is the belief that the love generated by a spiritually coherent community is greater than the sum total of the love emanating from its individual members’ lives.

Beyond the Polarization: Grace and Surprise in Worship

When Mark Twain finally mastered the intricacies of piloting a steamboat on the Mississippi and had catalogued in his mind every trifling feature of the great river, he confessed to a deep deprivation: "I have lost something which can never be restored to me in my life. All the grace, and beauty—the poetry—has now gone out of the majestic river!" The river, of course, had not changed. But familiarity with the language of the river had killed a certain spirit of wonder. The routines of navigational life had tamed the water’s treachery. The poetry was gone.

Two decades of worship wars are beginning to do to the splendor of church worship what Twain’s piloting routines did to his view of the river. They are dulling the brilliance of the grace and beauty that color the church’s praise. The poetry of worship, so crucial for conveying the glorious presence of God, is hard to find. It’s not that worship has lost its centrality in the larger life of the church, any more than the mighty Mississippi slowed to a trickle in Twain’s time. But people have poured massive energy into attracting souls to worship instead of helping those same souls meet a great big God through great big praise. Sadly enough, in many quarters an infatuation with style has displaced the rich substance that belongs to worship.

Years ago, it would have been unthinkable that two adjectives, contemporary and traditional, would so thoroughly captivate the imagination of the church. It would have seemed strange that these simple words could govern the views of those who plot the church’s worship. But captivate and govern they do. No other words dominate the worship landscape like contemporary and traditional.

They look like perfectly innocent adjectives. All sorts of faithful people lean on them for inspiration in trying to help the church and culture make sense of one another. But what a disappointing role they have come to play in defining separate worship styles for the church. Once thought to be the answer for securing the worship contentment of old and young alike, today contemporary and traditional are symbols of division.

Much of the polarization of praise in our sanctuaries stems from the ambiguity of the terms themselves. Contemporary and traditional may be useful concepts for making wallpaper and china choices, but they are of little help in expressing the magnificent breadth of praise that has formed the Christian community. Both words encourage formats that answer largely to the feelings of the worshiper. The adoration of God gets lost in a bog of subjective tastes. Reliance on contemporary and traditional tames the surprise of grace that is supposed to give worship its energy.

How does Mary know exactly what she needs in worship? And since when is the praise of God a need-based exercise? Since most of us instinctively favor behavioral habits that underscore the familiar, what incentive is there for John to break out of his own comfort zone in worship to experience other faithful forms and other people? And shouldn’t Bridget enjoy some measure of responsibility to the larger congregation worshiping around her—a joyous love for the whole that would supersede her own set of likes and dislikes? And even if Mary and John and Bridget are all of a mind to want more expansive worship expressions, expressions that more completely and surprisingly witness to everything God is about, the odds are that their parish’s worship schedule will force a choice upon them— contemporary or traditional.

Pigeonholing the manner of praise is more than a disservice to God. It threatens the integrity of the body of Christ. People in the pew deserve more spiritual protein than is offered by some church-growth dream. They have heard the arguments about attracting newcomers and retaining old-timers. They have been bombarded with relevance—generation this and generation that. What they haven’t heard enough about is the beauty of worshiping with people who might think differently from the way they do. They haven’t been stretched to consider looking beyond their own tastes. If the Holy Spirit is let loose, they might even be open to expanding their idea of why they come to church in the first place. These people are ready to meet God face-to-face in all of God’s glorious fullness. They want more than the transcendent glory of God in a neat package. They want expressions of faith that have some size.

"Sometimes I wonder," writes John Fischer, "if God is really interested in the noise of our contemporary clamoring [about worship]. Like my dog who can’t seem to get anywhere because he keeps having to stop and scratch his fleas, I wonder if we are so busy scratching where everybody itches that we aren’t taking anybody anywhere significant." Pastors, priests and worship planners need to stop scratching and begin to establish some new habits of thinking. Until the language of worship planning changes, people are going to continue to come to church expecting to he confirmed in what they already think they know or need. And until there are some clearer formulations of what makes for faithful congregational life, people are going to keep asking the consumerist question: "What am I going to get out of it?"

Divisions caused by choices about worship patterns are nothing new. The apostle Paul grappled with a similar situation in 1 Corinthians 13. The church in Corinth was being demoralized by arguments over spiritual gifts. The profusion of gifts among believers led them to draw what Paul S. Minear called "invidious distinctions among themselves, claim[ing] for one gift pre-eminence over others. Thus was produced a bedlam of sound and a competitive spirit that were destroying the fabric of fellowship. All this was rationalized and justified by an appeal to the Holy Spirit." In other words, well-intended praise had turned into anarchy.

Although the competitive spirit between two distinct styles of worship has not led to anarchy, a certain sadness accompanies our compartmentalization of praise. Within the seams of too many congregations, the fabric of fellowship is tearing. We can move beyond a polarization that fosters invidious distinctions and renew a sense of congregational identity by giving special attention to the delight of surprise in worship.

Listen to the way pastors and church leaders speak when they’re gathered for a seminar or conference. You’re likely to hear something like this: "How many do you worship these days?" "Oh, we’re right around 390." "Is that right! We only worship about 255." "Have you heard about Trinity? Someone told me they’re at capacity, worshiping 650 . . . They’ve got to build!" What is all this blather about? It is the language of church attendance. Hardly a book on evangelism in the past 15 years has escaped the language of attendance when it comes to mapping out strategies that promise to turn churches around.

What’s the problem with making special note of attendance? Nothing, really, except that it detracts from deeper values that give congregational life its beauty. One does not attend worship, at least not exactly. One may go to, congregate for or participate in worship, but one does not attend, in the passive sense of the word. We attend a junior high school band concert or a New York Yankees baseball game where a seating area is separated from a performance area. When we use the same word for worship, however, we’re usually relating numbers of people in the pew to worship talk. The clear focus is on us.

When we insist on emphasizing attendance, we subtly knock God out of the center of worship and replace this vital core with an emphasis on ourselves. Those planning public worship begin to think their task is to create an audience or to answer to an audience. And those who come to worship are individual spectators who wonder what they’ll get out of it. As long as pastors and church musicians believe they must satisfy the desire of every living thing, worship is in trouble. Congregations will keep leaning on the contemporary and traditional distinction, haphazardly adding services, hoping to serve the unformed subjectivity of worshipers who find their way through the door.

The real role of a pastor or a church musician, however, is to shape a congregation. It is to bring together a wild assortment of people and to hold them together by the Savior’s love. It is to keep God and the glory of God’s presence (not us and our attendance) as the subject in the grammar of worship.

We need a new sense of the understanding of congregation, that treasured body created to worship. The occasion of praise is a moment of togetherness unmatched by anything else in culture. It’s an opportunity to transcend every instinct bent on confirming personal taste. We shed our little worlds to enter a great big world. We leave the worst sides of individualism behind to gain a new sense of community. We become consciously aware of the needs of a whole body of people, unlike at any other time during the week. And we find all of this to be a marvelous privilege.

A more organic concept of congregational life would do wonders for recasting the way we think about worship. When 17-year-old Billy squawks from his world of severe retardation, it usually comes during the Gospel reading or sermon. Something excites him. With his wheelchair situated only a few feet from the pulpit microphone, there’s no telling what his boisterousness does to the radio taping. Congregational heads turn. But what a witness Billy’s presence is to the beauty of the body of Christ.

Billy and the rest of us belong together and somehow we know it. To participate in congregational worship is to recognize that we’re joined together as a living organism. It is to make the astounding realization that an incredibly unique assemblage of people—strong and weak, wise and foolish, gifted and ungifted—has gathered for worship around the presence of Christ in a shape that will never be reconstituted in exactly the same way.

When journalist Bill Moyers was researching a television series on creativity, an artist told him, "If you know what you are looking for you will never see what you do not expect to find." Every genuine exercise of faith entails some openness to the unexpected, some eagerness to encounter the surprise of grace. It’s in the nature of discipleship. When worship gets packaged in narrow boxes marked contemporary and traditional an inevitable predictability sets in. Mystery gets shortchanged. Preconceived biases get confirmed. Worshipers arrive expecting only that their preferred style will be in place. Ever so subtly, our minds begin to conceptualize God as one who might be reducible to a size that fits neatly into our preferences for worship.

The gospel, of course, doesn’t permit this kind of grasp of God. Jesus turns things inside out everywhere he moves, eluding the clutch of those who would manipulate him. As J. P. Sanders once said regarding biblical interpretation, "Anytime we read scripture and find ourselves right away on Jesus’ side, we have probably misread the passage." Translate this overconfidence to worship, and the praise of God becomes a pitiable idol that serves our own interests.

Authentic surprise in worship does not mean novelty for the sake of novelty. The goal is not schizophrenic activity where nothing can be counted on to build tradition or establish rhythm. It does not mean substituting gimmicks for theological sturdiness. But if the grace of God is as extraordinary as Jesus makes it out to be, we should not impoverish God with predictability. We should instead give genuine surprise a chance.

A routine football game comes alive with excitement when the puny punter fakes a kick and tosses a wobbly pass into the grip of the tight end. The punter’s successful pass doesn’t promise a win. The coach doesn’t try his luck with the same play next time they have the ball. But the fans move to the edge of their seats with a fresh enthusiasm. When two young siblings spend a rainy day inside the house, arguing constantly and irritating their mother at every turn, the routine is wonderfully shaken when the six-year-old suddenly offers to help prepare dinner. The exasperation of the day has not evaporated; tomorrow brings no guarantees. But the sweetness of surprise has frustrated the routine of predictability.

Church worship can include that kind of wonderful surprise. Every congregation has a personality that lends itself more naturally to certain liturgical patterns or musical forms than others. That’s fine. Such patterns and forms help establish meaningful worship traditions. But if there is not some character of thoughtful surprise that regularly shakes up the predictability of praise, it’s easy for a smugness to emerge among the people. Our way becomes the way. We close off an openness to the unexpected and the unfamiliar.

Accents of surprise in worship may be small or large. Perhaps the gesture is no more than a prayer petition for rich and aggressive and successful people—when is the last time your congregation prayed for these people? Maybe it’s a momentary fogging of the congregation with a dry-ice cloud of vapor on Transfiguration Sunday, bringing home the mountaintop text in a whole new way. How about putting the offering plates in the hands of children or youth some Sunday if this is not normally done? Or think of the visual impact, on the Sunday when the story of adolescent Jesus in the temple is read, of projecting slides of the great masters’ paintings of young Jesus alongside contemporary photos of city and suburban kids of every color. People will never forget Luke’s story.

A church member shows up on Easter morning, all dressed up for his one annual appearance, only to find the congregation huddled in the darkened sanctuary. "Did someone forget to pay the light bill?" he wonders. Three young women shrouded in dark garments, baskets in hand, make their way to a veiled cross that rises 20 feet into the air. A spotlight focusing on the cross pierces the darkness. As the women pull off the black veil, the choir crescendoes. The lights come up. The organ fires up. It’s Easter! Is this entrance rite contemporary or traditional? Is it 33 A.D. or 1997? I couldn’t tell you! But I know it’s biblically evocative. It’s powerful.

It’s time we do a better job of challenging our people with a mix of hymnody that’s selected as much for its textual appropriateness as for its melodic or instrumental familiarity. And instead of expending energy debating the merits of amplified versus unamplified instruments in worship, let’s require that all music demonstrate artistry and creativity. Both amplified and unamplified music can engage the gifts of people in making music that contributes directly to participatory congregational worship. This is more than can be said of prerecorded music, which lacks spontaneity, surprise and—short of adjusting the volume control—flexibility in leading a congregation in song. If you have access to them, why be afraid of different instrumentation and contrasting sounds within the same service—southern harmony, Appalachian folk, jazz, African rhythm or Genevan plainsong.

Keep the faithful on their toes. If there is a sensibility to the worship decisions made, and a theological integrity about the accents intended to awaken complacent hearts, people will not wince. They may cringe if it appears that the pastor, musician and worship committee are pushing their own preferences. But worship leaders have to try to shake loose of what maybe personally comfortable and familiar, even as they help others do the same.

Some of my own most worshipful moments as a pastor have come after reluctantly bowing to the sensibilities of others: The youth leader’s insistence that the clown troupe’s interpretation of the day’s Gospel reading was exactly what we needed... A music colleague’s delight in surprising the rest of us with something not printed in the bulletin. You too might question the value of a percussionist putting a violin bow to some strands of metal, welded to a muffler pipe, welded to two metal dog bowls full of water—and making music! And yet, as a prelude to worship, it did what it was supposed to do: jostle our senses enough so that we thought more imaginatively about God and the day.

If we can learn to welcome such surprises, if we can urge our congregations to be a bit more playful and a bit more serious about this calling, we just might save some of the grace and beauty—the poetry itself—that is disappearing from our worship.

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