Recovery of Liturgy & Ritual in the Emerging Church
3 Jan 2008
Here’s the Liturgy & Ritual Article I’ve written for the The Bible Society, that I mentioned last week.
It’s my rough first draft. Constructive editorial comments are welcome :-)
Tagged: Emerging-Church, Liturgy, Ritual
17 comments
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Comment by Gary Manders
8.49 pm on 3 Jan 2008
I really liked the article Jason, especially about refocusing on the everyday through celebrating ordinary time as part of the Christian calender. This is also called Kingdom time and you might want to make some further connections here, the creativity of the spirit within the mundain; the real presence of Christ mediated through the ritual of the Eucharist through simple bread and wine and one another- the incarnational sacramental life. See Foster’s Streams of Living Water.
Comment by Jason Clark
10.04 pm on 3 Jan 2008
Gary: thanks, that’s an obvious link I should have made to “kingdom Time’, thank you, and I’ll incorporate that.
Comment by jprapp
8.56 pm on 3 Jan 2008
Jason, thanks for the article on ritual. As a nearly dedicated anti-ritual antagonist, I’ve spent too much of my low-church life alternating between suspicion, contempt, and curious open-minded questions about the value of ritual.
I looked forward to your article for insight amidst my chaotic and alternating feelings toward ritual. I wasn’t disappointed.
Thanks especially for the testimonial parts of your article. I agree with your critical comments about various forms of commercialization and how these deteriorate our valuations of religious ritual.
I’d like to add a few, extremely brief additional notes, on other current forces, beyond consumerism, that I feel really torque our valuations of ritual. While my positive-constructive sense of ritual is guided more formally by Mircea Eliade who says that the vitality of ritual depends of the recurrence of hierophany (I’m charismatic: translated, the true vitality of ritual depends on God showing up), I feel that other factors beyond commercialism, and more powerful than commercialism, wage war against our sense of the sacred (see Eliade on sacred and profane), and I’d like to shoot a short list here.
Independently of consumer markets, we’re deeply embedded in a world established and grounded for its scientific progress (almost all natural sciences, including medicine) in which Darwinian random mutations (rituals of randomness) shape our lives alongside a weird mix of deterministic natural laws (rituals of order). For those of us who take God’s appearance as critical to our lives, ritual means that we’re constantly at bay, or brought near, by the unpredictable mixture of God’s random and ordered appearances – right down to our biology. We could almost make of our randomly-surprising encounters with God what Gregory Chaitin said of chance (or, Chance), that is, that he discovering chance by accident. How to keep a sufficiently open mind to chance discoveries without allowing any ritual to blind us to them (because we prefer order and ritual) is the major challenge of our generation. Methinks.
What’s wild about our naturalized rituals is that we’ve been given an irreducible uncertainty principle beyond which we cannot peer (Heisenberg, to some extent Godel) which means that our rituals as modes of learning and knowledge hit bars of final ignorance, while at the very same time we expend profound resources of time and money to fund projects like CERN (on your side of the globe), spending rituals in hopes to come closer to some original cosmology, or worse, perhaps to co-opt cosmology for military purposes, if our rituals yeild just the right secrets.
It’s curious, really, that Machiavellian politics are nothing new as ways to co-opt religious ritual: consider the weird case of the judge Ehud, an original judge, who knew well how to co-opt religious rituals of his enemies as an entrance into political assassination. A world where ritual is deadly.
I cannot remember the original author, but Martin Marty once had his class read (I was a student) a little essay advocating the idea that we see the ritual of Christian communion as a kamikaze attack by Jesus on the mundane and overly-familiar rituals of our religious life – Ritual attacking ritual.
This, of course, was pre-9/11. Or, was it?
Like yourself, I too was raised by families of atheists on both sides. What wasn’t settled in life by the rituals (on one side) of heavy barroom drinking, brawling, and shooting pool or shooting each other in barroom violence was settled (on the other side of the family) by making money in highly refined and sophisticated rituals of commercialized buying and selling, principally in international real estate. Alas, when Christ became alive, Real, and personal for me, I suppose I looked negatively on religious rituals, encrusted in churches around me, as weak, anemic, and deficiently powerless actions, inept against the more powerful rituals of bar-room drinking and violence, and more inept agains the riturals of money making. A view I still hold today.
I’m thankful eternally for my early forebears, like John Wimber and Chuck Smith, before their division, who could minister to hippies, casting aside lifeless rituals, to turn people on to the Living Christ. Since those early days in the 60’s and 70’s, I’ve pastored in a half-dozen different denominational churches, old school ones, from Presbyterian to Congregational, from Lutheran to one of Methodist-polity – and I still do admire the scoldings I’ve gotten, bitter complaints, because I didn’t light the Christmas candles in proper order – since it was during the lighting of those candles, years ago, that someone sitting in a cold pew, amidst an empty world, first caught a glimpse of Christ.
Oh, well.
I’m still hostile to religious ritual. I cop that this is my problem. I long for the “old days,” of Chuck Smith baptizing 500 people a month, in the Pacific …
… with flowers in their hair.
Jim
Comment by Jason Clark
10.08 pm on 3 Jan 2008
Hi Jim, great to hear from you!
I love many of my low church moments, of charismatic high dearly.
We practice the laying on hands every week at our congregation, as a liturgical practice, and sometimes God shows up in power, most of the time he doesn’t and we still believe he is present in our ‘ordinary’ prayer.
I’m allergic to religious liturgy, that is empty of meaning, whether that is high church and formal, or low church charismatic, or emerging church aesthetics.
All can degenerate into critical formulations.
Comment by jprapp
9.21 pm on 3 Jan 2008
48 Angels
… a brief p.s. I just saw the Irish movie, 48 Angels.
Very powerful.
Because Jason’s website promised an upcoming article on it, I watched this movie thinking about questions of liturgy. The movie’s nod to recent Irish religious experience contained far too many shades of nuance to note here – except to say that the final scene, of the boat floating (I won’t say more, no spoiler) out on the Irish waters made me think of the pain, the hope, and the ambiguities of our religious rituals – and our wars over them, right down to one adolescent Irish boy chanting the ritual prose, “this island is MINE!” An island of ritual, indeed, and Gollum-esque — “it’s MINE!”
Though the spoken language was hauntingly beautiful, I wish those darned Irish producers would have used the dumb ritual of including English sub-captions, for Americanized English speakers like me.
Comment by Josh Heilman
11.37 pm on 3 Jan 2008
Jason, this is good stuff. I appreciate your weaving together of Vincent Miller, Andrew Walker, and Luke Bretherton. Most appreciated are the thoughts on “ordinary time”. The Church needs to hear this: perhaps being counter-cultural (whatever that means) is insisting on the importance of ordinary time, given that, as you wrote, the “world [is] obsessed with avoiding the ordinary.”
Thanks again.
Josh
Comment by Paul
4.36 pm on 4 Jan 2008
Great work bro :)
Comment by steven hamilton
1.50 pm on 5 Jan 2008
i utterly agree that this liturgy is invitational…come ‘taste and see’ as we embody the good tidings…and i like in our liturgy it seeps into our bones, into the deep crevices of our daily lives…profoundly having its formational effect in ‘the mundane’, which is as you deeply point out meaningful and purpose-filled and really dances toward something douglas john hall ruminates about: an atonement theology for the zeitgeist of our times: meaninglessness and purposelessness (without disregarding death and fate and guilt)
as the wisdom of God in the seasonal ‘moedim’ or ‘appointed times/feasts’ that both told a story of the past that the people of God find themselves in, as well as pointing prophetically to a future…does our liturgical practices do that…both/and…not just looking back but forward also?
i guess my question about liturgical practices, in the context of a faith community that seeks to be ‘ancient-future’ or as you say ‘deep church’, how does innovation work its way out in the dance with tradition without succumbing to a ‘pick and mix’ eccelsiology? is it simply a matter of missional-incarnation in the context we find ourselves in? is it ‘blooming in the soil you are planted’? so-to-speak…
ps – since the end of november, i have gone liturgical in posting my wordcraft on my blog seeking to be inspired by and follow the church liturgical calendar…
Comment by scott
12.15 am on 8 Jan 2008
Thanks for the article Jason, yes I did enjoy it. Coming from a ‘high church’ background, there is something in Liturgy that now has a strong pull on my spirit. Your article has given that ’something’ a bit of clarity.
Cheers Scott
Comment by Mike McNichols
4.23 pm on 8 Jan 2008
Jase,
Great article, mate. I think this is a timely and important topic for the church.
There is another aspect to liturgy that I’ve been thinking about. In the book The Critical Journey, Hagberg and Guelich outline stages of faith that are initially about discovery, initiation and a new productivity in the community of faith. The authors point out that most protestant evangelical churches are ideally suited for people in those early stages.
But when people move into stages of uncertainty, exploring an inner journey that may be initiated by a life crisis, resulting in a new and deeper awareness of God’s love that transcends mere productivity and functionality, there may be no place for those people in the productive life of the church. This is not a function of discrimination, just a result of organizational design.
Because evangelical churches tend to focus on the sermon as the center of the worship experience, it is easy for those churches to have a demographic focus that emerges from the preferences and character of the speaker. But in classically liturgical environments (where, I might add, the homily is relatively short and a minor part of the service), sacred space is created where, potentially, the Spirit of God may work in the lives of people at diverse stages of the journey of faith. In the Eucharist, all stand shoulder-to-shoulder on level ground. I think the liturgy and Eucharist open up the possibility for transcending homogeneity in the community of faith–a place where there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free.
There is much for us to learn here. Thanks for initiating an important conversation.
Mike
Comment by Jason Clark
9.50 pm on 8 Jan 2008
Hi Mike, great to hear from you.
I thought James Fowler and his faith stage development theory showed something similar, how modern churches often want to keep people in places of certainty.
I think maybe, that liturgy serves a several functions, in that it allows for depth in the face of plurality (some anchoring), by bringing a uni-vocal response, which ironically opens out into a sense of mystery.
In a post modern world what could be more mysterious than the notion that there is a non solipsistic self!
Comment by Karen
4.38 pm on 13 Jan 2008
Jason,
Most interesting article. Your section on the liturgy of consummerism and individualism reminded me of narcissus, so I guess it’s no wonder that our society is more unhappy than ever. Thank goodness for ordinary time and our need for each other. More, please!!
Comment by Jason Reid
12.28 pm on 15 Jan 2008
Jason
I really enjoyed the article. I grew a high catholic, and when I ‘discovered’ charismatic house church worship loved the freedom of dispensing with liturgy. However I was taken down a peg or two by a Anglo-catholic vicar who pointed out we all have liturgy it just differs in its complexity. Mine was just an hour or worship and teaching, rather than rather more involved smells and bells.
What you elucidate and has got me thinking is how this liturgy spills into the rest of our lives, very clever. Now this leads me to think about how liturgical (and possibly legalistic) is our Christian interface to the world. I’m probably looking at this negatively, whereas you highlight the positive aspects of presenting an alternative world to inhabit. But nethertheless as someone who wishes to contextualise the gospel this is an important factor, both that which is positive and negative – thanks for the stimulus.
Comment by Thomas E. Ward
4.22 pm on 15 Jan 2008
I’m sorry to be so late to this discussion, Jase. Thank you for what you’ve written, especially the explication of liturgy as spiritual formation.
Comment by Ben Sternke
3.51 pm on 18 Jan 2008
Hello! I am late to this discussion as well – found the link via jonny baker’s blog.
I am a pastor at a Vineyard-esque church (former Vineyard actually) in the US, and we’ve just begun a satellite community that is embracing liturgical practices, church year, etc. for very much the same reasons you outlined in the article. I’ve also gotten many of the same strange looks from some folks! But thankfully I’ve also run into a lot of people who respond with a sigh of recognition and relief, saying “Yes! That’s what we’ve been intuitively longing for…”
So anyway, just wanted to drop a line – God’s blessings on your community as you continue to live out the gospel in the UK!
Comment by Andy Dodwell
2.03 pm on 25 Jan 2008
Jason,
thanks for writing this- short, lucid, beautiful.
You’ve expressed many of the thoughts I’ve been having over the past few years as I worship at my ‘low’ CofE church and develop our ecumenical links with local Baptist and Free Churches…
Each church has its own ‘liturgy’ sure enough, but I hadn’t really thought about the imposed liturgy of our consumer culture…
thanks again.
Comment by Anon
4.49 pm on 26 Jan 2008
Sometimes I feel a bit like a sheep, (but not in a good way – maybe a lemming!)
It all just feels like the latest church ‘fad’ and, being completely honest, I long for this one to be over. I loved stripping church of all the non-essential bells and whistles, and a service with loads of liturgy just makes me feel like I did as a child. I freely and unashamedly admit that I don’t ‘get’ it. I find chanting together boring and abnormal, and I count the minutes till it’s over. I find it a barrier between me and God, and other people around me, not a uniting activity in the slightest.
It’s not something I feel I can introduce a non-Christian to without them writing me off as a nut-job – so instead of a Sunday service being a way of me introducing part of ‘what being a Christian means to me’ to my friends, I can’t bring them. I’d feel a traitor for saying ‘this is the part when I go and have a tea-break’ – I feel a traitor for even writing any of this, and I accept I may not be as well-read as many of the posters, but it would be a scary autocracy without dissenters :)
That said, your article was, as ever :), brilliantly written and persuasive… maybe I understand where you are coming from better (before reading, I was totally confused and afraid!) I wrote as Anon because I fear being ripped to shreds by the intelligentsia, but as a friend I’m happy to share and discuss it with you Jase, so I didn’t hide my email!
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