The Focus of Worship

Address at EIDTS Graduation Ceremony, 2007 by Dr Ken Booth

I want to explore some features of contemporary worship in the Protestant tradition. What will become apparent is that worship turns out to be doing something rather different from what we think it is doing. Worship itself becomes deflected from its intention in a number of ways. Furthermore some of these deflections have come about for quite understandable reasons and have been so taken for granted that we do not even consider the extent to which the worship that results has been affected. A final preliminary consideration is that some of these shifts go a long way back. I want to begin with one feature of the Reformation in the sixteenth century.

 One of the things we need to appreciate about the 16th century is that it involved a series of revolutions, but not always that ones that seem obvious to us. When one thinks of revolutions in worship, we tend to think of the major shift in Protestant circles from the mass to worship in the vernacular. That’s only part of the story. But, to leap into the present, it never ceases to amaze me the amount of time that is spent hunting for words to include in the Sunday morning act of worship. Now, I’m not talking about the fact that we will talk when we get there, but about the number of trees that have to die to produce the reams of paper that are necessary to give us the text of what we are going to hear and say.

 It is this love affair with words in worship that I want to consider. Now, nothing I say is going to lessen the word count in the near future, I am sure, but it is worth stopping to consider where this pre-occupation with words came from and, just as importantly, what it contributes to the worship of God offered by the church when it gathers on Sunday.

 I regard this as being of both interest and importance to all of us here, and for two reasons: because you have spent several years in some instances putting words on paper and sending them to tutors to be marked and have now finished the course and demonstrated your facility with words in the subjects you have chosen for your L.Th. The other reason is that many of us live within churches which play this game with words on a Sunday, and we are so used to it that we do not even notice it any more, though we might if it stopped.

 There are two different issues in this. One is the modern ability of produce fresh words for people to use on every new occasion. The other is the impact of the printed text itself. There have always been words in worship. Indeed worship is largely incomprehensible without them. But until recently the words were primarily oral and in many cases still are. The modern ability to provide a new service sheet each week, whether on paper of projected on a screen, has its own effect on the worship that follows. The sheer volume of it, of course, stems from an easy access to cheap paper, photocopiers and computers and their peripherals such as data projectors. What are the implications of this? However fresh and evocative the words may be; however rich in meaning or theological insight, the people see these words for the first, and possibly only, time when they arrive in church to participate in the service. At one level it adds a dimension of novelty and a sense that our response to God is shaped by being always something new. But what does this do to the community? One result is to put the power over worship firmly in the hands of those who devise the service, another version of what used to be understood as the power of the pulpit. A second result is a direct corollary of that; the congregation are necessarily on the back foot. The power of a community event rests in large measure on familiarity with the rituals and moves of the event. This does not mean nothing can ever change, but it does suggest that the change needs to happen slowly enough to ensure that the community can participate fully. This impinges on the nature of the community involvement in an act of worship. What is this gathering of people? What are they here to do? I will return to this later in some remarks on the ecclesiology of worship.

 The other aspect of the printed text is the impact of that in itself on the nature of worship. Where did all this came from? When did we get this fascination with the written word? That takes me back to the Reformation. The entrepreneurs of the 16th century could see the potential in the technological revolution happening around them in Europe – the ability to produce multiple copies at speed of written pages of material. This was what made the difference between that age and previous ages in which written texts, including sacred ones, were the preserve of scribes and monks. In the 16th century William Tyndale could see a use for the products of this new technology that would be of enormous benefit to people. His primary interest was in getting copies of the New Testament, the very heart of the Christian gospel, into the hands of the increasing numbers of people who could read and write.

 Tyndale had a keen interest in making the New Testament available, along with a few other particular insights he espoused, but he was not fully aware of the theological, sociological and doxological revolutions of which he was part. There were some things of which he was aware beyond the mere technological wizardry of getting the text of the NT on paper so everyone could read it. He would never have called it a sociological revolution, but putting the Bible into the hands of ordinary people challenged the power structures of the medieval world and church at a crucial point, namely that the path to God no longer needed to run through the church and its hierarchy at all, nor through the sacraments of the church. This implication did not bother Tyndale. Indeed given what he thought about some of the self-serving occupants of episcopal and other positions, he regarded the implication as entirely justified.

 I am interested in the doxological implications of  the emergence of an accurate printed text of Scripture that is widely available. The new technologies of producing paper from rags (and therefore very cheaply) and the invention of moveable type and printing were not just a technological revolution. It also brought with it a major shift in the imagination of Europe, the very way you look at the world was changed. For the young today they virtually see the world through the computer screen. That is by no means as revolutionary as the 15th century transition to seeing the world through the book.

 Up until the advent of printing Christianity was not the religion of a book; it couldn’t be. It was a religion of church-going, of monastery and parish, of the cycles of life with the celebrations of that, of the mass and processions, of feast days and saints days, of daily living with sin and forgiveness and prayer, fasting and almsgiving. It was a community event. The production of books brought a huge mental shift. Suddenly you now have a text that is exact and invites credibility because it is written (just as if it is on the web it must be true!). Now you have to learn to read just to keep up, and piety itself becomes bookish, and the Bible assumes a new role in Christianity it never had before as a book to be read by all. It is then easy to place so much value on the book that all those other things like imagination, art, relics and rituals get disdained and thrown away. In the bright new age of the book all else is dross.

 But what did that do to worship? Let me begin with the mass. From the early church to the medieval church meant two huge changes: from participation to seeing, and from immediacy to remoteness. The role of the laity was to see, and to revere the mystery presided over by the priest, but not to participate. In the Middle Ages, from time to time people were exhorted to receive communion, but they were reluctant to do so more than two or three times a year. Even at Easter people had to be reminded of their obligation. None of this meant people did not go to mass. They did, and frequently; but they went to view the mass. The sense of mystery and awe was at its greatest when the priest began the silent recitation of the Great Thanksgiving. From this sense of awe, devotions before the blessed sacrament grew, as did festive processions of the sacrament, which we first hear of in the eleventh century.

Both attendance at mass and teaching about it were important. But the emphasis of both was on seeing and responding devoutly. People were encouraged to identify with Christ visibly present in the sacrament and elevated for their adoration. This development is evident in the occasional call from the back of the church at the elevation of the host, “Heave it higher sir priest”, if they could not see. To dismiss these developments as a mere travesty of Christian worship would be to misunderstand them. While we now look for active participation and sharing of the bread and wine as effective signs of communion, the medieval mass was just as much a communion for them in its own way. The community gathered, saw and adored; they responded in praise and humility; they contemplated the work of Christ for them and sought its benefits in their lives. They knew profoundly that the world was now pointed in the right direction – towards God. Life may continue to be nasty, brutish and short, but then it always had been, and the most one could hope for was the mercy of God that out of it all and through it all God was bringing all things to their appropriate end and us with that. In the mass we saw and felt that it was so.

 The idea of the Reformers when it came to worship was to return patterns as closely as possible to what they perceived to be the intentions of the New Testament and early church. I don’t want to go into that here, but to note the huge impact of this new phenomenon, the printed book, in shaping what they in fact achieved. Before we leave them it is important to note that they were profoundly interested in worship as a participatory and community event. Luther was insistent on the Spirit not the letter, and Calvin had a rich theology of grace. In relation to what Calvin intended for the worship of the church his Form of Church Prayers (1542) is very clear about the way in which the Church gathers for Eucharist to participate in the saving acts of God. The full title of this document spells out what Calvin had in mind. The Form of Prayers and the Manner of Ministering the Sacarments according to the Usage of the Ancient Church.

 Despite this, one way of summing up the overall effect of the Protestant Reformation on worship was to shape the meaning of Christian worship as rational discourse. This is not to say there were not other elements in it, but the key element was rational discourse. That was not at all what the leading Reformers were after in the 16th century, but by the 17th century, that in effect was what it had become. In part this was a by-product of the Protestant emphasis on preaching from and the reading of Scripture. That of itself helps to shape the kind of discourse that can follow. It is inevitably focussed on the text and exposition of the Bible as a source for a rational account of the faith. In this sense, of course, the church mirrored and was affected by the tendencies of the 17th century in general and into the 18th as theologians wrestled with emerging issues from the growth of scientific discoveries. John Wesley got into trouble by flouting this emphasis, by introducing a note of enthusiasm (that wasn’t his word; it was what those who did not like what he did said of his style, by which they meant more like what we would call fanaticism). And of course there were those hymns. Well, in the end, Wesley won and hymns became a fixture in every Protestant tradition.

 I want to draw a long bow and leap to some tendencies in contemporary Protestant worship. It’s a long leap, because I am not sure of some of the connections between the Reformation bias in favour of rational discourse and instruction and the contemporary tendencies I wish to discuss. What I would argue is that at the heart of wide-spread perceptions about Christianity is that it consists of a collection of teachings, even a body of doctrines and morals, a sort of package that can be taught and communicated. Now I am not going argue that there is no element of teaching or of doctrine or morals in Christianity, but I would argue that if we start with that we will seriously misunderstand the Christian faith and, in the context of worship, misconstrue the intention of our Sunday morning worship.

 Let me draw some sketch lines of how I think we might have got from the Reformation discovery of the power of the book and the printed word to this misunderstanding of Christianity as primarily a religion of doctrines and practices that can be described. The first thing is the power of the book itself. The printed page has a solidity about it that invites subscription to the ideas it contains. If you can put it down on paper, and if you have it in book form then the book is what this is all about. We may, with Luther, keep reminding ourselves that the words are only the vehicle for its inner meaning and spirit, but it is much harder to convince ourselves that the subliminal and evocative, imagistic and poetic in the text that keeps pointing beyond itself is more important than the surface. In a real sense the medium becomes the message. So if you have a book, the message is the book and its contents. Whether we like it or not, with the advent of the common book, Christianity became the religion of a book in a way it had not previously been. In most Protestant circles, of course, that book was the Bible. If that is your primary text then that is what must be at the heart of worship. That inevitably shifts the core of worship towards the exposition of the book at the centre. The Church of England was a different because it retained the idea of a liturgical book, the Book of Common Prayer, alongside the Bible. The shape of worship that developed was different, but it too was dominated by the text of the book. There were efforts in the seventeenth century to recover other aspects of worship of a more affective kind by people such as Lancelot Andrewes and William Laud, but Laud came badly unstuck when the tried the same sort of thing in Scotland.

 A second strand to my leap lies in the changing place of God in Western discourse. I am not going here to offer a history of Western philosophy and theology since the Reformation, but for a huge number of people rational speech about God has become increasingly vague, even when we decline to buy into Richard Dawkins’ pontifications (I think I use that word advisedly) about the God delusion. Where, at the time of the Reformation, the action of God in the world was simply assumed by most people, and their worship reflected that in text and attitude, we are in a different space. We may, as a modern western generation, be quite willing to own our belief in some spiritual being and even speak about our spiritual hunger, but it is much more difficult to define that any more precisely. It is even more problematic when it comes to speaking of God’s action in the world. So in church we are often quite cagey about the presence and action of God. I will come back to that. We will talk about all sorts of things to do with spirituality and morality and about Jesus and his teachings and so on, but the presence of God is much more hazy. It is close to Unitarianism: the idea of a universalist spirituality or divinity, and Jesus as a teacher of moral and spiritual truths.

 A third strand has to do with our western individualism. It has been around for a long time, but it gives a firm bias in favour of either the alone to the alone in a spiritual sense as we look for spiritual fulfilment for ourselves or back to me and the book again. Whatever relationship I may have with God, I am able quite easily to be a spiritual descendant of Tyndale on the basis of this book and my God, and nothing needs to come between me and those two things. I too have no need of hierarchy or sacraments or other Christians in community except as supports for my own personal journey.

 Finally, a fourth strand emerged more recently with the marketing industry. Time was when an advertisement was the announcement of some item. Now it is a sophisticated science that can persuade me to spend money I do not have on items I do not need just because they are there; the marketer is skilled at persuading me that I do need them. Living simply and being content with your lot are things the consumer world will not tolerate. But the trap for Christianity is that we get captivated by this consumer gospel and join the push to sell our product. It is not simply a matter of selling Bibles, though that is a big industry in itself, more important is the objectification of Christianity as something that can be marketed.

 Enough of the sketchy links from the 16th to the 20th century. I want to say some more about contemporary worship and the impact of all this on some styles of worship.

 It is not too difficult in conservative Protestant churches to identify the dominance of the book and the book’s message. Now I have no doubt about the importance of Scripture and of its centrality to the story we wish to tell about how we got to where we are. But where we need to be is not stuck in a book, but enfolded in a new relationship with God and with one another in Christ. For all its importance and centrality the book, as book, is witness to something more dynamic. Despite that, in some church circles the focus of the worship is almost unshakeably on the book and its message. There are, of course, other elements in the service, notably songs and prayers, but it is well worth looking at the kind of God who is met and addressed there. It is often a God who is described rather than met. Then there is the treatment of Scripture itself. One could be forgiven for thinking that God came among us not to create a single new humanity by breaking down the walls that divide us, but to produce a book to teach us and give us some instructions about faith and living.

 I am not suggesting that all conservative churches a like this. There is an obvious caricature in what I am depicting, but if you have not seen these tendencies in some churches then I invite you to open your eyes and note the extent to which Christianity so easily becomes a system of beliefs and morals that can be taught.

 In some ways, at least to me, even more fascinating is the extent to which liberal Christianity bought into this same reading of Christianity that flowed from trapping the gospel in the written word. Even as a student in theological college – a very long time ago –  we spent an inordinate amount of time inspecting the details of the text. I have no quarrel with that, but our pre-occupation was with redaction criticism – the careful comparison of the varied forms of the stories in the New Testament, especially in the synoptic Gospels, so that we could try to discover the original teaching of Jesus – his ipsissima verba. There is a sort of latter day version of this in the Jesus Seminar, who likewise have been fascinated by attempts to determine the authentic sayings of Jesus. I am certainly not against the careful scholarship that is necessary for reading and understanding the text, but it took me quite a long time to recover the sense that simply finding the authentic teaching of Jesus is not the whole story. It must always remain subservient to something else that is going on, namely the relationship I have to the one at the heart of the story and to all the others I meet around his cross.

 When it comes to worship in the liberal tradition, where this love affair with words and ideas comes home to roost is the reduction of Christianity, not domesticated within the covers of a book as in the conservative tradition, but to the few profound (if indeed they are profound, though they are definitely few) slogans with which Christianity can now be summed up. Can Christianity be represented by phrases such as love wastefully, live fully, and so on coined by Bishop Jack Spong? The risk always is in suggesting that wherever these things are done, there you have Christianity. The idea and its performance is what matters.

 Again, it can be found in hymns and prayers and sermons in many churches on Sunday, represented as the invitation to us to try harder to emulate one who is essentially our example of loving service and little more. So we get exhorted to follow this example. But at my age, I am tired of being exhorted. In any case you sophisticated theologians will instantly recognise that as Pelagianism.

 Which brings me to a consideration of what worship should be on Sunday. As an Anglican I can think of no better place to begin than with something the Archbishop of Canterbury said at Cuddesdon College in 2004. I apologise for its length, but it gets to the heart of the matter.

 It is about getting away from a view of the Church that is very seductive and very damaging – and very popular. This is the view that the Church is essentially a lot of people who have something in common called Christian faith and get together to share it with each other and communicate it to other people ‘outside’. It looks a harmless enough view at first, but it is a good way from what the New Testament encourages us to think about the Church – which is that the Church is first of all a kind of space cleared by God through Jesus in which people may become what God made them to be (God’s sons and daughters), and that what we have to do about the Church is not first to organise it as a society but to inhabit it as a climate or a landscape. It is a place where we can see properly – God, God’s creation, ourselves. It is a place or dimension in the universe that is in some way growing towards being the universe itself in restored relation to God. It is a place we are invited to enter, the place occupied by Christ, who is himself the climate and atmosphere of a renewed universe. (Rowan Williams, “The Christian Priest Today”, http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/2004/index.html - Friday 28 May, 2004 accessed 21/3/05)

 This enables us to see what is fundamentally wrong with both the conservative and liberal views of what being part of the church means. Even if I have given you a caricature of both, there is no doubt in my mind that ask virtually anyone in almost any church on a Sunday morning why they are there, and not one of them would give you an answer that comes within a bull’s roar of what Rowan Williams is talking about. The vast majority of them would be quite convinced that being a Christian is something that applies to individuals (you can declare it on the census form!) and that on Sundays, those who are so inclined will gather with others of a like mind to sing some hymns, hear some readings, do some praying and listen to a sermon, or if you go to the right place you can listen to some wonderful music. Belonging to the church is a personal choice, like my membership of a service club. The very notion that being with the church is to see and do the world differently is not in the common vocabulary.

 Why should we be there? We should keep coming back because in the company of these people and listening to this story and sharing this meal the whole world is re-oriented. Like the medievalists at the mass we should know profoundly that the world is now pointed in the right direction – towards God – the world, not just us, not even just the whole of humanity, the whole world is now caught up in what God in Christ has done and is doing, and is shot through with new light.

 On of my favourite writers on the subject of liturgy is a Lutheran, Gordon Lathrop. He has produced a series of three thought-provoking books on liturgy and what is supposed to be going on theologically when we gather for worship. The second book is called Holy People, and the sub-title is “a liturgical ecclesiology”. What does it mean for us to be the holy people of God and how does our worship shape us into that as God’s new humanity? We do not become other-worldly or unworldly. Rather the task of the liturgy is to show us what the world looks like when we see it through the eyes and heart of God. But that is an exercise in Christian assembly. Our human problem is not in our individuality but in our togetherness, our relationships. That is where we compete with each other for water, food, power, control, space, status,  . . . . And the Christian assembly is a different kind of togetherness, in which our relationships are made different by grace through the power of the cross. It is in our togetherness that we are anointed with the Spirit of Christ, of God, that makes of us what we cannot make of ourselves, one new humanity. And that is what our worship is about, not merely celebrating that, or giving thanks for that, or thinking and talking about that, or even praying about that, but BEING that because we have been gathered here in and by Christ.

 But it is Lathrop’s third book, Holy Ground, that most captured my imagination by the sheer scope of its theological and liturgical reach. In the round of liturgical revisions that have dominated the worship scene for the last fifty years, we have discovered a more intimate way of talking about and addressing God. At its worst this led to Sunday worship as a chatty and amicable event that removed any sense of challenge from the gospel. Without returning to an old-fashioned otherness to worship, we need to recover a sense of the sheer scope of what the liturgy at its best draws us into - a new view of the world and a moving engagement with the world transfigured in Christ.

 Holy Ground enlarges our horizons by exploring the way we make “maps” of our world, and the way in which the liturgy is both shaped by our maps of the world and shapes us through our participation in the liturgy. Lathrop writes of liturgy and spirituality as “a hole in the heavens”, his title for chapter 1. Here is a suggestive reading of the way the Bible and a truly Biblically shaped liturgy offer an alternative and distinctive map of the cosmos to the prevailing one available whether in the Greco-Roman or the modern world. This leads to Lathrop’s discussion of liturgy as “cosmic map” that shapes our view of the world, centred on Jesus Christ. “The renewal of the liturgy in lucidity, simplicity, and focus around the central things is thus a matter of some urgency, not least because such a renewal will orient the community in God’s world” (Gordon Lathrop, Holy Ground: a liturgical cosmology, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003, 62).

 And just in case you think this has nothing to do with the Reformed tradition that put its stamp so firmly on the sixteenth century, let me refer you to another important book on the church’s worship, Graham Redding’s, Prayer and the Priesthood of Christ. I am not going to take you through its argument, but in this passage he points us in the direction that worship needs to go if it is to stop being a sort of optional extra for those with a bit of a liking for some Christian teachings and stories.

 It is the basic contention of this book that when the vicarious humanity and mediatorial role of Christ are obscured, then the affirmation that stood at the centre of the Reformation, sola gratia, is radically undermined, and prayer and worship (as with other aspects of Christian life and thought) are inevitably recast in a Pelagian mould. That is to say, the emphasis falls on what we must do to pray, rather than on what Christ has done for us, once and for all, in his self-offering to the Father, in his life and death on the cross, on what he is continuing to do for us in the presence of the Father and in his mission from the Father to the world, and on our participation in this work (Graham Redding, Prayer and the priesthood of Christ in the reformed tradition, Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2003, 296f.).

 What this means, it seems to me, is that, among other things, we must look for a recovery of the transcendent, not the transcendence of the medieval mass, but something along these lines from Frank Senn:

 Renewed liturgy insists that we act together: that we sing along with but also to one another; that we help one another light candles or receive communion; that we discover meaningful others in the room; that we are not just alone with God “up there on the altar” or “deep in our hearts.” A fully trinitarian encounter with God suggests that we do indeed find the Father of us all “up there” and the Holy Spirit “deep within” connecting with our spirits, but we also find Christ the Word “dwelling among us full of grace and truth.” The God of Christians cannot ever be “wholly other,” not since “the Word became flesh” and entered into our human story. The location of transcendence is found in the immanence of the human community formed by the Spirit of the Father and the Son, the community in which and to which the Son of God is present in Word and Sacrament (Frank Senn, The People’s Work: A Social History of the Liturgy, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006, 328).