The Liturgical Conference: liturgy and mission

Friday, October 21, 2016

Liturgical Participation as Means Rather than End

E. Byron Anderson’s essay in Liturgy 31, no. 4 (2016) on how liturgical participation enacts God’s mission takes issue with an over-emphasis in our churches on getting people “involved” in worship in a way that seems to indicate the participation itself is the goal. He refers us to Don Saliers’s concern that ritual involvement not become something members of the body of Christ do “on our own terms, but in and as the church.” (Saliers, Worship as Theology) In other, more colloquial, language: It’s not about me or you; it’s about Christ in our gathering and who we become because of the Trinity.

Mark Searle also begins with ritual participation and then describes how it is related to two other forms of participation. . . . At the level of ritual participation, Searle resists the question of personal “ownership” of the liturgy; we do not do it “our way,” making it our own by “remodeling it to reflect [our] particular identity.” (Searle, Called to Participate, p. 18) Rather, we “participate in an activity whose shape and meaning derive from a tradition … [that] belongs to a community larger than the individual, larger even than the assembly gathered to celebrate.” (Such an understanding is easier to see in ecclesial traditions that prescribe rather than encourage the use of particular liturgical materials.) . . . Such work is grounded in our baptism into Christ and renewed at the Eucharistic table as we offer ourselves in union with Christ in praise and thanksgiving. Finally, participation at the level of the divine life “means nothing less than full, conscious, and active participation in the life of grace, lived and manifested individually and collectively, as union with God and communion with all humanity.”

The purpose of liturgical reform, then, is not for the sake of ritual participation, as much as such reform was and is necessary, but for the sake of our participation in God and in God’s saving work, in God’s mission of redemption and restoration, in the world. Liturgical reform, including the reform of our participation in the liturgy, is a means rather than the end to our formation for and participation in God and God’s mission.
If part of the difficulty in thinking about liturgical participation has been a misunderstanding of the purpose of that participation, another significant difficulty is that many in our churches, certainly in my own United Methodist Church, mistakenly believe that the church’s mission is and should be defined by the church itself, like an independent social service agency or corporation, rather than by God’s mission to the world. That is, we mistakenly believe that Christian people are called to serve a church-created and church-initiated mission without regard to how that mission is given to the church through Christ in the Spirit rather than created by the church. Such a misunderstanding of mission has often led to the churches’ collaboration with the forces of colonization and to missionary societies that were indistinguishable from the hegemonic forces of governments and industries.

. . . But, when we (re-)discover that God is the one who gives the church its mission, that God calls us to participate in God’s mission for the world, that God sends us into the world, we also discover that our participation in the liturgy is necessarily participation as church, a community defined by its participation in the paschal mystery of Christ’s dying and rising. Through such participation the Spirit draws us into life in and with God, and by means of such participation God sends us out in the Spirit’s power in Christ’s name.

E. Byron Anderson is Styberg Professor of Worship at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Evanston, Illinois. He served as president of The Liturgical Conference from 2003–2015.

E. Byron Anderson, “Liturgical Reform: For Participation and/or Mission,” Liturgy 31, no. 4 (2016): 11-18.

Friday, October 7, 2016

Has Liturgical Participation Subverted Worship’s Goal?

The relationship between liturgy and mission is the theme of Liturgy 31, no. 4 (2016) available through subscription or ATLA. It is chock full of insights that ought to spur our thinking about exactly what it is for which the church and its liturgical practices exist. E. Byron Anderson’s essay examines the role play by increased participation of laity in worship. Has it become an end unto itself?

There has always been a sense that reforming liturgy reforms the church—this was true in the context of the Protestant reformation, true in the context of the ecumenical liturgical reforms of the late twentieth century, and remains true today in the context of “emerging worship.” . . . Yet even among faithful Christians, this desire has been muted by expectations that worship satisfy individual psychological needs, that it be accessible to the occasional religious consumer, and, especially for Protestants, that it increase market share. Self-satisfaction, self-expression, and consumerism have displaced bearing witness to and being in service of God’s redeeming love for the world—the corporate work of the body of Christ.

. . . The resulting liturgical reforms — many necessary and long overdue — “reduced the dominance of clergy, musicians, and choirs in worship,” provided “for more lay participation and leadership,” and made “room for action, conversation, interaction, and involvement in the service.” But such forms of participation quickly became the primary if not the sole criteria for assessing the “effectiveness” of worship. Heightened ritual participation through leadership and creativity became the means and the end of liturgical reform.

What seemed to be a “democratic opening” in liturgical participation shifted away from a notion of liturgy as “public work” of witness and service through which “all members join to offer their worship to God” and turned toward a notion of liturgy as a retail commodity for spiritual seekers and the churches’ faithful who alike are invited to participate “on [their] own terms” and “without responsibility” to the community or to the world.

While such an emphasis on ritual participation as “liturgical enfranchisement” was a necessary first step in liturgical reform, it provided only the beginning of reform in the life of the church. It was, and is, not enough. Missing from this understanding of liturgical participation, Kevin Irwin suggests, is the sense that “through these sacred rites, symbols, and celebrations … we experience the very life of Christ, we participate and share (take part in and become part of) his paschal saving mystery,” the sense that “our insertion into this central ‘mystery of faith’ is what liturgy is all about.” (Irwin, Liturgy, Prayer, and Spirituality, p. 127) Missing is the kind of liturgical catechesis or mystagogy that leads people into prayerful engagement with the liturgy in the expectation that doing so will lead them into fuller engagement with God and with the world around them. Missing, too, is the sense that liturgical participation may critique our present experience and life (rather than reinforce entrenched notions of power and privilege), offer a vision of a world not yet realized, repattern the church and our lives in relation to the world, and provide a means through which we are not only engaged with but joined to divine life in God.

In order to move beyond participation as enfranchisement, beyond simple participation “in the rites themselves” or participation at “the level of ritual,” we need to attend to two additional forms of liturgical participation. . .

This essay continues to make the case (see the blog for October 21) that the central point of worship needs to be re-set to focus on participation not simply within liturgical experience for its own sake but because God’s mission is larger: to transform us for the life of the world.