Rediscovering Liturgy

VCC has already been touched by this wind of the Spirit; will we continue to let His breeze blow, or will we shut the window? Here are some recent CT articles that might help us out.

A Deeper Relevance
Why many evangelicals are attracted to that strange thing called liturgy.

"...Worshiping in the liturgical tradition is no panacea. When not approached wisely, it can be misused and abused; it can tempt participants to substitute mere religious ritual for a vital, personal faith in Jesus Christ. Nonetheless, this tradition does have much to offer contemporary evangelicalism. Take our fascination with relevance: the first thing this liturgy asks us to rethink is what we mean by "relevant" worship.

It is not an accident that when we think about making church more relevant, we usually mean meaningful for one particular group. In North America, that usually means 20-somethings and young families. For one, 20-somethings are some of the hardest people to attract to church—we evangelicals love the challenge of reaching them. Two, when they start raising families, they begin to return to church—we also love a field ripe for harvest. It's a perfect "target audience" for a new church to aim at.

Unfortunately, churches that perceive themselves as relevant often by their nature limit a full-bodied expression of the church—that is, they "target" 20- and maybe 30-somethings, and usually those of that group who are middle- and upper-middle-class white-collar types rising in income and influence. Few churches that consciously seek relevance want to clear the way to church for the poor, the homeless, welfare moms, drug-addicted men, or those trapped in nursing homes and convalescent hospitals. These "target audiences" are not very relevant to many "casual, contemporary" churches.

Liturgical churches know that as profound a reality as is the surrounding culture, there is an even more profound reality waiting to be discovered. This is one reason I thank God for the liturgy. The liturgy does not target any age or cultural subgroup. It does not even target this century. (It does not imagine, as we moderns and postmoderns are tempted to do, that this is the best of all possible ages, the most significant era of history.) Instead, the liturgy draws us into worship that transcends our time and place. Its earliest forms took shape in ancient Israel, and its subsequent development occurred in a variety of cultures and subcultures—Greco-Roman, North African, German, Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, and so on. It has been prayed meaningfully by bakers, housewives, tailors, teachers, philosophers, priests, monks, kings, and slaves. As such, it has not been shaped to meet a particular group's needs. It seeks only to enable people—people in general—to see God....

We are in the habit of thinking that our culture—the reality we strive to be relevant to—is the measure of meaning. That's why we're tempted to shape our churches to look like that culture, because that is what people in this culture will find meaningful. It is logical on one level, and there is no question that we have to be culturally sensitive in our outreach. But the liturgy wants to show us a deeper logic and relevance.

The liturgy begins by saying that our culture needs not so much to have its "presenting needs" met as to be gently and calmly invited into a wiser culture—the culture of a Trinitarian God and his kingdom. This is what is blessed, now and forever. Our culture is the transitory thing, an apparition that will someday have to pass away, just as childhood has to pass away. The liturgy says to us as we enter, "You're in the culture of God and his kingdom now. Things will be different from now on."

See also:

Relevant Liturgy

"There’s an article on liturgy in a surprising place. RelevantMagazine.com is a for-twenty-something very significant Christian site. The magazine, more known for its emergent, missional approach, typically slates “religion” as often seen to be “irrelevant”. Yet in this article (link off this site) LisaMarie Goetz, a Christian Education major at Wheaton College with a minor in Christian Spirituality, declares: “Young adults all over the nation and the world are beginning to feel this way [that they want church – not a concert or a comedy club], and many are crowding liturgical churches each Sunday. It truly looks as if the liturgy is being revived in this generation....”

The Future Lies in the Past
Why evangelicals are connecting with the early church as they move into the 21st century.

"We confess that we have often lost the fullness of our Christian heritage, too readily assuming that the Scripture and the Spirit make us independent of the past. In so doing, we have become theologically shallow, spiritually weak, blind to the work of God in others and married to our cultures. … We dare not move beyond the biblical limits of the gospel; but we cannot be fully evangelical without recognizing our need to learn from other times and movements concerning the whole meaning of that gospel...."

"Like Webber, journalist Colleen Carroll Campbell has surveyed this youth movement that's dissatisfied with culturally co-opted Christianity and wants a more historically rooted form of the faith. Her results, featured in her 2004 book, The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy, show that these young people recognize the anti-Christian nature of the culture in which they grew up. They have been "reared in a media culture that relentlessly lobbies for their attention and panders to their whims," and thus "find it refreshing when religious leaders demand sacrifice, service, and renunciation of consumerism." They feel not restricted but "strangely liberated" by the focus on objective morality and obedience in these churches. To them, this is finally a form of religion that stands over and against individualism and relativism. And they are "captivated by groups that stress stability, commitment, and integration—the very values they found wanting in their splintered, mobile families and fragmented, impersonal communities...."

"...Campbell found that the informal, spontaneous style of many free-church Protestant groups does not give these young adults enough of an anchor. In Massachusetts, Campbell spoke with Sharon Carlson, a young woman raised in the Plymouth Brethren movement, a free-church tradition that eschews liturgy, tradition, and hierarchy. Carlson described the Communion experience as "tearing up bread and passing around cups of grape juice after men in the assembly spontaneously stood and repeated the words that they felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to say," and she felt that was no longer enough. As Campbell reports, " 'I want to be more connected to history, the history of the Christian church,' said Carlson, who relishes the knowledge that she is worshiping the way Christians have for centuries. 'There have been generations of people before me saying the same prayers.' "