in which a Baptist falls in love with liturgy
This is something that I’ve been thinking about and — to be honest — struggling with for a while. For the most part, I have remained silent on this, partly because much of what I am experiencing is new turf and partly because I don’t want to sound like I am universally bashing the old turf. Assuming I haven’t already lost you with all this vagueness, let me start getting to my point.
Well, not my point yet — have you met me? — but, at least. something less fuzzy.
For the sake of shorthand, I’m going to use a term that I use often. I don’t know that I coined it, but I don’t remember anyone using it before me (or besides me, for that matter — so much for being a trendsetter). Romophobia is the fear, revulsion, and often hatred, of all things Roman Catholic, generally driven by ignorance or misrepresentation by others. It is the rejection of anything with any relation to Roman Catholicism.
A classic example of Romophobia is when a certain seminary of conservative theological ilk stopped using mortarboards in its graduation ceremonies, because it was discovered that similar headgear was worn hundreds of years ago in some forms of Roman Catholic worship.
I kid you not. Anyway ….
In Matthew 6:7 (NKJV), Jesus warns:
And when you pray, do not use vain repetitions as the heathen do. For they think that they will be heard for their many words.
Now, the elementary school that I attended was wildly Romophobic. And so, they used this verse as prooftext against Roman Catholics, whose practices included repetitions of the Lord’s Prayer and other passages. They even went on to state that repetition was inherently vain — and therefore sinful — just to drive home their “point”. (Apparently, they never read Psalm 136.)
The logical extension of this thinking was noted as well — the liturgies of “high church” traditions are also vain and sinful. Spending the better part of the first five decades of my life in “low church” traditions, I had no personal experiences to contradict this fallacy. In my adult years, I came to realize that such practices were not actually sinful, but I still viewed them as inferior and possibly dangerous.
And then came a (largely self-induced) baptism of fire.
In the late winter and spring of 2016, I felt God pulling me away from my church of 14 years. Now, this was my family. It was through them that I started getting a real grip on what grace is really all about. They got me through an out-of-the-blue divorce after 18 years of marriage. And we all stood together as several storms rocked the church itself.
I was good friends with all of the pastors who served there, and would count two of them among the “top ten” most important non-family-members in my life. The latter of these two men brought me on unpaid staff with the full intention of making it a full-time paid job when the church could afford it. And nobody was more tickled than he when I told him that my (current) wife and I had eloped a couple days prior.
So, needless to say, I fought really hard against the idea of leaving. I chalked up the Spirit’s prompting to everything from emotional reactions regarding unrelated life events to bad pizza eaten too late at night. I wrestled with God about this for so long that I probably ought to change my name to Israel and walk around with a limp. But — to beat the metaphor into the ground — He touched my hip, and I relented.
I made the commitment to leave in early summer, but I had taken on responsibilities that I didn’t want to just bail on, so I set my “departure date” for the end of September, thereby giving enough time for a smooth transition. During this time, I started looking around and considering where I was to go next.
Also during this time, I watched evangelicalism crumble all around me, rejecting the vast majority of the (good) things it had taught me in exchange for the promise of political power from a guy who literally quoted Satan to them. It made the Jacob/Esau trade seem like an even swap in comparison.
The thing was, though, they had taught me far too well. And so I chose 50 years of teaching over a few months of complete reversal.
This left me in a bind, though. I knew nothing but evangelicalism my entire life. Was I going to burn months, if not years, trying to find an evangelical church in the deep South that hadn’t lost its mind? Was it even possible?
A few years previous, I caught up with Brent, a friend from college who is now a Methodist pastor. (If that isn’t an interesting use of an electrical engineering degree, I don’t know what is.) Brent’s theology is a good bit more conservative than the average Methodist minister, or for that matter, the official stances of the United Methodist Church. Now, I had long ago recognized the silliness of conflating the beliefs of a “mother church” with that of individuals in the denomination — regardless of the denomination. But Brent’s case took this theoretical concept and gave it a practical application in my life.
And so I realized that, even if I stayed true to all the good things that evangelicalism had taught me, that didn’t necessarily mean that I had to attend an evangelical church. This was freeing and relieving, but also daunting, as it widened the field almost too much. I feared that my brain and heart would freeze up over having too many choices.
Friends at my (then) current church who knew of my impending departure asked where I was going. I told them that I had no idea, and that I felt like Abram when God told him to “go to a land which I will show you.” However, within a couple weeks of searching, I found that God had given me a peace about the whole thing. My situation wouldn’t be a frightening sense of homelessness; rather, it felt like God was leading a grand adventure.
My wife has to work some Sundays, so I took on the role of advance scouting party. If a church seemed that it warranted further consideration, we would go back there together when she was off work.
Given Brent’s position, I decided to try a Methodist church first. It became clear that that particular church wasn’t our new home. But I liked the overall structure of the service, so we started checking out other Methodist churches.
Now, Methodist churches aren’t very “high church”, but they’re a good bit higher than what I was used to. And I was really digging it. More specifically, the liturgical aspects were what most appealed to me. This struck me as a bit odd. I mean, I expected that God would make me fairly comfortable with the level of liturgy where He wanted me. And I wouldn’t be too surprised if I grew to like it.
But for the liturgy to be the strongest appeal to me right from the jump? That didn’t make sense. I wasn’t upset or freaked out over it. But my mind wouldn’t let go of “Why?” And so I asked. And so He answered. Well, partly.
The partial answer came in two pieces. The first piece was an article by Geoffrey Reiter that drew analogies of liturgy from — of all things — a stop-action animated movie.
In his book Desiring the Kingdom, James K. A. Smith observes that humans are “liturgical animals” who adopt rituals and cultural practices that reflect but also shape our desires and loves. Even apparently shallow, or “thin,” liturgies are formative and have implications in shaping our loves.
So it is in Shaun the Sheep Movie. The liturgies of the pastoral life may seem to be “thin” ones comprised of repetitive and mundane chores. They certainly are formative, however.
The author shows that we are designed to be liturgical, even in secular life. But this fact also means that even the lowest of “low church” traditions has a liturgy of sorts. So, in one sense, this wasn’t as different from my past as I had thought.
The other piece of my (partial) answer was simply a realization that slowly dawned on me. While I certainly believed in the brotherhood of all believers across the globe, this liturgy gave a tangible representation of that bond. Sure, there were probably hundreds of thousands of believers across the country joining in with my former church in singing the latest Chris Tomlin song. But there were 1000 times as many people reciting The Apostles’ Creed or The Lord’s Prayer.
This fact is also part of what sustained me while hopping from church to church. I knew that God was always going with me, but He also had already planted tangible evidence that He was there.
After a while, though, no church that we visited was feeling like home. Most were fairly appealing, but there was no sense that “this is where I want you to plant yourselves.” Not to knock the churches that we visited, but the commonality made me wonder if no Methodist church would be a fit.
And so, a new chapter began.
A friend of mine asked one day how the church search was going. I told him that we were still looking and he reminded me that we were welcome to come check out his church. His was a PCUSA church. All of my experience with (and knowledge of) Presbyterians was with PCA churches. The only thing I knew of the PCUSA was that it was more theologically liberal than the PCA. But I had worshiped with Methodists for several months and never once felt the need to sacrifice a virgin or go into prostitution, so I figured I was safe.
One of the things that caught me off guard was that the sermon was not the last thing in the service. I had never been in a church where anything more than a closing song and/or an invitation stood between me and lunch. Not even the Methodist churches had strayed from that formula. But here, it came off as just another part of the service.
Now, I am not specifically praising the brevity of the sermon. If I’m enjoying a sermon (and I don’t mean in the ear-tickling sense), keep talking. That pastor who brought me on staff? I got mad at him more than a few times because he cut himself off.
That said, I am repulsed by the idea (to which — I say to my shame — I used to subscribe) that short sermons indicate a lack of spiritual depth.
But here’s the thing: For all the (rightful) decrying that I have heard throughout the years of turning church into a show or a concert or something else that church certainly is not, the evangelical tradition has largely turned the pastor into the headliner. Everything else is just filler or designed to prepare the crowd for the sermon. One has to wonder who a worship leader is telling us to worship when he has one eye on the throne room and one eye on the pulpit.
Now, I’m not just talking about the narcissistic attention whores masquerading as pastors. I personally know several incredibly humble men who have been thrust (unwillingly, and sometimes, unknowingly) into the headliner role.
The problem started out innocently enough. For hundreds of years after the invention of the printing press, most people still couldn’t read. Couple that with the post-Reformation thirst for the Bible, and the pastor’s main role became that of Scripture Delivery System. Or as Skye Jethani puts it, “you found the most educated person in town, gave him a Bible (it was always a him back then), and sat under his teaching every Sunday.”
But the dilemma being addressed has two points of failure.
- The low supply of Scripture teaching/interaction is no longer an issue, between the fact that most read and the proliferation of technology.
- While teaching of Scripture should be a part of the service, it is not the main point (and certainly not the sole point) of the gathering of Christians for worship.
That first issue is obvious, but the latter is the one into which I want to delve further. Andrew Peterson has this to say about liturgy’s place in weekly gatherings:
One of the things I like best about liturgy is the more or less constant involvement of the congregation. The word “liturgy” means “the work of the people.” It’s not so much about us coming to sit while the pastor and the elders do everything, but about all of us together rehearsing the story of redemption, edifying each other by reading Scripture aloud, reaffirming what we believe, embodying worship by kneeling or singing together ….
This is what resonates with me. There’s a whole lot of “work of the people” in my church. The average Sunday bulletin is slightly smaller than a menu at The Cheesecake Factory.
In a May 2018 YouTube interview with Preston Sprinkle, Jonathan Merritt notes the following (this is slightly paraphrased to convert from conversation to the written word):
Liturgy is built on a premise … that language is not just expressive, [but that] language is formative. … A “low church” form of worship [sees] language as predominantly expressive — “I think something and language lets me say what I think.” That becomes very individualistic. “Why am I going to repeat something that I didn’t write and that I didn’t think?”
What liturgy says is, “This historic language … is not about expressing what you’re thinking. It’s about shaping what you think. Shaping the mind. Shaping the behaviors.” Liturgy operates in a formative framework of language, whereas most evangelicals are in a post-enlightenment expressive framework of language.
This strikes me as both enlightening and confusing. The enlightening part should be self-evident — that’s some heavy and heady stuff. But it’s also confusing. Because the “old time religion” crowd places such a low level of importance on words that were written over a millennium ago while placing at a much higher premium (comparatively) modern interpretations of the words on which they are based.
In “low church” services, if you can fake your way through 3 or 4 songs, you’re home free. But there’s a lot less room to hide when you’re part of a congregation that’s reading aloud a confession like this (penned by our pastor, Fritz Bogar):
Loving God, we confess together our need for cleansing and transformation. On Sundays, we announce the abundance of your grace, but by Monday, we have returned to the world ruled by scarcity. We have regarded those in need as threats to our own well-being rather than opportunities to offer your good news in the world. We speak of sacrifice, but cling to what we have; we celebrate the power of love, but are moved by fear; we yearn for forgiveness, but still demand atonement from those who have wronged us. Have mercy upon us, oh God, for you alone can change our hearts. Let the power of your Spirit strengthen us, and the presence of Christ fill us, that we might live as ambassadors of your glory.
There is also something that grabs me about “passing the peace”, another liturgical tradition that is the analog to what many churches refer to (perhaps euphemistically) as “fellowship time”. Instead of a vague, “How ya doin’?”, which can be met with virtually any response and receive the same reaction, we wish each other some variation of “the peace of Christ be with you.” We are literally blessing one another, thereby adding another element to the “work of the people”.
All of this, from Peterson to Merritt to that prayer to passing the peace, speaks to — nay, screams about — the dangers of seeing Christianity as individualistic. In reality, with the exception of the salvific experience, their is nothing individualistic about our faith. Paul speaks to this very issue when he compares the body of Christ with a physical body. As he illustrates the wrong mindset, even if one sets aside the ridiculous nature of talking body parts, the ideas of individualism that they are expressing are absolutely ludicrous. One can almost see Paul high-fiving himself for writing such a clever illustration that will stick with his readers.
I’ve done this Jesus thing on my own for half a century. I can’t anymore. This isn’t me suddenly becoming weaker than I once was. This is me acknowledging the way that God designed me — and all Christians, for that matter — to be in the first place.
The work of the people. Yeah. I dig it.