In our class time, using Dr. Thomas' thoughts as our guide, we looked at the various forms of worship expression in this temperament. Thomas identifies those as ritual, symbol, and sacrifice.
We focused mainly on the the first two. Ritual, such as creating sacred rhythms of prayer and worship through the use of liturgy, or observing the Christian calendar, helps us create a fixed point in which we can focus on God. Likewise, symbols are physical reminders of God's presence in our lives. Both serve a crucial role in the life of a traditionalist.
Concerning liturgy and sacred rhythm, I am privileged to introduce you to one of my "distant mentors," Dr. Christine Longhurst. Dr. Longhurst received her undergraduate degrees at the Mennonite Brethren Bible College as well as the University of Winnipeg. She then went on to receive a Masters' Degree in Music from SMU, and a Masters' from Perkins School of Theology in Dallas. In 2006, she received a Doctorate in Worship Studies from the Robert E. Webber Institute for Worship Studies.
She has taught courses on worship and music at many prestigious academic institutions, and continues to write and teach about worship and music to faith communities in Canada.
I came into contact with Dr. Longhurst through her blog, re:Worship, which is what you might describe as an anthology of worship resources. Though she is does not consider herself a "traditionalist," she has created a wonderful resource that combines the use of the Christian Calendar and ancient practice with a contemporary slant. Her resource has allowed me to dig deeper into the traditionalist temperament in a way that other resources have not provided. There is not a day that goes by that I don't access something on the re:Worship blog. I cannot recommend it enough.
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| re:Worship Blog |
Here are some thoughts in response to a few of your questions. I thought I’d begin with some introductory comments, so that you can get a sense of the context out of which I’m responding:
I come from the Mennonite Brethren tradition, which is part of the larger stream of Anabaptists who came to the fore during the religious reformations of the 16th century. Ours is a “free church” tradition, with no set liturgy and a strong emphasis on the personal relationship between God and the believer. We are communally-driven, non-hierarchical in polity, and believe that the church is made up of a priesthood of believers, all of whom serve the church with their varying gifts and abilities. Pastors function as shepherds and spiritual care-givers rather than “leaders” per se. We believe we are called to serve the world, to care for justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God. (Micah 6).
So, I’m not at all sure I fit the single “traditionalist” mold that you are exploring. In fact, when I took the You’ve Got Style survey of spiritual temperaments [...] my results were more than a little mixed! In case it’s helpful, this is what I got:
Ascetic 20
Activist 20
Traditionalist 18
Intellectual 18
Naturalist 17
Sensate 17
Enthusiast 16
Caregiver 16
Contemplative 14
With that in the background, here are some answers to your questions:
1) How did the idea for your blog, re:Worship, come about?
In the spring of 2011, I found myself with a few months of free time. My husband (an avid blogger) had been encouraging me to do some work online, and so I decided to give it a try. I’ve spent a good part of my life in pastoral ministry, so I decided to experiment with a blog of resources for people working in worship ministry.
I’ve often been frustrated looking for worship resources on the internet. There’s so much good material available for planning and leading worship, but much of it is hard to find. You often have to dig deep into each individual blog or website to find something useful. Text this Week, for example, does a great job of making sermon resources available to preachers (commentaries, articles, illustrations), but they only do a passable job of worship resources (prayers, litanies, confessions, benedictions, etc.). I thought we could use a blog or website that aggregated those types of resources, and made them more easily available to worship leaders/worship planners/pastors.
The re:Worship blog was not conceived first and foremost as a personal spiritual resource, although many people tell me they use it that way. Instead, it was conceived as a resource for corporate worship—the weekly conversations that take place in worship between God and God’s people.
Here are a few of the key convictions that have shaped my approach to the blog:
Biblical worship is corporate worship. Contrary to what we see in a lot of North American churches these days, the faith Jesus calls us to is not merely a private, individual faith. Although we are each invited into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, God’s purposes in this world are primarily accomplished through the covenant community. It’s through the people of God that God makes his presence and his purposes known. And so Jesus’ invitation to us is an invitation to something much bigger than our own personal experience. It’s an invitation to step out of our private world, and join God in what He is seeking to do in the wider world.
In the same way, biblical worship is not primarily individual worship—something that takes place between God and each separate individual. In the Bible, worship is a corporate experience – a conversation between God and the gathered community. When we come together for worship, we set aside our own specific needs and interests (and even concern for our unique spiritual temperaments!), and join as one to listen to and respond to God.
My motivation for working with the various worship elements on my blog (calls to worship, benedictions, litanies, and prayers) is rooted in my concern that worship be practiced and understood as a communal event—something we do together with others. The resources on my blog are chosen with that goal in mind.
Loss of Scripture in worship. I’ve become increasingly concerned about the lack of scripture in corporate worship. Many congregations read very little scripture—often just the text for the sermon. That’s a problem, because worship is not just our response to God. Worship is also God’s revelation to us. In essence, it’s a dialogue between God and the gathered community. Scripture is one of the primary ways in which we hear God’s voice in worship, and are reminded of God’s story—the story of creation, covenant, incarnation, redemption, and re-creation. So much contemporary worship centers on our story rather than God’s story. We come to worship looking to bring God into the story of our personal lives, rather than allowing God to draw us out of our own concerns and needs and into the story of what God is seeking to do in the world. As Christian Smith (sociologist at Notre Dame) has discovered, many North American Christians see God primarily as a cosmic butler/divine therapist – there only to meet our needs. (We see so much of this attitude in contemporary worship music—songs that celebrate God for being “enough for me”—as if God’s “value” can be measured according to our need!) Rooting our worship in the Word of God is one of the primary ways we have of keeping God’s story (rather than our story) central. It is one of the primary ways we affirm that worship is not something we do for ourselves—to serve our personal agenda—but something we do with God and with one another. Scripture keeps drawing us back to the purpose and plan of God, which is much bigger than our personal needs and desires.
That is why scripture is at the heart of this blog. I believe that rooting our spoken worship leading—our prayers and comments—in the content and imagery of worship helps keep us grounded in God’s story, and helps keep our worship focused on God rather than simply our own private needs and concerns.
My choice to follow the weekly scripture readings suggested by the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) was entirely practical: it allowed me to know exactly which scripture readings were being looked at by churches around the world each week. (My own congregation only occasionally follows the RCL.) [If your class is not familiar with the RCL, it is a three-year cycle which suggests four scripture readings for each week: one from the Psalms, the Old Testament, the Gospels and the Epistles. Pastors/worship planners are free to use some or all of those readings. The lectionary approach to using scripture is a very ancient one, and was used by the synagogues of Jesus’ day as well as by the earliest Christian churches.]
This April (2014) I will have completed the three-year lectionary cycle, which means that I will have worked through many biblical texts in both the Old and New Testaments.
Since my own denomination doesn’t use the RCL, I’ve been careful to also provide scriptural indexes for the prayers and readings. That way churches that don’t use the RCL can still access scripture-based resources without having to understand or follow the lectionary system. So, for example, a worship planner working with Psalm 8 can check the Old Testament Call to Worship Index (or Prayer Index or Confession Index or Benediction Index), and find worship resources inspired by the content and imagery of that particular Psalm. The indexes are by far the most popular posts on the blog.
A need for good worship resources. In my experience, many pastors and worship leaders have very little training in worship planning and leading. Pastors-in-training often spend significant time at seminary learning how to preach, but relatively little time learning about corporate worship itself. When they enter ministry, most of them tend to leave worship planning and leading to the music people…who are often great musicians, but who also often know little about worship and liturgy[i] (see footnote below). What happens? The music people simply do what they know best: lead music. But the spoken aspects of worship – the way we gather the people (calls to worship), the way we acknowledge the presence of God among us (opening prayers/invocation), the way we speak the truth before God and hear God’s words of forgiveness (confession/assurance), the way we lift up our world to God (prayers of intercession), and the way we close our worship gatherings (with the blessing of God on each one – benedictions) – these important movements of corporate worship are often ignored altogether. I’ve discovered that many pastors and worship leaders don’t even know where to begin. So I hoped that a blog liked re:Worship might give them some idea about how to understand and use these important pieces of the worship dialogue.
I don’t know how many people simply take something off the blog and use it verbatim in worship. That’s rarely my approach. Instead, I allow the ideas and the language to inform and inspire my own preparation, and then re-think those ideas to fit my own congregation and circumstances.
2) In your opinion, what are the benefits of following the liturgical calendar in terms of spiritual growth?
The way we use our time is just about the best indication we have about what really matters to us. We always find time for the things we consider important.
Just as the use of scripture in worship reminds us that God’s story should be the focus of our worship, so observing the liturgical calendar reminds us that God’s agenda—God’s time—has a greater significance than our own.
Following the liturgical calendar—from anticipation (Advent) to the birth of Christ (Christmas), the ministry of Christ among us (Epiphany), the journey to the cross (Lent), God’s ultimate act of redemption (Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Sunday), and the gift of the Holy Spirit/birth of the church (Pentecost)…and then the season of Ordinary time in which the church works out its call and mission in the world…we relive God’s story, over and over again.
The earliest Christians understood the value of the liturgical calendar, and they used time as one of the building blocks of worship. God’s story changed the way they viewed the past, present and future. And one of the ways they bore witness to this new reality was by re-ordering time. (Although you’ve just asked about the liturgical calendar – i.e. the church year – the early Christians also told God’s story on a daily and weekly basis. But that’s another conversation!)
3) How has the use of liturgy deepened your personal experience with God?
You might already have picked up on the fact that my decision to use “liturgical resources” in worship is not really about my personal experience with God. That is, it’s not so much a stylistic preference as it is a means to an end—to enable the people of God to worship with integrity and truth, and to ground their worship in the story of who God is and how God acts in the world (as known through scripture).
That said, I’ve discovered that “liturgical resources” such as the ones on my blog often deepen my insight and understanding of God’s Word. Careful thought has gone into reading and understanding the scripture passage(s) in question, and careful thought has also gone into the preparation of the readings and prayers. That doesn’t always happen when we pray spontaneously – and I speak from plenty of personal experience!
4) How do you respond to those who oppose pre-written prayers?
I’ve always regretted the unfortunate division that has occurred among Christians—between those who prefer established liturgy and written prayer, and those who stress intimacy and spontaneity in prayer. One side wonders how authentic worship can happen when you are using the words of others instead of your own. The other side wonders how worship can be effective if you’ve given little or no advance thought to what you’ll pray for.
I’ve decided I need both. I just look at the example of Jesus. He certainly participated in the liturgical prayers of the synagogue. The Bible says he went to the synagogue every Sabbath as was his custom (Luke 4:16). And he would certainly have participated in the private devotions expected of every good Jew: reciting the Shema twice every day (from Deuteronomy 6:4-9 “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is one God….” followed by Deuteronomy 11:13-21 and Numbers 15:37-41). Jesus also would have observed the three hours of prayer each day (morning, afternoon and sundown), reciting a prayer and a series of benedictions each time. And when the disciples asked him to teach them how to pray, he gave them fairly clear instructions about what to include – which we have in the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13).
On the other hand, we know that he also had an active extemporaneous prayer life: we read that he often went off by himself to pray, including on the night he was betrayed and arrested. We also have his beautiful high-priestly prayer in John 17.
Certainly, Jesus whole-heartedly embraced both “liturgical” and extemporaneous prayer.
The truth is, even those of us who pray “spontaneously” still choose our words from tradition—it’s just an oral tradition rather than a written one. Pastors and worship leaders know how easy it is to fall into the same oral patterns. (If you’re in doubt about that, try recording the prayers you hear in worship for a few weeks, and then compare their content and language. You’ll be amazed at the similarities from week to week.) In many ways, our ‘spontaneous” prayers are just as grounded in traditional patterns as are written prayers. Thomas Howard once wrote, “Spontaneity is impossible sooner or later; there only remains for us to choose which set of phrases we will make our own.”
So we all inherit patterns for praying and preaching, and unless we consciously and deliberately refresh and expand our patterns, we tend to preach the same sermons and pray the same prayers over and over again. That is why many of us find it helpful to look around for inspiration. It’s not a matter of praying someone else’s prayer as much as it is a matter of allowing the shape and content of that prayer to inform and enrich our own prayer.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches. William Willimon once wrote: “…the real issue is not liturgical versus free prayer or formal versus informal prayer. The issue is whether or not our forms are functional or dysfunctional, whether they do an adequate job of communicating for the congregation. … [The] two forms of public prayer—free and liturgical prayer—are not mutually exclusive....They represent two ways of being with God. … These two forms of prayer complement one another when used with an awareness of their differing values.”
As much as I value spontaneous prayer in worship, it’s not really something I can post on my blog! But I trust that worship leaders can find inspiration and insight for their spontaneous prayer through reading, praying, and absorbing the written prayers of others.
Well, that’s probably more than enough from me! Hope something here is helpful!
Christine
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[i] ) By liturgy, I just mean the shape or pattern of worship. All of our churches have a specific order of worship, whatever we call it. (I have yet to find someone who can’t sketch out their typical order of worship in under two minutes!) The word liturgy comes from two Latin words, which essentially just mean “the work of the people.” So “liturgy” doesn’t actually refer to any particular approach to worship – just worship generally.
A huge thank you to Dr. Christine Longhurst for devoting her time to share with me her passion for worship, and for providing us with great insight.
Please be sure to check out the re:Worship blog, as well as Dr. Longhurst's other resources, Songs for Worship and Contemporary Psalms.
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