Liturgy and Life, part 1
by Mike Farley
In recent years, American evangelicals have shown increasing interest in viewing the Christian life as a process of “spiritual formation,” and they have sought instruction and literature and practices to pursue spiritual formation from an increasingly broad range of Christian traditions—Protestant, Orthodox, and Catholic. Authors like Richard Foster and Dallas Willard have led the way in teaching evangelicals anew about ancient spiritual disciplines such as prayer, meditation, fasting, solitude, confession, service, submission, and celebration.
One lacuna in this resurgence of evangelical interest in spiritual formation is reflection on the contribution of corporate worship to the process of spiritual growth. Evangelical literature on spiritual formation devotes the majority of its attention to private practices and relatively little attention to corporate worship. And when evangelical authors do address the role of corporate worship (exception: Donald Whitney), they fail to exegete the actual forms and ritual practices of the liturgy itself to show how the liturgy forms Christians in a particular way of life.
Two influential examples illustrate this point. In his popular work, The Spirit of the Disciplines, Dallas Willard defines worship as the response of delight and wonder that results from filling one’s mind and heart with the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. It is an expression of “the greatness, beauty, and goodness of God in words, rituals, and symbols.” While he thus acknowledges the role of ritual and symbol as a means of expression, Willard offers no analysis of the particular ways that specific rituals and symbols in corporate worship might form particular virtues and disciplines. While Willard emphatically stresses the bodily and social dimensions of spiritual formation, his otherwise profound discussion on these points devotes no attention to the role of corporate worship in cultivating particular bodily and social virtues and disciplines. Indeed, in his later work, Renovation of the Heart, Willard treats liturgical form or ritual as virtually irrelevant to the real work of spiritual formation. The form and practice of corporate worship is merely the vessel which contains treasure of an inner commitment to and experience of Christ, the cultivation of which is presumably unrelated to liturgical practice. Thus, to insist that one particular liturgical form might be intrinsically better than another is to give undue importance to a very secondary matter.
In his work Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster also teaches that, although liturgical forms are necessary since we are finite, embodied creatures, there is no necessary connection between a particular liturgical structure and the experience of worship:
“Worship is our response to the overtures of love from the heart of the Father….Forms and rituals do not produce worship, nor does the disuse of forms and rituals. We can use all the right techniques and methods, we can have the best possible liturgy, but we have not worshipped the Lord until Spirit touches spirit…..We must have ‘wineskins’ that will embody our experience of worship. But the forms are not the worship; they only lead us into the worship. We are free in Christ to use whatever forms will enhance our worship, and if any form hinders us from experiencing the living Christ—too bad for the form.”
Foster does stress the uniquely powerful experience of God’s presence that occurs only when the church assembles for corporate worship, and he helpfully discusses practical ways to prepare oneself for corporate worship and to engage in the liturgy with full inward devotion. However, Foster does not explore the particular ways that liturgical ritual might in turn inculcate that inward devotion.
For evangelicals like Willard and Foster, the ritual and symbol encountered in corporate worship is fundamentally expressive rather than formative. The practice of worship gives expression to an inner devotion to God that is primarily cultivated in other contexts and by other means (usually more private and informal).
While it is certainly true that private devotion affects one’s capacity to benefit from public worship, it is also true that public worship can influence and shape one’s walk with God. This latter insight is the key insight of the tradition of liturgical spirituality. Although it is an underdeveloped theme in evangelical literature on spiritual formation, there is a significant body of Christian scholarship on liturgical spirituality that examines the formative role of liturgy in the spiritual life of individuals and of whole Christian communities. As liturgical scholar Susan White explains in her introduction to this field, this approach to spirituality maintains that:
“the primary source for the nourishment of the Christian spiritual life is to be found in the Church’s public worship….The heart of the liturgical tradition of spirituality consists in the willingness to understand the liturgy from inside, to discover and experience that ‘epiphany’ of God, the world and life which the liturgy contains and communicates, to relate that vision and this power to our own existence, to all our problems.
The ritual and symbol of corporate worship thus sets the pattern for the Christian life: ‘The common prayer of the Church provides both the model and the content of the Christian devotional life.‘”
My thesis is this: The tradition of liturgical spirituality is correct in its claim that corporate worship can play a formative and not merely expressive role in spiritual formation, especially when it is celebrated in a manner congruent with its inherent theological meaning and when the church is taught how to understand the liturgy’s sacramental role in the Christian life. Consequently, evangelical approaches to spiritual formation must attend more fully to this formative dynamic by which Christian liturgy establishes normative patterns of Christian discipleship and provides a kind of experience that shapes the spiritual life of those who participate in it in a wide variety of ways.
While a thorough vindication of this thesis would require many volumes, in the remainder of these posts I want to illustrate some particular ways that corporate worship can furnish the model and content of Christian devotional life by examining the patterns of life ritually embodied in the practice of the Lord’s Supper. Since evangelical churches celebrate the Lord’s Supper in a variety of ways, I will focus on the basic ritual established by Jesus in the institution narratives of the gospels—which lies at the heart of the many different Eucharistic liturgies—seen in the light of its larger biblical-theological context. Specifically, I will offer a theological meditation on the Lord’s Supper that briefly highlights a number of different virtues and spiritual disciplines or practices that the Supper embodies and ought to inculcate in those who partake. Hopefully by opening up—albeit all too briefly—the theological and spiritual depth of the Supper, I will commend a more frequent and more attentive celebration of the Supper in evangelical churches.
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Mike Farley is an adjunct professor of theological studies at Saint Louis University. He is a member of Crossroads Presbyterian Church in St. Louis, Missouri, where he has formerly served as worship director.
Posted: February 9th, 2009 under Bible, Catholicity, Ethos, Liturgics, Sacraments.
Comments
Comment from David Cassidy
Time February 9, 2009 at 8:43 pm
Michael,
“Can play?”
My guess is that you would no doubt say, “Always unavoidably plays…”
Indeed, I don’t know of anything that is more formative than liturgy that is Scripture-soaked, historically catholic, culturally informed, pastorally led, and passionately executed.
The lack of good liturgy is formative as well, but with rather different outcomes.
Will you be writing at all about the dangers associated with liturgy?
Thanks for the helpful article. I look forward to more.
DC
Comment from Mike Farley
Time February 10, 2009 at 12:15 pm
David,
Liturgy is indeed always formative in one way or another. By “can play” a role in spiritual formation, I was assuming a positive, constructive role. It can also have a deforming, destructive role when it is done badly.
When liturgy is what you describe– “Scripture-soaked, historically catholic, culturally informed, pastorally led, and passionately executed”–then it becomes an enormously important way that God uses to conform us to the image of Christ. However, not all liturgy is like this. To the extent that liturgy fails to be this way, to the extent to which it lacks biblical-theological substance, is poorly planned and led, and is not received and performed in faith by the people of God, it will fail to form people rightly. Hence my qualifier “can play.”
I’m not going to address the dangers of liturgy in this series of posts. Maybe some other time.
Thanks for your helpful comments.
Comment from Nathaniel Ruland
Time February 10, 2009 at 10:18 pm
“…Christian liturgy establishes normative patterns of Christian discipleship and provides a kind of experience that shapes the spiritual life of those who participate in it in a wide variety of ways.”
I like the interwoven fact that discipleship, worship expression and experience represent. Robert Webber pays some attention to this concept in his book ‘Ancient-Future Evangelism’.
Comment from Jedidiah Slaboda
Time February 11, 2009 at 5:56 am
Thank you mike for this post. I look forward to further thoughts on eucharistic practice. I especially appreciate your pushing against hard substance/form distinctions and the qualities that lend to formative liturgical practice. The challenge, for me, is not to worship according to a set form that is understood well and has a definite theological arc, but to “[celebrate] in a manner congruent with its inherent theological meaning.” In other words, I am still not a praying man and am tempted to “use” the liturgy for something other than it is intended, i.e. covering up failures in preparation and regular spiritual discipline outside the context of corporate worship. Even in that case, however, I feel that I am glad to have a theologically sound liturgy that can, mitigate against my particular failures of the heart to respond to God with something that is more objective.
A question I have that is related to your post: Foster and Willard’s anti-formalism echoes Protestant apologetic anti-Roman Catholic rhetoric. The idea that there could possibly be “a” liturgy is, for obvious reasons, is not really a possible idea if one is thoroughly Protestant. My question is how/if this pushes us not only to fragmentation/schismaticism but to theological relativism and makes the possibility of catholic unity a mere pipe dream (as opposed to a true prayer).
Comment from Mike Farley
Time February 12, 2009 at 8:58 am
Jedidiah,
You’re probably right that Protestants will not ever likely adopt one liturgy in the Catholic sense of a fixed text that is almost identical from congregation to congregation. That is not a goal that I would favor at all. However, the alternative to that degree of uniformity is not necessarily complete disunity and disarray. Most liturgical scholars and denominations seeking liturgical reform over the past century have found a surprising unity and convergence in practice not in a common fixed liturgical text but rather in a common outline or framework for worship that has a relatively fixed order but permits lots of variation in the particular forms in which the elements of the framework are embodied. I think it is conceivable that Protestants could converge around the historic Christian framework that looks something like this:
Call to worship, confession of sin & forgiveness, reading & preaching of Scripture, response to the ministry of the word in creed, prayers of intercession & offering, Lord’s Supper, benediction and dismissal. The particular forms that one uses to accomplish each of those elements can vary quite a bit. But our liturgical life could be much more biblical, unified, substantive, and historically catholic if we would move toward a common, universal framework like I outlined above. I think there is a strong biblical argument to be made for that particular framework (on the basis of patterns/sequences of covenant renewal), but that would require much more space to spell out.
Comment from Jedidiah Slaboda
Time February 12, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Thank you for taking the time to respond, Mike. I think I might have logged too many hours in various ‘Pentecostal’ and Baptist worship services to be as hopeful as you seem to be! Or I might just not have as much faith. Is it your sense that there is even a majority of Protestants following that framework (which is the same basic framework of the mass too)?
Comment from Mike Farley
Time February 14, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Well, I said that it was conceivable, not that it was likely to happen any time soon. That framework has become much more common in mainline Protestant churches, but certainly the majority of evangelical and Pentecostal Protestants do not follow that framework. However, I do see glimmers of hope in a new level of interest in historic liturgical traditions and patterns among evangelicals in America. The emerging church conversation has at least raised some good questions, and I hear stories from lots of different corners of the evangelical world that indicates a small but growing dissatisfaction among younger people with the songs & sermon model found in so many evangelical churches today. I think that only substantive, historically catholic worship forms can adequately sustain the church in mission over the long term, so I think it will happen eventually (say, within the next 1000 years). I’m trying to help lay a foundation for my great-great-great-great granchildren.
Comment from Jedidiah Slaboda
Time February 14, 2009 at 8:23 pm
Mike, again, thanks for responding. I wonder if it would be worthwhile for us in the PCA to pray and work for re-working our Directory for Public Worship with the intent of making it both reflect such a framework and. I think we are a long way from getting the whole church on the same page. Maybe we should start in the PCA. I’ve wondered what the sense of having such a toothless document is and what it says about us that we can’t even agree on a “directory” that has little formal content at all, much less an actual liturgy or even formal liturgical options ala the Book of Common Worship.
Comment from Mike Farley
Time February 15, 2009 at 5:50 pm
It’s nothing new with the PCA. American Presbyterians have had largely toothless directories of worship since the first one was drafted in 1788. I think that attempting such reform right now would be very unfruitful. First, it’s very difficult to effect liturgical reform in top down fashion. Second, one of the compromises that maintains cooperation and unity within the PCA is almost complete congregational autonomy in liturgical matters. The PCA (along with the Presbyterian tradition generally) has insisted on a high degree of doctrinal uniformity and a vast amount of liturgical freedom. Thus, one can find almost the entire spectrum of liturgical models within the PCA. Any movement toward greater liturgical consensus would be a change in the PCA’s very DNA which much of the denomination is currently unprepared and unwilling to consider. Such change could only come from lots of informal, bottom-up, grassroots consensus, and it will take at least a generation or more of informal, educational groundwork to even make that conversation thinkable (let alone effecting any concrete changes in the status quo). One major key is the absence of sufficient attention to worship in seminary curricula. I’m convinced that there will not be any substantial movement toward any kind of greater liturgical consensus unless and until the Reformed seminaries that train PCA pastors begin to offer a much more thorough, systematic training in the history, theology, and practice of liturgics.
Comment from John Haralson
Time February 9, 2009 at 11:42 am
Great work, Dr. Farley. I look forward to your subsequent posts.