Liturgy that shapes a missional people
Context-shaped liturgy does not shape missional people. There is a strong urge today to shape the church's liturgy in the light of its cultural context. Being aware of the fact that the church's liturgy is often not attractive to our contemporaries, especially the youth, those who take this approach begin with culture as their starting point, and do so in the hope that shaping liturgy according to the needs, expectations and culture of contemporary people will result in significant renewal. In fact, those who argue for a change of the church's worship and liturgy in the light of contemporary culture look at liturgy pragmatically. The theological questions of worship and liturgy are rarely raised; the issue at stake is considered to be one of communication. Since our contemporaries are often illiterate concerning the church's liturgy, it is argued that liturgy needs to be changed so that people can relate to worship. These efforts might take several forms by becoming more informal and contemporary in one case, and introducing candles, symbols and drawing from ancient traditions in another. The common element is that these liturgical changes always begin with where people are. One is built on the assumption that informality is necessary to communicate with post-modern people; the other finds its starting point in the post-modern person s thirst for mystical experience. These pragmatic approaches are understood to be missional since their goal is to reach new people and involve them in the worship of the church. However, by succumbing to the narratives of the reigning culture, which is post-modernity in our case, these changes fail to be guided by the biblical narrative of God's mission. Thus, they cannot be called missional. By this denial the danger of syncretism is faced because the resulting liturgy of the church might so uncritically resemble the values and ways of the surrounding culture that it is unable to voice the word of God. Newbigin's words shed further light on this issue:
Authentic Christian thought and action begin not by attending to the aspirations of people, not by answering the questions they are asking in their terms, not by offering solutions to the problems as the world sees them. It must begin and continue by attending to what God has done in the story of Israel and supremely in the story of Jesus Christ. It must continue by indwelling that story so that it is our story, the way we understand the real story ... As we share in the life and worship of the church, through fellowship, word and sacrament, we indwell the story and from within that story we seek to be the voice and the hands of Jesus for our time and place.
Newbigin does not only unmask here what he calls false contextualization but also points out what the task of worship and liturgy is in the missional church. If liturgy is not shaped in a way that assists God's missional people to indwell the gospel story, then it is not shaped by God's mission. Therefore, the church's liturgy cannot be primarily defined by context. Mission-shaped liturgy is not first and foremost context-shaped liturgy.
Instead, the church's liturgy should be shaped by the gospel/biblical narrative. By this, I mean that the goal of liturgy is to immerse God's people in God's gospel story in such a way that this people will be able to live out the mission of Jesus in their everyday lives. The church gathers on Sundays to be renewed, and to receive strength for its mission that its members carry out while being dispersed in all segments of society from Monday to Saturday. Mission-shaped liturgy stands in the service of this renewal.
The young Hungarian biblical scholar, Tamás Czövek, reflecting on preaching in the RCH, points out that most sermons are didactic, moralizing, and present general and universal ethical and theological truths. Most sermons, says Czövek, resemble lectures and have as their goal the mediating of knowledge and information, and sometimes of encouragement and guidance. Czövek calls for a different preaching that takes seriously the literary style of the text, and imparts strength instead of knowledge by creating alternative visions of discipleship. Czövek emphasizes that people are to experience the story of God, i.e. the gospel event in the worship services. That experience empowers them to give up and leave behind other narratives that have shaped their life in a false and destructive way. His concluding words are worth citing, particularly in relation to the church's liturgy:
Worship is celebration. Preaching is an organic and maybe the most important but not the sole element of this celebration. We can only take part in the worship with the whole of our being if the service is moving from one point to another, and we are aware of that move, knowing where we start from and where we arrive. The service should be capable of drifting us, worshipping people, with itself. In other words, both the service and the preaching must have a certain span; they must be like an event, a story having a beginning, a high point, and a closure.
I believe that Czövek gives a description of what mission-shaped liturgy, i.e. one which is defined by the Word of God, the gospel event, should be like. His understanding is further deepened by N. T. Wright who states, "The biblical story from Genesis to Revelation is a great drama, a great saga, a play written by the living God and staged in his wonderful creation; and in liturgy, whether sacramental or not, we become for a moment not only spectators of this play but also willing participants in it. It is not our play; it is God's play, and we are not free to rewrite the script." The key thought here is peoples participation in God's story, or as Newbigin put it, indwelling the Bible, i.e. experiencing the gospel event. This is the task of a liturgy that aims at shaping and nurturing a missional people for God. Once the primacy of God's story, i.e. the biblical narrative, is secured in our understanding of missionshaped liturgy, we can turn to the question of context.
Mission-shaped liturgy takes a plurality of forms and means in a plurality of contexts. While emphasizing that mission-shaped liturgy cannot be primarily shaped by the context, the church, if it wants to avoid being irrelevant in a given place, needs to consider the familiar cultural forms. Churches with a plurality of traditions, ranging from highly liturgical to spontaneous and contemporary ones, will develop in the context of a pluralist Europe a number of liturgies. Being mission-shaped does not depend on whether liturgies are conservative or inventive, liturgical or informal, contemporary or traditional. As earlier stated, the church is to cherish the culture in all its created goodness, as well as to be critical of all its evil aspects. As N. T. Wright emphasizes, tradition should be celebrated and the contemporary adopted, and both should be done through the lens of the gospel. An uncritical insistence on rigidly keeping all the details of a liturgical heritage might lead to the church's irrelevance, while the openness to embrace anything new and popular might result in syncretism. Cultural elitism and traditionalism might become an idol of the church's worship as easily and subtly as being contemporary. Therefore, the work of continuous critical reflection on liturgical practices in the light of the gospel and the culture, whether these practices be old or new, cannot be avoided. As the missional church is in the need of continuous conversion, its life of worship must be open to being re-shaped time and again. Mission shaped liturgy is neither engraved in stone, nor it is forced to change with the arrival of every new fashion.
It was argued that mission-shaped liturgy is birthed in the dynamic interaction of gospel, church and culture, and takes a multitude of styles, forms and expressions. However, mission-shaped liturgy has two common aspects that need to be emphasized, especially in the context of the RCH and, I believe a number of European mainline churches. First, mission-shaped liturgy is one in which God's people actively takes part; second, it is God-centred.
In the light of both the centrality of the pastor and clericalism referred to above, it becomes obvious how the communal and God-centred aspects of liturgy belong to each other. Both Wright and Marva Dawn call attention to the development in which worship leaders, being preachers in a more traditional setting or musicians utilizing contemporary songs, are put in the centre, in front of the congregation. This placement on the stage might bring the false notion that worship is the act and performance of the leader for an audience. It happens even more drastically when worship is confused with evangelism. When the church's worship is put into the service of evangelism it becomes people-centred and loses the correct focus, which is the glory, love, grace and justice of God. The church does not worship God because it wants to attract non-Christians, even if worship does have a missionary dimension. In this situation Dawn's word are timely, "Worship attenders in contemporary and traditional spaces must all be reminded that they are - each one - the actors in worship, that the leaders are not there to perform but to direct the action, that God is the audience (object) of the work of the people (the Greek leitourgia or liturgy)." It follows, that the practical elements of worship must be shaped according to the theological conviction that worship is the act of God's people, and that it focuses on the person of the Triune God. The members of the congregation are to be involved not only in the worship itself but also in the process of preparation. Again, the way this participation is carried out depends on the size, the liturgical tradition, and other characteristics of a given congregation. Mission-shaped liturgy, however, is both communal and God-centred.
András Lovas (2006, July). MISSION-SHAPED LITURGY. International Review of Mission, 95(378/379), 352-358.
So, your thoughts? Personally I found that András' thinking here on Christian liturgy had many interesting parallels with my own thinking elsewhere on Christian art. Regular readers may recall that I have many times voiced a preference for Gospel scenes over Jesus portraits precisely because they more directly connect the viewer with the narratives of our faith - this comes from a core conviction that while stylistic experimentation is fine, story rememberance comes first. But I was still challenge by this. I was challenged to consider more deeply what this implies for our liturgies. And it has highlighted for me some of the many ways we - in emerging and established contexts - have fallen short.
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