What is Catalyst?
Four issues of Catalyst are mailed each academic year to some 5,000 UM theological students in more than 100 seminaries in the U.S.A.

AFTE
Catalyst is a project of A Foundation for Theological Education (AFTE).

What is the John Wesley Fellowship Program?
Each year AFTE awards up to five John Wesley Fellowships to assist gifted United Methodists in their doctoral studies at the finest universities.

Back Issues
Several back issues of Catalyst are now available on-line.

Subscriptions
Subscription is free for UM seminarians, and is available to all others for $5 per year.

THE CHALLENGE OF WORSHIP RENEWAL

Nobody says all Christian worship should be in Aramaic, or that first-century Palestinian music, architecture, or dress are the only proper kinds for worship. The Reformation principle that that the language and culture of worship should properly be that of the worshippers has largely prevailed in all the major Christian traditions, certainly in their American expressions. The Bible does not give us even one full description of any worship service, let alone a prescription for all worship services. Even weekly Sunday worship is not a matter of explicit biblical injunction. Instead, Scripture primarily portrays the object of our worship: God revealed in Jesus Christ. The details of worship are left to our own wisdom, sensibility, and creativity. 

Worship renewal is the intentional change of the style, pattern, and practice of worship. Much of the challenge of worship renewal comes from the tension of several related sets of seemingly opposed needs that variously motivate renewal efforts. Let me propose three such tensions in worship renewal: contextualization versus differentiation, accessibility versus depth, and tradition versus creativity. 

Contextualization versus Differentiation

How different should the culture of worship be from the surrounding culture? Using H.R. Niebuhr's classic taxonomy from his Christ and Culture (HarperCollins, 1951), what parts of worship should be "Christ of culture" and what parts "Christ against culture"? 

The need for contextualization ("Christ of culture") begins with the fully incarnational nature of our faith: We claim that God came to us as a first-century Palestinian Jewish man, and that he himself worshiped as such. We thus follow him as we seek a full, bodily, temporal, cultural experience of worship. Furthermore, our bodies are to be living sacrifices (Rom 12:1) so that all the cultural particulars entailed by embodied life should rightly be considered in shaping and ordering worship. Our call to worship "in spirit and in truth" (John 4:24) is not a call for disembodied worship but rather an affirmation that spirit and truth can now, under the New Covenant, be localized in the time and culture of any place. 

Contextualization is also needed because it is impossible entirely to escape the larger culture. To use the 12-note western musical scale; printed books or projected graphics; sound amplification, electric lights, plumbing, and mechanical ventilation; the 24-hour clock, 12-month year, and 7-day week (with most days named after pagan gods); offerings rendered in dollars and cents; and the vernacular language-to name just a few obvious items-is to participate in the larger culture. Any claim that a particular form of worship is wholly removed from the larger culture is selective and naïve. 

Contextualization is needed most of all because we are called to love God with our whole heart, soul, mind and strength (Mark 10:30). We thus need ways to bring as much of ourselves into the worship moment as possible. For the Christian, all of life is to be consecrated to God, both in the sense of each moment of life being an act of worship, and of corporate worship being an offering of our whole lives. Each local church needs ways for its people to find their own voice, identity, and story in the worship moment. This may include recognizing that their racial, ethnic, class, regional, or national culture and identity is not to be called impure for the purposes of worship when God has made it clean (Acts 10:15). 

Perhaps the best example of contextualization in contemporary America is Afro-Baptist worship, where the music, preaching, way of gathering, sense of bodily presence, and sense of time all distinctly and recognizably express the story and identity of African-Americans in their embrace of suffering and its transformation by the gospel. 

But alongside contextualization, differentiation ("Christ against culture") is also needed. We are told that this world is fundamentally evil, so that we are not to love it (1 John 2:15-17), be friends with it (Jas 4:4), or be conformed to it (Rom 12:2). Instead we are to live as aliens and strangers, distinct from the world (1 Pet 2:11; 2 Cor 6:14-18). "The world" in this sense means the values and powers of the world as opposed to God, not absolutely everything in the world-or else we could not so much as inhale. However, just because something is superficially differentiated from the world (e.g., sitting in pews) does not mean it is deeply differentiated (truly gathering for worship and actively worshiping); and just because a practice is superficially similar to something outside the church (casual dress) does not mean it is not deeply differentiated (coming before God humbly, expectantly, gratefully, and without pretense). 

Differentiation is needed in particular when aspects of culture have moral content clearly opposed to God. For example, fraudulent commerce and arrogant, hypocritical religious leadership in the place of worship were both explicitly condemned by Jesus. Some features of contemporary American culture that likewise bear condemnation include self-referential individualism, the concomitant weakness in commitments to family and the larger community, worship of youth and physical beauty, materialism and commercialism, and dependence on national wealth and might for security. 

Differentiation is also needed because of the inherent ritual need for worship to be demarcated from the quotidian. Anything specially momentous needs to be marked as such. If birthdays, public holidays, and major sporting events are so marked, certainly the corporate worship of God should be also, if not more so. However, this ritual need for differentiation does not necessarily require the points of differentiation to be exclusively Christian or even religious. For instance, while a space used for worship should be demarcated as such in some way, it need not be with a cross, pews, or stained glass. Each of those was, after all, the product of particular cultural developments in particular places. At the same time, it is probably unfortunate that most American Protestant worship remains unhelpfully differentiated not so much from the world as from Catholic and Orthodox worship in their use of such very ancient practices as signs of the cross, kneeling, vestments, frequent communion, icons, chant, candles, and incense. 

Accessibility versus Depth

In worship as in all of life, there is always more depth to be had for those willing to work harder. The mistake comes when any one point in depth is declared an end point. For instance, hymns are sometimes declared deeper and more profound than praise songs; but in the same way, medieval chant is deeper and more profound than most congregational hymns. One of the criticisms leveled against Luther's cultivation of congregational singing was that the music was necessarily simpler than what the trained medieval choirs had sung, and closer to the popular music of his day. Greater depth, though a desirable thing as far as it goes, is a moving target. 

Yet who would argue against an increasing depth in worship? Are we not called to maturity in our faith? While the direct access of believers to the Throne of Grace makes untutored prayers and extemporaneous thoughts acceptable for worship, why would we want to leave our prayers (and especially our corporate ones) always at the mercy of mood and whim? Set forms of prayer can be used as tutors and guides without precluding the use of extemporaneous prayers. The admirable desire to worship "honestly" and "as we are" should not preclude considerable effort in worship to aspire to the more and deeper we can become. 

Meanwhile, greater depth must be balanced against the need for accessibility. Every public worship setting includes people with a range of language fluency, musical skill, biblical and theological knowledge, training in religious gestures and rituals, spiritual maturity, emotional capacity, cultural literacy, and aesthetic sensitivity. Since worship, like all acts by Christians, are to be loving, it would hardly do for worship leaders not to attempt to meet people where they are. This is the goal of neo-revivalistic, seeker-sensitive services (where facility with churchly language, concepts, and rituals is not always assumed) and seeker-driven services (where such facility is never assumed). The mistake comes in assuming that people do not have the capacity to grow, even quickly, or that they are not capable of appreciating something done beautifully and coherently even if it is new and different for them. 

Received Tradition versus Local Creativity

It is a cherished feature in the American self-concept that each of us can invent and reinvent ourselves at will-and indeed, that to do so is to be at our best and happiest. This idea has brought some blessings, but unfortunately it has also made us predisposed against both a positive use of tradition and an honest avowal of our use of tradition. To pray extemporaneously is a fine thing; but to assume that such a prayer is always deeper, truer, more personal, or more edifying than the avowed use of a historic prayer; or that the extemporaneous prayer is less than chock-full of formulaic (= traditional) religious phraseology is simply not to understand the nature of things. In some Christian circles, it is further assumed that to be led by the Holy Spirit in worship is necessarily to dwell on the extemporaneous and spontaneous, as if the Spirit makes it a point never to reuse anything (in which case we had better not sing any song twice), or as if we have nothing to learn from what the Spirit has led previous generations to fathom, express, and pass down to us. Sometimes we forget that we claim a real unity with the church not only across space but across time. Do we have positive, tangible ways of honoring that temporal unity in our worship practices? 

At the same time, God gives each individual and community gifts of fresh creativity and expression, which we are impoverished not to cultivate. To repress that creativity is to do harm to the image of God in which we ourselves are created. God clearly revels in stupendous variety and variation in the natural world; surely he enjoys the same in the acts of worship created by his children. It is challenging to foster and honor local creativity in a culture that has so commercialized and commodified the arts. However, in every local church there are undiscovered talents and unused gifts for creating music, prayers, visual art, congregational movement, and stories that can enrich the worship moment. 

This tension between tradition and creativity is part of the universal tension between form and freedom. In free worship traditions, which do not use prescribed forms, it bears reminding that the true enemy of freedom is not form but bad form. Where there is no form there is only chaos; and some kind of form-usually not very good-will emerge to fill the vacuum. The only question then is what form is operating and whether it fosters healthy freedom. So much of free worship ends up being monologue from the front and congregational singing. Both are sturdy and greatly useful forms, but taken alone they do not make for a very rich variety of expressive freedoms. 

If I am right that these tensive needs--contextualization versus differentiation, accessibility versus depth, and tradition versus creativity-exist in every worship setting, then it follows that worship renewal is a never-ending process of trying to balance these contending needs, and all amid the moving (rushing!) stream of changes in the larger culture. By now you might rightly guess that I consider questions of hymns versus praise songs, suits and dresses versus sportshirts and pants, declamatory versus conversational preaching, pews versus stack chairs, and stained glass versus video projection as symptomatic issues emerging from deeper needs. My goal has not been to provide ready prescriptions for resolving intergenerational, interethnic, or interclass conflicts in worship renewal-if I had them, I would gladly share them! Rather, I hope I have been able to provide a conceptual framework for understanding why such conflicts are so prevalent and persistent, and why they have no easy or final resolution. 

By Russell Yee, Ph.D., Pastor, New Life Christian Fellowship, Castro Valley, California; Adjunct Professor, American Baptist Seminary of the West, Berkeley.