This is what my friend CT said to me at the recent up/rooted collect. I was piping up a little too much and a little to neo-orthodox. He laughed and suggested that I keep quiet. I had been granted evangelical standing for a day. I should try not to squander it. Ha! So true. So I stopped talking so much and tried to listen. The very strong fully-caffeinated jo made this difficult.
Go to Mike's blog if you are interested in another's perspective on the day. He actually quoted me. I am flattered to no end, but it shows jsut how much I prattled along. I have to speak a lot for something useful to come out. Heh.
Anyway, here is what I ended up thinking about during our meeting together. Ed Phillips, the presenter, is a professor I studied under at seminary. He is a bright man. He's an evangelical with a liturgical understanding of the church and its history. He teaches at Garrett.
[Editorial Happiness: AKMA has responded to this post. He offers a lot. It left me with many questions, but I may simply have to get to those on my own later.]
The program was split into two halves. I was onlt able to attend the first. You may have to poke around to see if anyone posted on the issue of electronic media in worship.
Evangelicals are the Christians most interested in reaching postmoderns, but they are also the least equipped to do so. -Stanley Grenz (as quoted by Geoff Holsclaw, Stanley wasn't there)That was our starting point. So, um, yeah. It was interesting.
Here is the first question that cought my attention and sent my mind reeling. paraphrased: "How do we understand the purpose of liturgy as a teaching tool? It seems that whenever we become too didactic, we cannot worship, but the moment we stop explaining then worship becomes meaningless." Yep. This is the non-liturgical/non-sacramental struggle with liturgy. This is why we are always reinventing the wheel. God bless SWTS. Quickly it became clear that worship/liturgy is both performative and catechetical. It is an expression of the faith and it shapes us in the faith. It is both. It is not either. The trick, it seems, is to step into a stream of living tradition and attempt to enter in. I think of it as art. It is high art. It is prayer.
How does one understand teaching liturgy?
- it is embodied formation and as important as feeding the hungry
- we may simply need to allow the liturgy to teach itself
- we are entering an existing tradition; we need not reinvent the wheel
- there is a question of leadership and our non-liturgical/non-sacramental understanding of the place of the ordained leadership. [We never got this far in conversation. I was hoping we might.]
There is some Protestant fallout where this kind of thing comes into play. We do not really have priests. We have the priesthood of the believer, but we do not have Priests. We have worship leaders. We have song leaders and maybe even the occasional liturgist. We have preachers and pastors instead of priests. We fulfill ritual roles, but we have no sacramental understanding of Christ being incarnated in the leader or the gathered. Our understanding is much more fluid and, well, analytical.
Oddly, because we do not have priests, we have a hard time understanding worship as pastoral...as formative. It can be educational and informative (analytical again), but we do not understand it as formative...even though it clearly forms us. General sweping statement? Yep. But it is interesting.
Where can we go to gain an understanding of liturgy as formative? Calvin saw liturgy as pastoral and formative. This is why he was so didactic. Taize may be a good place for us to explore as well. At this point in the conversation (and my musing) I made the comment Mike recalls about monasticism: Not everyone can be a monk; but seeing a monk be a monk positively informs my own experience of the faith. We protestants, especially we non-liturgical types, have lost the monastery. No one, except for the occasional individual, prays daily offering their work to God in a way that is appropriately public for the gathered community of believers. I spoke of the Community of the Holy Trinity and how Reconciler is trying to create a formal relationship between the two. I believe we need monasticism to better understand what it can mean to be Christian. As it stands, we wax and wane between individualism and sectarianism.
So, that was one of the many threads of conversation yesterday. I will see who else may keep a blog and might have posted on the gathering. It was a great meeting and I was sad to leave early. But Justin needed to move into his new digs. So, I schlepped in the afternoon.
[Mike posted this article many moons ago. It may give some sense to this whole post-modern thing approached from an evangelical perspective.]
Posted by tripp at February 27, 2005 07:34 AM | TrackBack