conjectural navel gazing; jesus in lint form

Well Lessig certainly is very persuasive about our current situation. And I think I have argued something similar in discussions about copyright, intellectual property and cultural production. However, I am not certain of the connection you see between what he is saying and liturgy, in part because I would say participant and reception have very different dynamics when we are talking about the liturgy of the church. Lessig's point is bound up with technology and progress and of "culture" as something ever evolving. None of which I would dispute in the context Lessig is speaking.

The problem of finding the lines of connection and of what participation, reception and creation means in terms of the liturgy of the church is that unless in the end everything about Christian faith must change then do some degree our liturgy and faith is weighted on the recepetion end of things and not the creation end of things. The Christian faith and thus liturgy is not meant to be recreated in each new generation but be received and lived out in every generation. In a sense I am not a user of liturgy or Christian faith, so there is no user generated content.

Of course I would argue over time for Protestants and we splintered further and further and then as denominationalism became the dominant way of organizing Christian faith and groups from a Protestant perspective reception became less and less of a reality and we were in each new iteration of Christian faith generating new content and remixing what we could remember from the old. However, this is the result of the loss of reception and continuity that had been and is still central to liturgy and faith for many Protestants who value catholicity and certainly so for RC and Orthodox.

So, am I missing something or are you saying what I think you might be saying, in which case I think it has nothing to do with how we have approached Reconciler's liturgy. Or maybe you are seeing something I am not seeing in Lessig's speech (well almost a sermon).

I thought you might have those objections. But does change have to be evolution? Cannot change be clarity? You seem to put change in a poor light. And I know that's not what you think about change. Liturgies have changes, morphed, grown, deepened, become context specific again and again in Christian history. The church in first century Jerusalem did not worship in the way that even the Orthodox do now.

The elements were there perhaps (Trinity, eucharist etc), but that's not what I'm talking about. I am suggesting that true liturgy is active, participatory, and is work.

So, we are likely speaking past one another. I think we are on the same page with this. BTW, Lessig's points interest me because they take demonstrate how there may be a cultural sea change. We may be getting away (yet again?) from receiving information to creating information as primary. There's always a both/and there. And the hope I see in this is that the "free church" traditions are based on the receiving of information (illumination by the Holy Spirit when it works) and not the interaction with it. Our liturgy reflects this.

This may be because of the cultures from which this liturgy emerges. I dunno.

I am seeing something different, Larry. Since I'm so focused currently on our congregation's participation in the liturgy this video jumps out at me and practically knocks me over. What I see is a parallel, not necessarily a correlation.

Liturgy (the work of the people) should be a highly participatory activity. However, with the advent of modern society (closely timed with Susa's dismay at Washington, I think), we moved from creators to consumers. In this situation, creators doesn't necessarily mean making something new and totally different, but participating in an activity, and thereby creating it anew. As our culture became more and more professionalized and industrialized, so did our worship. Our worship, at least in mainline protestantism became more and more passive until worship basically consisted of sitting for an hour to listen to a good speech and a pretty song. Oh, sure, we still sang hymns, but more often than not, the choir sang the hymns while a few brave souls in the congregation timidly joined in while the majority stood and listened with bored expressions on their faces. Now, obviously what I'm describing is in the extreme and there are many variations out there with all levels of participation and non participation.

And now, as our culture moves from a modern society to a post-modern society the younger generations are looking for something more. In this video, Lessig is focusing on UGC as the new 'vocal chord.' And that is one aspect, I think, of the current cultural sea change. Another aspect, I think, is the rise of the emerging church, as well as a growth in the number of young people attending Orthodox, Catholic and other highly liturgical traditions. The younger generations are looking for more than a good speech and pretty song in the course of an hour one day a week. They don't want to consume like their parents did - not at the movies and not at church. They want to create - user generated content, and liturgy. Not create new liturgy, but participate fully in Story - to tell the Story anew, not change the story. Well, I'm sure there are some who want to change the story, that happens in every generation, but that's beside the point.

I guess what I am saying is that I see a big neon flashing parallel between Lessig's description of this one aspect of our culture and the trend that worship seems to be taking - from participatory to passive and back to participatory.

Tripp, thank you for posting this video! Great food for thought and very timely for me.

It seems to me that the purpose of liturgy is primarily offering God our worship, praise, and thanksgiving. (It is the people's work in the sense of our duty.) Change should be viewed, not from the perspective of what "works" for those involved, but from how it draws them into the work of worship (or so it seems to me).

Tto answer your question, I don't think liturgy is "user generated". Unlike culture it is focused on something (Someone) completely outside of ourselves. Our participation is to lift us up so we reach him, to allow him to recreate us, not so that we can recreate ourselves.

Yes I am negative about "change" in regards to thought and language about church, and it is not the thought of evolution that bothers me, but the technological view of change, that is implicit in our culture and is what Lessig's presentation is about, cultural change that is driven by technology.
I think the Spirit and thus ecclesial evolution is different and it occurs through reception, our faith is received and developed.
The problem I have with technological conceptions of change is that it give priority to the future, expressed in the new technology. The church has a very strange and different relationship to time and thus to change, or so I am coming to believe more and more. I am also coming to believe that most forms of Protestantism have lost this unique understanding of time. Liturgy is among other things an expression of our relationship to time. If the liturgy of the church is to be eschatology, if it is in some sense supposed to reorient us, than its relationship to change and time and cultural shifts will be, or should be very different from what Lessig describes.
I am also coming to believe that this difference is the only thing that brings about true transformation. Change is not transformation necesarily.
Now, what has happened in Protestant liturgies is the stagnation of a culture of liturgical change that has viewed liturgy as technology. But I don't think the solution is to re-invigorate this paradigm but to recapture and retrieve what Protestants slowly abandoned after we split from Rome.
So, a difference may be that I am increasingly suspicious of the "Free Church" traditions claims, largely because I don't think those claims makes sense of how the Spirit worked in the development of ecclesial life and form and liturgy in the first 1000 years or more of church and liturgical development, even perhaps especially after Constantine.
But do revise "Free church" traditions along these lines is to also give priority to those who have gone before, and to be willing to sit at the feet of the Saints who have gone before us. Technological change, and the technologies Lessig mentions is about expression and this insistence that the young are radically different than the old. I think this is a fable our technological civilization tells itself in part to legitimize our otherwise unfounded need to progress and have new things. The more I think about my grand-parents and great grandparents the less and less I feel distanced from them. I live with very different technologies and yet their struggles and longings their faith at bottom is much like mine. Granted if they lived now they'd hardly recognize my own re-mix of Goth, Punk Christian, etc. But in some sense that give the illusion of radical difference that require change, when in fact it is difference that requires sitting with what has gone before and what has given me what I have now.

Larry...

What Amy said is much more coherent than my prattle. Respond to that instead.

Heh.

Amy,
If we talk parallel and not correlation, I do see the parallel. Also, one of the reasons I have long been an advocate of "high church" verses "low Chruch" or "free church" liturgical is that or more to the point in favor of liturgical traditions that were cognizant of a connection to the development of the liturgical forms of the church through history was that it was more participatory than the liturgy of sing a few hymns have an offering and listen to someone preach for 20 to 45 minutes.

But the question I am interested in is how "participation" is different for the church in its liturgy from what Lessig describes. Perhaps because of the fact that the Covenant straddles a divide I am particularly sensitive to a certain way of apply or seeing parallels between how change is viewed in our highly technological culture and the misapplication of that in our church's. That while I find Lessig interesting I would withdraw from using his ideas to address Protestant liturgical problems.

But your comments also make me wonder if its an issue of perception. The challenge perhaps isn't necessarily to alter the liturgy in someway (though certain forms of liturgy in the Protestant context I would argue are deficient and more prone to a dichotomy of UGC verse professionalism), but to change peoples perception of the liturgy.

What I think I can draw from Lessing's speech is only related to the first of the 3 stories. For my purposes, and for my argument above, the technological stuff isn't really a factor. What I'm concerned with is the passivity or participatory nature of our culture.

Now, I do see your point clearly that the church cannot be driven by technology. To let technology to drive change in the church is for the tail to wag the dog. Technology should only be a tool, and in each generation we find really good and really bad ways of using the current technology to help us worship. Sometimes the tools that should be serving the church, ends up running the church. The church may have a vastly different relationship to time and change, but the people who make up the church live in this world where technology drives change, and so our congregations are changed by technology.
I think our challenge is this: how does the church live counter culturally and not let the tail wag the dog when in all the world around us, the tail is wagging the dog?

Oh boy, I'm tired...

Amy,
One thing you may have misunderstood: it is not technology but a certain way of thinking that an uncritical approach to technology tends to foster in us, that is my concern. And then viewing liturgy as technology, to which I would object.

And I am also becoming less and less convinced that cultural and technological change is as significant as we believe it to be, and as I have believed it to be. I actually do not believe that what we are struggling with as church's actually has to do with either, but with something else, more subtle and actually more universal and timeless, we just might call it Sin. But that gets us way off topic.

Larry,

I think you and I may be working with differing views of technology. A book is technology. A candle is technology. So too is the i-pod. They have all had a tremendous impact on culture.

So, any tool, liturgy included, is technology. That's how I think of it.

Tripp,
I will have to think on this more. Clearly from both yours and Amy's responses i am not communicating well. Since I agree except that I don't see liturgy is a tool. Liturgy is not ectrinsic to worship but intrinsic to it. A song is not technology, though musical notation and instruments are, yes there is an analogy at work there.

But my point is a philosophical one about a view of technology, not about technology itself. Technology is of itself philosophicaly and theological uninteresting, but our attitudes around it fascinating and none of them necessary and I would say not always applicable, and we can make too much of our views of technology and our technology.

As I see it Lessig's point while a valid one with in the constraints of his subject matter (as far as I am concerned) also caries a view of technology that is not all encompassing, and I would argue over emphasizes the way in which technology changes humanity.
Well, I will stop now.

This is what I'm thinking about...

Culture and Technology have an intertwined relationship...A stream within a stream. I'm thinking about the printing press. It was an invention that led to many changes, but the desire to mass produce had to precede the invention. No? Well it's plausible. There was already something on the wind.

What I think Lessig gets all excited about and uses technological innovation to pint to is a cultural shift in how we relate to information. And what I find interesting in all of this is that Lessig's excitement exists because his own life spans enough time to remember a world before this current attitude came to the fore. And he wants us to know that there are people whose whole lives exist entirely within this "new culture."

Am I making any sense? So, technology may be landmarks for cultural change and may, surprisingly, concretize (sp?) cultural change...and even bring some change on. I doubt very seriously that the Baptist notion of the freedom of interpretation could have become such a cornerstone of our tradition without the printing press. But the printing press may not have come about without somebody thinking that more copies of the Bible would be better than less. Chicken. Egg. Egg. Chicken.

So, with the liturgy, the parallel to what Lessig is saying is apparent to me because the technology we have (non-liturgical i.e. internet) has changed our attitudes about liturgical technologies, who can use what and why. The Emergent Folk certainly will remix cultures. And, to some degree, at Reconciler we do as well. Our denominational culture are "remixed" but to a purpose of reconciliation. We don't do it simply to enjoy juxtaposition.

And people are drawn in because they see the remix, they see multiple traditions validated and challenged at the same time. And, I think, they see the desired reconciliation as well. Now, they may not be conscious of that all, but I think we both know that the dynamic exists on some level.

Right...that's enough for now.