What´s Up Next?
Identifying the
liturgical-missional issues emerging before us
Juan Oliver
APLM has a venerable record of spotting
liturgical and missional issues as they emerge in the life of the church. Recently, however, we have been forced to
return to issues first explored in the years leading up to the 1979 BCP,
concentrating on the relationship between liturgy, mission and
ecclesiology: How do we understand the
community of the baptized as first-fruits (“green shoots”) of the coming
Kingdom of God? How do we embody this
liturgically? How do we carry it out in
mission to the world?
Our recent work on the centrality of
Baptism has been of huge importance --and necessary. At bottom, however, we
have been “cleaning up” canonical denials of the ecclesiology of the
BCP, first formulated 35 years ago, and reminding ourselves and others of
the baptismal understanding of the nature of the Church as expressed in the
BCP. The work had to be done, and we will
probably have to keep an eye on these matters all along.
Yet I am itching to spot, once more,
what liturgical-missional issues are emerging
before us so that, as APLM, we might support and encourage discussion,
experimentation and sharing of best practices.
From my point of view there appear the following areas of further
development:
1. Inculturation
(especially in Anglo suburban life) is still very weak. Our liturgy, as I have pointed out, no longer means to many people what
theologians think it means.[1] This presents a communications crisis in
liturgical practice, and might lead us to examine the vocabulary we employ in
worship. For more on this issue, see Matt Johnson’s article covering much more
than the inculturation of language.[2]
2. Almost forty years old, the BCP does
not reflect the most recent research by
New Testament scholars, particularly regarding the historical and
socioeconomic context of the New Testament.
As a result our liturgical and missional practices remain unaffected by these
developments.
3. In our current liturgy, the missiological aspects of the Christian
life, especially in relation to the suffering of all creation, are very, very
weak, and practically silent in naming the causes of that suffering.
As APLM Council member Amy McCreath has
written, “… the suffering we are not naming…
is not only regarding the environment… but also the economic and social
suffering, the militarism, the violence, the mental illness that results from
and is not addressed by all the other ills above. In the parish I serve, very few of the young
adults affiliated with the parish are thriving. All are some combination of
unemployed, emotionally unstable, depressed or anxious, disaffiliated from
church and society, addicted to something. At MIT, where I served as a chaplain
for 9 years, although successful ‘on paper’ and in labs, few young adults
experienced the world as anything more than chaos they needed to survive. The reality of young adulthood these days is
virtually invisible in our official church discussions & unnamed in our
liturgies.”[3]
We absolutely need the naive language (i.e., NOT academic
theological language) in which our contemporaries cast their experience of the
world if we are to craft worship that communicates our Christian hope for a
healed world, and our vocation to work for it.
These are just the tip of the iceberg,
but I fear that without tackling them –and others-- in depth and over a long
period of time, our liturgy will not be able to recover its verve and drive us
to witness to the coming Kingdom.
Juan Oliver
has written widely about liturgy and culture. His Ph.D. dissertation, The Look of Common Prayer: The Anglican Liturgical
Place in Anglo-American Culture, explored
the role of liturgical architecture in presenting a vision of the Reign of God,
the main theological criterion for evaluating worship.
He is a member of the International Anglican
Liturgical Consultation, Societas
Liturgica, and The Council of The Associated Parishes for Liturgy and
Mission, as whose president he served from 1997 to 2001. He´s retired in Santa Fe, NM.
[1] Juan
M.C. Oliver. Worship: “Forming and Deforming.” in The Worship-Shaped Life: Liturgical Formation for the People of
God.” [Canterbury Studies in
Anglicanism] Ed. by Mark Eary and
Ruth Meyers. NY: Church Publishing Inc.,
2010. Or go to http://books.google.com/books?id=3gto7dIPj2IC&pg=PA15&lpg=PA15&dq=worship+forming+and+deforming&source=bl&ots=4m5pSwImgM&sig=GtvkkLu2Z2IBJXA-08ojbDhX5TI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=96LuUbGDNoSfiAKwnYCADg&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA
- v=onepage&q=worship%20forming%20and%20deforming&f=false.
[2] Matt
Johnson. “Tool, not Idol: Inculturation and Prayer Book Revision.” Open: The Journal of the Associated Parishes
for Liturgy and Mission. Spring 2013.
Available on line at http://www.associatedparishes.org/images/Open_Spring_2013.pdf
[3] Amy
McCreath, personal communication June 2013.
Hi Juan,
ReplyDeleteI couldn't agree with you more on the need for more inculturation in our Episcopal liturgies. We are woefully behind many of our other Christian brothers and sisters in terms of issues around ethnic/racial inculturation leave alone the many other ways in which inculturation could occur.
I'm not sure that I understand your second point. Could you elaborate a little more on it? I am probably just ignorant on the connection between recent NT scholarship and the BCP.
And again, I couldn't agree more on your third point. The Episcopal Church really needs to move away from the idea of making our liturgies prettier and prettier so as to attract people to church. The attraction model simply isn't working in today's society. We need to return to a missiological model and the liturgy is certainly the first place to start doing that work.
Blessings!
Shawn Strout
Diocese of Washington