On Liturgy and "Relevance"

Do check out this article by Mark Galli at Christianity Today. Galli has recently written a book about the growing attraction some evangelicals feel for traditional Christian liturgy. Here, he summarizes some of why that attraction exists. Some of my favorite bits include:

The worship leaders wear medieval robes and guide the congregation through a ritual that is anything but spontaneous; they lead music that is hundreds of years old; they say prayers that are scripted and formal; the homily is based on a 2,000-year-old book; and the high point of the service is taken up with eating the flesh and drinking the blood of a Rabbi executed in Israel when it was under Roman occupation. It doesn’t sound relevant.

Yet many evangelicals are attracted to liturgical worship, and as one of those evangelicals, I’d like to explain what the attraction is for me, and perhaps for many others. A closer look suggests that something more profound and paradoxical is going on in liturgy than the search for contemporary relevance. “The liturgy begins‚Ķ as a real separation from the world,” writes Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann. He continues by saying that in the attempt to “make Christianity understandable to this mythical ‘modern’ man on the street,” we have forgotten this necessary separation.

And:

[C]hurches that perceive themselves as relevant often by their nature limit a full-bodied expression of the church‚Äîthat is, they “target” 20- and maybe 30-somethings, and usually those of that group who are middle- and upper-middle-class white-collar types rising in income and influence. Few churches that consciously seek relevance want to clear the way to church for the poor, the homeless, welfare moms, drug-addicted men, or those trapped in nursing homes and convalescent hospitals. These “target audiences” are not very relevant to many “casual, contemporary” churches.

This is one reason I thank God for the liturgy. The liturgy does not target any age or cultural subgroup. It does not even target this century…. Instead, the liturgy draws us into worship that transcends our time and place. Its earliest forms took shape in ancient Israel, and its subsequent development occurred in a variety of cultures and subcultures‚ÄîGreco-Roman, North African, German, Frankish, Anglo-Saxon, and so on. It has been prayed meaningfully by bakers, housewives, tailors, teachers, philosophers, priests, monks, kings, and slaves. As such, it has not been shaped to meet a particular group’s needs. It seeks only to enable people‚Äîpeople in general‚Äîto see God.

Ponder as well at Michael Bird’s aphoristic explanation of why one needs a healthy balance between word, sacrament, and Spirit:

1. If you focus predominantly on the power of the preached Word, but push the Sacraments to the corner and domesticate the Spirit to suit your theology, then you’ll turn the church into a Mosque.

2. If you focus on the experience and euphoria of the Spirit, and have the Word eviscerated into some pop-psychology, and relegate the Sacraments to something too “liturgical” and passe you’ll soon find yourself practicing Mysticism.

3. If you focus on the Sacraments as instruments through which we encounter God, but reduce the Word to sound bites of moral advice, and censure the Spirit as the concern of a few eccentric enthusiasts, then you’ll find yourself pushing Magic.

Press deadlines beckon, but I expect I’ll have more to say about all this in a couple of weeks.