Roger Ray, D.Min.
"This has to be said; so let it now be said. Whoever you are, whatever in other respects your life may be, my friend, by ceasing to take part in the public worship of God, as it now is, you have constantly one guilt the less, and that a great one: you do not take part in treating God as a fool....." Soren Kierkegaard
Christian liturgy should intensify the "cognitive dissonance" between the community of faith and the world surrounding it.
Richard John Neuhaus, The Catholic Moment
Just seven years ago there were a couple of dozen people meeting on Sunday evenings to talk about why we didn't go to church anymore and to consider what we could do with our spiritual instincts. We read books together about religion and social justice. We were liberals, we were progressives and so we had little difficulty in setting aside traditional Christian beliefs and embracing a scholarly approach to the Bible and the historical Jesus.
We quickly and easily agreed on the priorities that should be a part of any spiritual community..... working to save the planet, fighting poverty and prejudice, working for the civil rights of minorities, gays and lesbians and immigrants...working for international peace and inter-faith dialogue. With each essential priority we named, there was always at least a little bit of looking backwards. We talked about how the churches we had left had disappointed us in these areas.
After several weeks of conversations, one brave lady stood up and asked in a very demanding way, "Why don't we just start our own church?" A bit of electricity moved through the room but it died out just as quickly when I began to ask my friends what we would do when our new church gathered.
Would we sing hymns? If so, what kind of songs would we sing? Would we have corporate prayers? Would we practice communion, baptism or any other sacramental or ritual observances? In a group of about 25 people, it became evident that we couldn't get more than three or four to attend any church service that we could design.
This may seem like the least interesting chapter in this book and yet, I assure you, if your intention is to create communities around progressive faith, this will be the highest hurdle you have to jump. After several months of conversation, we decided that we would give starting a church a try.
Our experience paralleled much of what I have heard about other new church starts. There was a lot of coming and going in the first two years for all of the reasons we had identified in our pre-church conversations. There were those who wanted a church that was open and affirming, pro-marriage rights, etc. but who still wanted pretty traditional evangelical theology and practice. Others were quite firm in their post-theistic views and were quickly disdainful of any religious ritual or use of words such as "worship" or "Lord" that had followed us from our traditional roots.
I have no uniform service suggestion to make here for how progressive churches should gather. In the end, when we started our little congregation, our first service looked a lot like my last service in a formal denominational worship service. My theology had evolved but my habits took longer to change and they are, in fact, still changing.
Though we had some interfaith and some no-faith participants from the start, most of us have come from either Catholic or Protestant traditions. Both consciously and unconsciously, we brought some assumptions with us about what it meant to have a church service. My liturgy professor at Vanderbilt was a strict, formal, high church Presbyterian who could be aptly described with the words John Steinbeck used to describe Liza Hamilton in "East of Eden" - "...a tight hard little woman humorless as a chicken...with a sour Presbyterian mind and code of morals that pinned down and beat the brains out of nearly everything that was pleasant to do."
For twenty-five years I was a liturgical purist, adhering to the formal traditions of the church and rejecting all forms of syncretism with American culture. I have no excuse for why it took so long for me to realize how absurd this was. The ancient church seasons and holidays were predicated on the harvests and traditional observances of the cultures that gave birth to them. The timing of the spring wheat harvest in Palestine, that is the root of the early celebration of Pentecost, should not carry more weight with us than our nation's observance of Memorial Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving or even Mothers' Day.
Many popular hymn tunes were not sacred in origin, some were even quite colorful drinking songs in their earliest incarnation. We owe no fealty to hymns that, though familiar to us, articulate a theology contrary to our own. The issue is to find some balance in which we give ourselves permission to honor our heritage while being free to grow, learn and change.
One of the great architects of progressive thinking is Bishop John Shelby Spong, who still often appears in public in the clerical collar he wore as an Episcopal bishop. Marcs Borg, who has done as much to de-mythologize our understanding of the historical Jesus as any author alive today, still speaks in very devotional Christian language.
In our church, we have slowly evolved away from much of the language and formal practice the church traditions of our past. We never sang the traditional doxology but we did sing a gender inclusive version of it until a member of our church asked, "Why are we singing a Trinitarian song if we don't believe in Trinitarian theology?" There was no rational explanation beyond the fact that none of us had ever consciously thought about the Trinitarian nature of the doxology.
We have since written new lyrics that are focused on our faith community but the new version doesn't pack the nostalgic punch of the more traditional one and, as some observe, without some vestiges of our former experience, our gatherings do not "feel like church." Still, the next generation of progressives will not likely want to hold onto theologically sanitized hymns and prayers. My suspicion is that they will not continue our observances of communion, they will probably not want a hymnal at all, nor will they preserve the cross or the clerical vestments that some of us still need to make our gatherings look and feel enough like what we associate with the practice of faith to stay connected to our community.
We freely blend the reading of scripture with the public reading of passages of philosophy, theology, science or other wisdom sources. We blend traditional religious music with secular music. And though we primarily come from Christian roots, we now freely blend the literature and conventions of all world religions in our gatherings because we are trying to foster and strengthen our spirituality but not sectarianism.
We may be one of the only progressive churches in the world that begins our Sunday service with a chanted Psalm text. I have argued in favor of holding onto this because, for me, it marks the movement from ordinary time into a time when the community is gathered for the specific purpose of being the church. We still have congregational singing and prayers because, we believe, the blending of our voices in unison is a way of both becoming and expressing community.
Our services maintain the traditional four fold movement of formal liturgy: Gathering, Proclamation, Thanksgiving, Going to Serve though any one of its parts would seem rather different from what you would experience in a Catholic, Episcopal or Lutheran church. We have eschewed the use of such words as "praise" and "worship" because we do not believe that there is an ego deficit Deity enthroned in the clouds who needs, wants or would enjoy our worship and praise. We strive to avoid religious language that would in any way encourage or institutionalize gender or sexual prejudice, dominance or triumphalism..... which, of course, cuts out most of the hymns we know by heart!
While many progressive churches have given up on offering classes or even including sermons in their services, we have doubled down on both. We believe that the teaching function of the faith community is central. We cut a lot of corners to save money but we have invested heavily in guest lecturers and seminars because we are convinced that critical thinking and a well-informed membership is vital to our success.
As the progressive movement was starting to find its legs at the end of the 20th century, two books made an important impression on me. The first was a little volume by Leander Keck entitled, The Church Confident and the second was Marva Dawn's Reaching Out without Dumbing Down.
Both argued that our gatherings should be theologically rich, instructive, intelligent and that we should strive for excellence. Keck very specifically decried the lack of beauty in the world and pleaded with us to infuse our gatherings with art, music, poetry and even architecture that can feed our starving souls, indeed, astonish us in a way that changes us, enlarges our vision and awareness.
Though they did not quote the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, I think that both Dawn and Keck would have said "Amen" to Kierkegaard when he praised those who had stopped going to church because in refraining from attending public worship as it was in his day, they were at least avoiding publicly insulting God.
Our public gatherings, by the simple fact that we are gathering, promotes the building of community. Some of the most important parts of our Sunday mornings take place around the coffee pots and in the church aisles. If, as St. John of the Cross has said, we pass every other test but fail the love test, we are still failures. Our gatherings should nurture friendships and break down the walls of indifference and anonymity. The language we speak to one another should be obviously seasoned with sincere love and a cherishing of one another's humanity.
But what happens between prelude and postlude should include instruction, inspiration and moral challenge. While much of what happens under steeples in America seems intent upon slowly killing parishioners with boredom, Richard John Neuhaus said that "liturgy should intensify the 'cognitive dissonance' between the community of faith and the world surrounding it."
There are things going on in the world about which we should be shocked, grief stricken, and provoked into action. Most of those things will never make it into the media but they sure better make it into the liturgy.
On a perfect Sunday, those who attend our gatherings will learn something, experience a sense of awe and wonder, and they will leave this hour feeling more closely connected to one another and more determined to go into the coming week prepared to bear prophetic witness to justice and to serve in sacrificial and meaningful ways to being healing to the world. We won't get all three every week but if we fail to consistently get one or two of them then we should just quit and turn this place into something more useful, like a used car lot or a flea market.
The modern church should take its prophetic voice in society seriously. If they lack the courage and insight to be prophetic they should at least be of service in an exemplary manner. But the old saying that you should either lead, follow or get out of the way applies nowhere more than it applies to churches.
Perhaps the old motto of the French Foreign Legion is not too much of an over statement: If I falter, push me. If I stumble, help me up. If I retreat, shoot me.
