Living into Liturgy

Hand-held percussion beats bounced off the walls, highlighting the ethereal sound of the keyboard. Hundreds of people stood in the room, singing and praying and swaying. The band on stage served as actors, moving in and out of the liturgy in a seamless fashion: one offering a scripture, another, a reading, still another, a reflection. Someone moved toward a table, spoke about Jesus’ body and blood, and we ate and drank.

We ask many questions about worship:

• Is it individual or corporate?
• High church or low?
• 1928 or 1979 Rite II?
• Hymns or contemporary worship music?
• Public or private?

Church of the Apostles, a Lutheran-Episcopal church plant in Seattle, led the gathering designed for corporate worship described above. They run a tea house and create Anglican prayer beads and other such sundry items so that they might be like a self-supporting monastery. It wasn’t until the person walked up to the table that I realized I had been so graciously led through the Liturgy of the Word. It was beautiful.

In this room I saw friends, most from non-liturgical backgrounds, who were engaged in worship. Many of these folks are finding creative ways to live into liturgy:

• A small group who gathers at the church office to pray Morning Prayer each day of the work week
• Ash Wednesday worship gatherings with folks who didn’t know what the season of Lent was just a few years prior
• A non-denominational congregation who uses Rite II to shape their weekly corporate worship
• A pastor who regularly spends time at a Benedictine monastery and meets with a spiritual director
• Creative, multi-dimensional ways of engaging God in worship that engages our eyes, ears, touch, taste, and smell
• A worship space that doubles as an art gallery where those involved in corporate worship are encouraged to spend time in prayer while looking at the pieces

Each has contextualized these practices in their own setting and frame of reference. The form — the way worship is expressed — may take on a different appearance, shape or feel.

I know that many of these examples are not new — people have been discovering the beauty of liturgy in general and Anglicanism specifically for a while (for example, Robert Webber’s Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail). But what does seem new or maybe different is that these folks aren’t leaving their non-liturgical churches to join liturgical ones. Rather, they are learning about liturgy and allowing it to shape their congregations and their own personal lives.

It makes me wonder, if this is the state of so many non-liturgical churches, then:

• Why do so many Anglicans struggle with living into the liturgy, opting instead to just do the bare minimum to “fulfill all righteousness”?
• Why is it that in this current cultural context that so many of my evangelical Anglican friends are abandoning the liturgy?
• Why do so many feel hamstrung by it, doing it to fulfill the letter of the law but not engaging culture with it?
• Why is it that the creative liturgical ideas are coming from non-liturgical churches?

I wonder if we need to recapture the meaning behind Article XXXIV: Of the Traditions of the Church:

It is not necessary that the Traditions and Ceremonies be in all places one, or utterly like; for at all times they have been divers, and may be changed according to the diversity of countries, times, and men’s manners, so that nothing be ordained against God’s Word…Every particular or national Church hath authority to ordain, change, and abolish, Ceremonies or Rites of the Church ordained only by man’s authority, so that all things be done to edifying.

I wonder what might happen if we look at the breadth of what was available to us as Anglicans, paying attention to the variety that the rubrics actually allow, and then allowing our ideas about worship to be stretched and reshaped.

I wonder, as we do this, if we will have a treasure to offer these non-liturgical churches.

Will we be able to offer a liturgy that has become a means for spiritual formation for all involved, finding a rhythm of life in our church year that lives counter to the chaos in which our culture at times invites us to live?

Will we find creative ways to contextualize the Good News in the context of our liturgy?

Will we recover some ancient practices that make sense in our digital culture?

I wonder if edification of the body — of Anglicans and others outside our denomination — might be a further by-product of our contextualizing our corporate worship.

I wonder what it might look like if we lived more into liturgy.

Holly Rankin Zaher is an Adjunct Faculty member and TEEM Online Education Coordinator. She is also active in Pittsburgh’s postmodern church plant, Three Nails.