Back when I was in seminary – and admittedly, that was so long ago that everything was in Latin – the North American church in general and The United Methodist church in particular were entering a time of change in the way we approached worship. The worship renewal movement was an exciting period in our history. Names like James F. White, Lawrence Hull Stookey and the Dean of worship voices in the UMC Hoyt Hickman were all publishing prolifically and producing resources that helped to change our liturgical landscape.
It was a time of the emergence of the Common Lectionary. That document has gone through several revisions, but the root work remains the bedrock of much of our worship practice to this day.
In those post-Vatican II days we moved altars out from the wall of the sanctuary, had the presider stand behind the Communion Table and face the congregation in a gesture of inclusion.
The hodgepodge of worship elements that stood as “Suggested Orders of Worship” in our Hymnal and Book of Worship gained reconsideration. The General Conference of the church announced plans for a new Hymnal in its 1988 session and a new Book of Worship at its 1992 gathering. The church quickly produced both of these volumes soon after each received approval.
I believed in those days that we were living on the cutting edge of a movement that would truly transform The United Methodist Church and the Body of Christ for years to come. It was an exciting, exhilarating, wonderful time. I couldn’t wait to see what was coming next.
I’m still waiting.
Somewhere around the turn of the millennium, someone stomped on the brakes. There have been few significant books or resources regarding United Methodist Worship – or worship in general – that I have been able to find in a good many years. We accept as a given that worship must fall into one of three categories: traditional, contemporary, or blended. Let’s be clear, in the face of liturgical renewal, the latter two groupings are more performance-driven than participatory for the “person in the pew” (or the auditorium seat). Contemporary worship tends to mean choruses that contain between seven and nine words repeated over and over and over…
Everyone wears jeans and golf shirts. Coffee from the expresso bar sits in the hand of many of the worshipers. And there is lots – LOTS – of emphasis on “feelings.” (And if I hear one more prayer that repeats the phrase “we just” more than twice in a given prayer, I may go screaming into the night.)
Blended worship tends toward the contemporary format but without the jeans and the cappuccino. It is neither fish nor fowl, and the format frequently changes from week to week. I don’t see this as a bad thing inherently, but moving from empty fluff to another version of empty fluff doesn’t reflect a lot of power.
If you go to our denominational bookstore website (Cokesbury) and enter "worship" in the search the whole first page consists of bulletins, hymnals, candles, ashes and then finally a couple of different versions of our official Book of Worship. There are a lot of reprints and re-hashes of books that originate in the last century and one (1) serious volume that has a publishing date within the last two years.
I am not a curmudgeon who has lived too long, sitting in the corner and grumbling about the good ol’ days. And, I don’t pretend to have sat in every single sanctuary/worship space in the country in order to experience each congregation’s worship first-hand. What I do lament is the loss of focus by our church. I am not going to spend time on the things that currently confuse the UMC. I’ll do that some other day. What I do want to observe upon is that I believe that our confusion and our lack of emphasis on quality worship have their beginnings in similar points in time. When we lost our worship vision, we lost our way.
A lot of people, when speaking about the work of the church, are quick to quote our United Methodist Mission Statement: "The mission of the church is to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world." (⁋120, Book of Discipline) That is well and good. That is our mission. That is what we do. But it does not say who we are. We leave that task to the UMC’s Articles of Religion. These Articles, which date back to John Wesley, include Article XIII — Of the Church
The visible church of Christ is a congregation of faithful men (sic) in which the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments duly administered according to Christ's ordinance, in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.
Do you want to know who we say we are? We are a worshiping community. All that we are and all that we do grows out of our identity as worshipers of the One True God. When we lose sight of this, when we cease to meditate and consider and debate and improve upon our worship lives, we quickly stagnate. What follows is division, disruption and irrelevance.
In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew. And one called to another and said:
'Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of Hosts, the whole earth is full of his glory!'
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke. And I said: ‘Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!’
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: ‘Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out.’
-- Isaiah 6
I believe that is where we start.
