Liturgy in the Local Community

Four Thoughts About the Possibilities of Liturgy and Locality

Introduction

I believe the worship (liturgy) of God’s church must be
driven by Scripture and historical wisdom. I believe some of our
problems in evangelicalism today have been because we rejected history
and thereby became Scripturally dubious as well. We cannot and should
not invent liturgy. Neither should we explain it to death. We (that see
the indispensability of liturgical worship and spiritual formation
practices) must avoid both the trite liturgical exercises devoid of
Scripture and historical integrity as well as high church liturgical
"orthodoxy" that is too Constantinian to be workable for those of us
who wish to engage a post Constantinian world. -David Fitch, "When Liturgy Goes Bad: Constantinian Liturgy in a Post-Constantinian World", on his blog Reclaiming the Mission

I am the "elements" guy at the church plant I am a part of in an upper
middle class community that has been "under-churched."  Entering into a
community like this in a missional way, one must take care to find a
"balanced" liturgy.  What Fitch alludes to in this essay is the
necessity of liturgy to both be an integral part of the community and
to not water down the liturgy for the community or force an unwilling
community into foreign liturgical structures.  

In such a post-Constantinian world, where power is seen with skeptical
eyes and met with hard hearts, the question becomes how can a church be
liturgical in a way that succeeds power to God.  This liturgy is not
controlling but prophetic, not the Word of the Church but the vessel of
the gospel, the Word of God.  This liturgy is local and ecumenical, in
the sense that it is aware of the body of Chrst on both global and
local levels.  The liturgy of the local church does not bring people
under the power of Christendom but instead points them toward the power
of God.
The essence of worship in a post-Constantinian community facilitates
the ancient ways (what Fitch calls "historical wisdom") through the
lens of local knowledge, existing traditions, and the truth of the
Word.  Change is not "bad" in this scenario, but it should shy away
from any claims to salvific or puritanical means.  Liturgy is not
something to be thrust on a community.  It is something that must grow
from within a community as it engages in the work of the kingdom and
(i) the recovery of historical theology, (ii) the foundation of their
own tradition, (iii) an ecumenically local worldview, (iv) and the centrality
of the Word to the worship service.

The Recover of Historical Theology

What came first, Protestantism or the Early Church?

That question is a tough one for some people.  (For you who are still contemplating, the
answer is the Early
Church).  In the modernist quest for foundational truth
movements often take shortcuts and simply rebuild the foundation of
Christianity again in their own words and ideas, and the old foundation becomes
lost and forgotten.

We do not need to idolize the early church.  We do not need to name drop saints and church
fathers all the time.  But we do need to
know where we come from if we are ever going to build liturgy within a local
community.

I am a mutt.  I am an
Anglo-Mexican-Hungarian Jew brought up in the Lutheran faith, educated at a
dispensational university and participating in an emergent-missional church
plant.  My wife is Polish, German, and
Irish brought up in the Assemblies of God. 
We are not who we are because of our background, but we are part of
different communities based on our past history and the importance of cultural
events in our life.  I grew up on Mexican
food, not Hungarian food, so I readily identify as Mexican—quesadillas and
chicken mole are part of my food heritage, not goulash.  For my wife Sarah she has much more cultural
resonance with the Polish side of her family, and foods I had for the first
time with her were pierogies, sauerkraut, stuffed cabbage, and real kielbasa.  Our pantry and refrigerator evidences this in
the hodge-podge of canned black beans, stacks of tortillas, homemade salsa,
pieriogies, and so forth.

The local church is like this.  We are all descended from somewhere, the
early church, then the Western and Eastern Churches, and then maybe some
Protestant denominations and breakups thrown in the mix as well.  But since the foundations of the historic
faith have been cut off for most Protestants to the past 500 years (and
Evangelicals the past 80 or so) we don’t know how to connect our culture
heritage as Christians, historic theology, liturgy, and practice, to the
present day.

The way we must attempt to do this is to start at the
beginning.  We need to read the prayers
of the New Testament in church.  We need
to incorporate the wisdom of the early church fathers and saints into our sermons
and prayers.  We need to see the Roman
Catholic Church as a rich source of wisdom. 
We need to not shun the ways of our spiritual parents.

God asks us to honor our father and mother.  We might not always agree, but we must show
respect.  The same needs to go for our
spiritual fathers and mothers.  We can
not relegate them to the dusty pages of seminary libraries.  They are our heritage, our faith, our
foundation, our physical tie to Jesus, the author and perfector of our faith.

The Foundation of Your Tradition

In the last Liturgy In the Local Community post I discussed why an
ancient-future perspective on theology and an ecumenical outlook are
important for the local church to consider.  The local church should
not only bring an ecumenical ancient-future outlook to their worship
but also reflection on the positives, negatives, and realities of their
tradition.

It would be misleading to think that an ancient-future church can
happen in a vacuum, and even more naïve to ever think a
non-denominational church is tradition-less or foundation-less.  All
churches have traditions and foundations—some wear it as a badge of
honor, others live with it, and still others pretend they don’t.  But
all churches come out of a tradition, even if it is a tradition of
having no traditions (i.e., the free church tradition share many common
distinctives and traits that form a core of what they identify with as
“free churches”).  

We should not be scared of the far reaching totality and diversity
of church history.  In the same way, we should not be scared of our own
denominational and sectarian traditions.  We need to respect the
traditions we come out of and how they have shaped the theology and
practice of the local church.  These traditions took shape for a
reason, and recovering the identity of your own tradition will enable
the local faith community to find their identity in the great river of
Tradition.

An Ecumenically Local Worldview

Local community is often seen as synonymous with the local
church, and the local church is often seen as synonymous with "that church over
there on the hill."  For liturgy to truly
be meaningful in a local community I think pastors, lay persons, and
congregations need to begin to think of the local church as all the churches in
a local community.  In other words, the
local church is the grouping of the handful (maybe dozens) of churches that are
down the road from each other, down the block from each other, or even next door
to each other.  The church plant I attend
meets inside of another church—talk about the proximity of churches in a
locality.  When the local church is
thought of as the collective of churches in a community, then liturgy is seen
in a fresher, and I would add truer, light.

Liturgy is "the public work," and the local church presents
itself to the community through its worship, both inside the church and outside
the church in the local community.  The
local church is present at the deli when a member of First Baptist
Church is buying some
lunch meat the same way the local church is present in the community when a parishioner
of St. Peter’s Roman Catholic Church is talking to someone at the local Post
Office.  The local church is present in
the local community seven days a week.

This re-orientation from the local church as a single church
to a collective of churches points the Christians of the local community
towards each other in conversation and dialogue.  As the Body of Christ doing the public work
through worship, discipleship, stewardship, and fellowship we are all working
to see the Kingdom
of God come to the shared
local community.  We might work in
different ways, we might not agree with each others theology, we might not
approve of each others techniques (or lack there of), but we must see that we
are working together.  We must see each
other as an ecumenical movement of the Kingdom in a particular place.  And we must see the collective that is the
local church in the local community as being the presence of Christ, through
the power of the Holy Spirit and the grace and mercy of the Father. 

The community my church, The Plant is centered in,
Allendale, NJ, has a public Stations of the Cross each year that all
the
churches in the local community participate in on Good Friday.  The
pilgrims of Christ go throughout the town
to different stations and participate in public worship.  This is a
perfect example of  how the liturgy can and should function in the
local community: the local church getting together, worshiping together
as the
public work, and presenting themselves as the presence of Christ inside
the
local community.

The Centrality of the Word

Alan Hirsch, whose quote began this essay,  questions the usefulness of the term church planting,
and whether it would be better to do "gospel planting."  The quote he finishes with has some tribal
and nationalistic overtones I am not very fond of, but the basic gist of what
Hirsch is saying is how I wanted to wrap up my discussion of liturgy in the
local community:

The centrality of the Word is paramount.

The local community can only be truly renewed and disciples
be truly made when the Word is at the center of the local community as the
collective of churches in the locality as well as the secular members of the
community.  The Word must be planted in
the center of a local community.

This is only accomplished through the paradox of Christ and
the work of the Trinity within this paradox. 
The centrality of the Word is the paradox of Christ, that he is present
in both Word and Sacrament, and both of these, according to Lathrop, make up
liturgy at its most elemental level.  The
Lord’s Supper reminds us and enables us to enter into the mystery of the
ever-present Christ in a powerful way, empowered by the Spirit to in turn be
Christ to others.  The ever-presence of
Christ in the Sacrament reminds us of how he is present everyday in his Spirit,
and that we do the work of the Father, found in his Word and the community (and
tradition), living continually the prophetic message of Christ’s kingdom.  The Word is God, and thus God, through Christ
and the Spirit, as the Trinity, are present together wherever liturgy is done,
where Word, Water, and Bread unite in worship and celebration and push the local
church out of its doors and into the local community.  Weekly worship of the local churches is thus
the first and last day, the first and the eighth day, when Christ is both
renewing his presence and completing his presence with us.  We live out the already/not yet of Christ,
present to us in Word, Sacrament, and his Spirit, yet still not yet come into
his Kingdom, because we must be Christ’s presence in the world until he does on
earth what he has done in the heavenlies.

The centrality of the Word is then the already/not yet we
share with others as we find Christ’s full presence in the Scriptures, the
sacraments, his Church, the local church, our own church, each other, and our
families.  Christ is Lord of all, and he
stands in the center of all as the Word of God enfleshed as Jesus of Nazareth
and ever-present before us through his Spirit.