The Limits of Liturgy
Liturgy isn't what you think
The whole Christian faith is captured in the first two words of the Lord’s prayer, “Our Father.”
We pray with Jesus the Son, by whose invitation and Spirit we are made children of his Father with him. As long as we remember that prayer is a response to God, we can say that our status before God and our communion with God are determined in this prayer: we know we are God’s children because we can pray in this way, and by so praying we are God’s children. And if this is true, then it follows that specifically common prayer is a central feature of Christian existence. To be a Christian is literally to live and move and have one’s being within the context of common prayer—to be in a communion of persons, human and divine, whose communing simply is prayer. It is precisely for this communion that God created us.
It follows that prayer is the sore spot of the Christian life. We do not, Saint Paul reminds us, know how to pray. And though the spirit is willing, the flesh is weak: we would rather sleep than pray, even though that means entering into the time of trial and doing so unprepared. To be a sinner is to have the urge to break free from this communion; that is, to hide from God as did Adam and Eve in Eden, to opt (impossibly) to exist for some other end than that for which we were created.
The affliction of common prayer reaches into the church. The commonness of prayer is elusive. The words we use to pray—most of the raw material of our communion with God—are variously contested, complained about, minimized, idealized, and subjected to abuse. Unasked for modifications to common prayer seem always to be the first weapon wielded in the wars against congregations that authoritarian clergy inevitably find themselves waging: liturgical creativity is frequently clericalism masquerading as an effort to meet an alleged pastoral need.
And in this way, the same sinful effort to live for another purpose than what we were created for is directed at common prayer: the end for which we were made is taken up as a means. Seizing the instruments of common prayer, we attempt to instrumentalize communion.
This tendency to instrumentalize worship is human, not a symptom of this or that theological camp. My people do it as much as anyone else. I’ve done it.
In recent years, more and more of my evangelical friends have discovered the joy and benefit of formal liturgy, often turning to The Book of Common Prayer as their go-to resource. Praise the Lord. And also, with their emerging interest in liturgy, I have noticed their unexamined tendency to make use of liturgy. So, in an effort to speak to this tendency, I wrote an essay on the subject, which Christianity Today kindly published last week. Below is a brief preview, along with a link to read the rest on the CT website.
Despite my yearning to lay down roots, over the past two decades I’ve lived in a handful of American cities. One consequence is perspective—and if I’m being truthful, strong opinions—about things some places do better (and worse) than others.
For example, you can buy tacos in Dallas and Los Angeles alike, but you’re better off getting a burrito in Los Angeles and a taco in Dallas. My wife and I have learned the hard way that pizza outside our native New Jersey is usually a disappointment. And infrastructure quality varies much more than you might expect: Reliable snow removal and coherent traffic patterns are not a given.
Without that kind of comparative perspective, it’s easy to assume local advantages and problems are more unique than they really are. In their excellent book How Big Things Get Done, Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner argue that this “uniqueness bias” is a recurring obstacle to our plans. We fail to see that our thing is also a member of some larger category or “reference class.” It may have unique features, but it’s still one iteration of many. This bias leaves us shortsighted, and as a result, many people are unknowingly stuck with poor snow removal, and Midwesterners persist in believing they’ve had pizza.
Christians are not exempt from this problem. We are isolated from one another by the grievous divisions of the church, so theological movements, denominations, regional church bodies, and individual congregations are highly susceptible to uniqueness bias. We are at risk of neglecting lessons we might learn from our reference class—that is, other church communities with similar experiences. Continue reading here.