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Some Theses Regarding Christian Worship
Introductory Note:
What happens in worship is of critical importance for the Christian’s life and for the life of the Church. It is an encounter with the Living Lord who promises to be present in our midst as God’s promises in Christ are shared, as people are baptized and remember their baptism, as the Lord’s Supper is celebrated, as the gathered assembly is again formed into the Body of Christ by the Spirit of God. Thus worship is not “just for us.” It is God’s encounter with the gathered assembly and that assembly’s response of worship. In the worship service, the people of God rehearse and repeat the confession of faith that they carry with them in their daily lives. So, this is important stuff!
As a congregation’s pastor and now as bishop, I have had opportunity to shape, lead, participate, and observe this church’s worship. The following theses grow out of those opportunities and observations. The theses are not meant to be exhaustive but are designed to prompt further conversation, thought, prayer and planning for the sake of faithful worship in the congregations of the Northwestern Ohio Synod.
The theses were offered, in a somewhat modified form, as part of the introduction to the Synodical Day of Prayer and Reflection on Dec. 4, 2004. For further reflection and study, I encourage pastors and congregational leadership to use, The Use of the Means of Grace, and Principles for Renewing Worship. You can obtain these resources by going to the Northwestern Ohio Synod Web site here. If you cannot access by that means go to www.renewingworship.org/resources/principles and both documents will be available as well.
1. By the power of the Holy Spirit, worship will express and impart the Gospel.
Comment: The Augsburg Confession reminds us that the Church is, “…the assembly of all believers among whom the Gospel is purely preached and the holy sacraments are administered according to the Gospel.” The pastor and congregational leadership need repeatedly to ask, “Is this happening in our midst?”
2. The words, music, and drama of worship need to be understood by those who gather without diminishing “the scandal” of the Gospel (see I Corinthians 1:23-25; Matthew 11:6)
Comment: One needs to know one’s situation for mission and ministry. Worship will use different words and images when it is done in a gathering of many children, in the inner city, a rural parish or in Dodoma, Tanzania. Context changes. Language changes. Apart from such awareness, our ritual and liturgy can become a “noisy gong.” Yet as the worship service is shaped, it is also important that the story of the God “made flesh” in Christ, his ministry, his death and resurrection for us be kept central to what is said and done. Faithful worship “necessitates Christ,” that is, it makes plain why it is that God was made flesh in Jesus and why it is that Jesus lived, ministered, suffered, died, and rose again. Education is very important. It is important to address the questions, why are we doing this in this manner, with these words? What does this mean?
3. As worship is molded and shaped it is vital that it be faithful to the tradition without yielding to dead traditionalism.
Comment: Christian worship is not about novelty or just doing something new for the sake of doing something new. It is about handing on what we have received from Jesus Christ, the apostolic witness and the Church’s witness to Christ throughout the ages. The “specifics” of that tradition have to do with what God is doing in Christ (see I Corinthians 11:23ff.) But doing the same thing over and over again (keeping the local traditions) does not necessarily mean that we are “delivering the tradition.” The troubling thing is that we so often confuse the two.
4. As worship is molded and shaped, it is critical that it be “contemporary,” that it speaks in ways that can be understood in its specific situation, without trying so hard to connect to the world that the worship service begins to look more like the world than the rule of God in Christ Jesus.
Comment: It is often tempting for congregational leadership to simply look around to see “what works”, what attracts the crowds, and then to adopt that style without thinking about the longtime impact of those decisions. What we believe does shape what we do. What we do does mirror what we believe. Are we aware of that “operative theology” in the worship services we shape? Does it serve the Gospel or is it, in fact, an “other” gospel?
5. Worship needs to draw from the “fullness” of Scriptures’ witness to “God for us in Christ.”
Comment: The early church rejected as “false teaching” those who wished to reject the Old Testament (the Marcionites). We run the risk of reclaiming that false teaching again. We need to hear the Scripture lessons next to one another (Old Testament lessons, Psalms, Gospel lessons and New Testament letters). They inform, teach, and shape when held in tension with one another, and with the lives of the gathered assembly. The tendency to minimize the use of Scripture makes it more likely that we will use it for our own purpose as opposed to Gospel purposes. How is it that we fight so valiantly over Scripture but use it less and less in our personal lives and in our worship services?
6. Faithful worship needs to address the full range of the life of the assembly-faith and doubt; praise and lament; the need for Law and Gospel, the personal relationship with Christ and life in community etc.
Comment: These days it’s tempting for us to yield consistently to the plea, “We want worship that is upbeat; that makes me feel good.” Surely, there is a place for that. But it dare not become the whole diet less we yield to a “theology of glory” that knows nothing about the cross. For example, our Lord Jesus does bid me to “deny myself, take up the cross and follow.” That is not a popular phrase in our culture.
If what I am receiving in a given worship service is a constant diet of smiling faces and praise hymns, what do I do with my lament for a friend who has just been killed; or thousands whose lives have been snuffed out by the chaos of waters unleashed, or to the truth of my own indifference to such suffering. The opposite is also the case, we have sometimes majored in sad faces while speaking of a joy that is nowhere to be seen either on our faces or in our lives.
7. Faithful worship will reflect the truth that the Church does not begin and end with us. By God’s grace and the power of the Holy Spirit we are a part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church “surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…” (Hebrews 12:1)
Comment: The Lutheran tradition values the congregation as central to the life of the Church. That accent is critical and necessary. Yet the congregation is not the whole of the Church. By the power of the Holy Spirit we are connected throughout time and space with all those who “call upon the Lord Jesus.” How will our worship including our sermons and our prayers and our actions reflect that truth? We are not called by the Holy Spirit to “go it alone.”
8. Faithful worship will make use of the rich variety of sources (readings, hymns, art, dance, and so forth) available to us as gifts given across space and time while being sensitive to local tradition.
Comment: Often the temptation is to go either way, that is, to use all the resources and cause the local assembly to wonder what “hit” them or, on the other hand, to make the “local tradition” (what “we have always done in my congregation”) that which is “the tradition” which cannot be changed. Both are important as we remain sensitive and value the best of the local tradition while reminding the gathered assembly that the “local tradition” is not, by any means, the whole of the Church’s tradition.
9. The pastor has primary responsibility for shaping the worship life of the congregation together with the lay leadership of the assembly/congregation.
Comment: The pastor’s call is to provide a ministry of the Gospel, a ministry of Word and Sacrament, for the sake of the gathered assembly. Through the Gospel, the ministry of Word and Sacrament, God calls the Church into being by the power of the Holy Spirit.
With respect to the shape of worship, it is not a matter of “one’s person’s opinion being as good as another.” It is not a matter of doing whatever feels good at the moment.
A goal would be that the lay worship leadership grows increasingly to share in that “tending of the Gospel” for the sake of the assembly. There may be points when such lay leadership needs to address pastoral leadership when such leadership is failing to tend the Gospel for the sake of the assembly.
10. Faithful worship results in God’s empowering the baptized people to bear “God’s creative and redeeming word to all the world.”
Comment: The Church is God’s mission to the Church. The Church is also God’s mission to the world. To forget the first is to leave the assembly thirsty, hungry, and vulnerable to despair, self-righteousness, indifference, and apathy. It is to fail to deliver the Gospel. To forget the second is to forget that “God so loved the world that he sent his own beloved Son.” (John 3:16) It is to believe that our confession of Jesus as Lord ends when we walk out the doors of the church building. In worship we cast an eye to God who invites and empowers us to live in the light of his promises given in Christ Jesus. In doing so, we also cast an eye to this world and its hunger, thirst, and pain.
Submitted by:
Bishop Marcus C. Lohrmann
Northwestern Ohio Synod
Feast of the Epiphany,
Jan. 6, 2005
