Lutherans Reflect on Worship Life

CHICAGO (ELCA) -- Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) explored the church's worship life during "Worship 2000 Jubilee," the church's first national conference on worship held here July 10-13. About 1,000 clergy and lay leaders who plan worship gathered to ponder and celebrate various liturgical traditions, ethnic and cultural expressions, religious spaces and music styles in Christian worship.
Worship 2000 Jubilee was part of the ELCA's "Initiatives to Prepare for a New Century." The 1997 ELCA Churchwide Assembly designated significant areas of ministry for the new century, including "Deepening Worship Life." Leadership teams were formed in 1998 to provide overall guidance for the work of congregations, synods and the churchwide organization. There are 11,000 congregations organized into 65 synods of the ELCA in the United States and Caribbean.
Conference participants visited Christian churches in Chicago to experience distinctive worship styles and settings. They were Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Luke, Fourth Presbyterian Church, Rockefeller Chapel, St. Benedict the African Roman Catholic Church, St. Clement Roman Catholic Church and St. James Episcopal Cathedral.
"We believe that it's very important to explore the worship traditions of churches with which we have special relationships," said the Rev. Paul R. Nelson, ELCA director for worship. "In Chicago those relationships include a covenant with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and full communion relationships with the Presbyterian Church and The Episcopal Church," Nelson said.
A goal of the conference was to "broaden participants' perspectives on worship," said the Rev. Kevin Anderson, ELCA director for worship education. "We hope some participants will model some of what they've experienced here back in their own local settings to deepen worship life," he said.
"There are those within this church who might see worship as an opportunity for 'entertainment evangelism,'" said the Rev. James E. Boline, Hollywood Lutheran Church, Hollywood, Calif.
"But those who truly understand and experience worship as a cosmic encounter with the Divine (those who were at Worship 2000 Jubilee) have found a common ground within a worship pattern of simply gathering, hearing the Word, eating the Meal, and being sent out," he said.
"The kind of worship that follows this pattern is what is uniting Lutherans liturgically, no matter what our musical style or aesthetic taste may be. That pattern itself is inclusive of all our ethnicities, all our musical tastes, all our liturgical styles," said Boline.
Plenary presentations focused on the elements of "Word and sacrament" in worship. The Rev. Gordon W. Lathrop, professor of liturgy and chaplain for the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, delivered the first of four presentations at Worship 2000 Jubilee. Using images projected on two large screens, Lathrop reflected on the future of the "liturgical assembly" in connection with the shape and function of the Christian community.
"Assembly is not just a group of individuals who come together as a passive American-targeted market to see if there are any religious ideas the individuals might buy for their own perceived needs -- the church-growth sales language so common in America today," Lathrop said.
"Assembly, rather, is a common, shared active stance of openness and need and praise before God. Everyone is welcome because everyone is in need. Everyone is welcome because everyone can be introduced to the authentic reasons for praise," Lathrop told participants. "It is the basic foundation of Christian worship, the beloved beginning of God's mission in the world, the place where each specific person ought to be honored profoundly and yet each one be welcomed in the common stance of the whole body."
Lathrop said God "enlivens our little meetings around Word and sacrament. Open the door," he said. "Work on hospitality. Try to see if your own congregation can grow, even a little, in ethnic and racial and sexual and age and generational diversity. See yourself in all those who come through the door. Be a needy 'us.' Keep reminding yourselves that all of you are also still seekers and beggars to whom Christ has given hospitality. Don't segregate the seekers nor the people by their generations. That is such a bad idea. All of our full services of Word and sacrament are and ought to be seeker services."
The Rev. Susan R. Briehl, an ELCA pastor, former co-director of Holden Village, Chelan, Wash., led a presentation on how the "Word" is best preached today.
"The preacher has only one Word to speak, one story to tell, one mystery to proclaim. It is ... the story of God's Word made manifest among us, the mystery of God, out of compassion for our weakness, becoming flesh as fragile as breath, that we might not be destroyed but forgiven and given new life. In other words, all of God's mighty works and wonders unfold among us. God's infinite mercy is poured out upon us," said Briehl.
"But how does preaching give this gift and speak of this mystery heard and known from our elders? How shall the preacher tell the story of God's boundless compassion for earth ... to those who have never heard and to those who know it best? Where are the words for speaking the Word that speaks light into darkness, beauty into chaos, freedom into fear and life into death? What aids the preacher, week after week, in handing over Christ Jesus and his benefits? Or, put another way, what hinders and what helps the evangelical preacher to offer God's mercy in Jesus Christ to a stubborn, wavering, unfaithful people in a way that enables faith in them to trust this gift?" Briehl asked participants. "Preaching is rooted in human history and time. A preacher is met all the time and transformed by Jesus," she said.
The Rev. Don E. Saliers, professor of theology and worship and director of the master of sacred music program, Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, explored the visual and aural arts in worship.
"The history of the Christian faith is also a history of the eye, the ear, the mind imagining, and the human body at full stretch. Wherever human beings hear and encounter God, the consequences are poetic, visionary, metaphoric, parabolic, revealed in images, and ordered sound -- voices, instruments and dance," Saliers said.
"Christianity remains steadfastly a religion of the body -- Christ incarnate, the Word's body crucified, lifted up, and the sacramental body received by a people becoming the body of Christ for the sake of the world. The music of heaven became the music of earth. This is why the church continually searches to sound and to sing the depths of life before God," Saliers said.
Saliers proposed four "theses" for participants' reflection. "The meaning and point of language used in worship to proclaim and celebrate Christ in our assemblies depends radically on non-verbal forms for its meaning and point," he said. Second, "Christian public worship is in art, but not a work of art." Third, Saliers said, "Christian public worship is faithful and relevant to the extent that its art features a series of permanent tensions: the already and the not-yet, the words and the deeds, the hearing and coming-to-see, the declaration and the transformation. And finally, he said, "Christian liturgy is an eschatological art. Participants thus make visible, audible and palpable the promises of God."
The Rev. J-Glenn Murray, SJ, director of the office for pastoral liturgy and a teacher of homiletics for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Cleveland, examined the link between the eucharistic meal and the assembly's sending out to lives of justice, peace and mission.
"What would happen to our mission were we to remember that we are one? Our language of separatio