The first part of a two part Minister's Moment is available
at the "Continue reading" link. The second part will appear next month.
A few months ago, I was researching a now-forgotten subject online and ran across the same subject: practical direction on “how we worship.” In the first case, the we was the Konko-kyo, a monotheistic Japanese “new religion” based on Shinto. (They and the Unitarian Universalist Association have occasional contact.) The second we was a Ukrainian Orthodox church. Though the content was different, both articles were concerned with the practical, everyday aspects of worship.
Such a concern is less obvious in the wide swath of “mainline American Protestant churches,” of which ours is one. I suppose there are two reasons for this. First, it was assumed that anyone new to a church like ours would have had a similar experience in a church with worship customs more-or-less like ours. When I first came to UNMC, I reviewed more than a half-century of letters of membership transfer, I saw that we have been linked to Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregationalist, Disciples of Christ, Unitarian, and (of course) other Universalist churches across the country. Though there is a good piece of diversity within that mix, it is still true that its members are expected to learn the ways of worship through participation and osmosis.
The second reason is that as a tradition that is a self-conscious “reform” from another tradition — and here I mean wider mainline Protestantism, and not just Universalism — one of the points of reform was a simplified form of worship, and ostensibly a simplified form of worship should be accessible and even self-evident. Norms change like the tides. Should the style of worship be informal, immediate and focusing on the personal? This typifies the “low church” approach. Or should it be structured, eternal, and focusing of the global, even cosmic? This is the “high church” trajectory. This church is on the high church end of a low church tradition, so the differences are hard to tease apart. Nevertheless, once you know how to worship here, each step can seem pretty logical — at least in theory.
But worship is not the goal of a logical or emotional process, but the goal of a human cultural process that, ironically, tries to escape from culture and find closeness with God, who cannot be captured by culture or anything human-made. We bring our rational and emotional selves to worship, but fundamentally, worship is learned so we can be mature in faith to approach God with or without it. In worship, we learn not only who God is, but what God is making out of us, and in return what are a set of appropriate responses to other people and the natural world.
The subtle and direct directions in worship, the printed material, the emotional cues, and the learned worship elements, like the Lord's Prayer, the Declaration of Faith, the versicles, the doxology, and the placement of the amens, are more than just words: these make up the form of worship. But the content of worship is the collective action of the entire body of the church engaged in being near to God, and this is neither a direct or “reformable” action.
This thought continues next month.