Liturgy, the Husk and the Worm

If you were to go by the general wisdom of American Christianity today, traditional worship is dead. To reach people today, one needs to dump the symbolism and rituals of the past for worship bands and other “contemporary” components — the symbolism and rituals, perhaps, of the present.

Is this really the case?

I don't think so. The problem with the conventional wisdom is that conventional wisdom generally runs behind the times. It was true that over the past few decades, contemporary worship has become the way to draw people. But contemporary worship, much like the Evangelical traditional service of the twentieth century, is really modernist at its core. It's functional. Everything that doesn't serve a purpose, the thought goes, ought to be removed. Next, add new stuff to serve new purposes (e.g. be marketable) and that will reach people. And it worked for younger Baby Boomers and older Generation Xers.

The thing I'm noticing as part of the so-called Generation Y (but on the edge of it, and also well connected with the parts of Generation X) is that the whole idea rings hollow. I talk to friends who are unchurched, and to the extent church intrigues them at all, they want the sacredness of the past. They want the meat of traditional theology, too. Same goes with many of my churched friends, even ones who seem generally “contemporary.”

(Let me digress before I go on, let me say that I am no critic of contemporary Christian music as a genre. In as much as Christians like Nicole Nordeman or the band members of Sixpence None the Richer write music that is every bit the equal of secular music, that excels as an art, I'm all for it. That's not the point, really.)

The postmodern winds of change are blowing. Postmodernism is nothing if not an utter rejection of the utilitarian ethic of the last few centuries. It looks at contemporary services, and even the Evangelical “traditional” service, and yearns for something more. It yearns for the ancient. It is intellectual, yes, but it wants the emotional, spiritual, sacred connection to the communion of the saints that comes out of the ancient words of the Church. It values tradition even as it tramples it, finding an odd synergy with the Glori Patri and Doxology, with the liturgical year and the cathedral.

The amorphous thing that postmodernism is, I think, is well represented by two bands I like: Engima and Evanescence. Both are notable for their combination of somewhat disjointed, even existentialist themes intermixed with Classical influence. Engima pulls in the Latin chants of the medieval period, for example; Evanescence draws influence from composers such as Mozart.

This is not a rapid, radical shift, but rather one that has been coming for a century. It is shown in Karl Barth's engagement with the Church Fathers and Catholic theologians unlike almost anybody else in the modernist era. Barth's work is engaging in part because he holds a conversation with the Church historic rather than acting as if his own time was so enlightened as to render it moot. Likewise T.S. Eliot's powder keg of “Modernist” poetry (which fits into cultural postmodernity) is constantly hungry for tradition, rejecting the realist ideals of the pre-War era.

As postmodernism continues to encroach on the popular psyche, I expect that what these “prophets” of the change saw fifty, seventy or ninety years ago is now being felt — even if people do not have the vocabulary to explain it — in the inner depths of the average person. Not, perhaps, in the Baby Boom generation or even that following, but in the ones succeeding from there. Cut “free” from the benefit of having been nurtured by tradition, many are willingly returning to it.

We need more of the richness of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Francis and less of Rick Warren and Pat Robertson. We are an malnourished church, starved of that which fortifies us in the midst of an orgy of information. Worse, like the Corinthians, we parade around thinking we are being spiritual and ascendant as we slowly pummel our culture to death.

The Journey is a St. Louis-based church that has a tendency to shake things up. It has grown astronomically in the few years it has existed. It is notable in that it seems to have an awareness of what the culture needs so as to be ministered to that is incredibly accurate thus far. They just launched a liturgical service.

The past 30 years in American evangelicalism have seen the rise of the contemporary, non-denominational church. Because of the noted success of these churches in reaching Baby Boomers, many church leaders today automatically equate being “relevant” or “missional” with a hip service with a rock band that sings contemporary choruses instead of hymns, complete with swirls of tie-dye eye candy decorating large screens instead of stained glass, crosses, and icons. What many have failed to grasp, however, is that these slick contemporary worship gatherings that meet in big auditoriums are often unsuccessful in connecting with newer generations. Churches like these build their philosophy of ministry on the fact that “we are not like your parent’s church.” In a post-Christian culture, however, people don’t generally care as much about not going to a church like their parents, simply because they didn’t grow up going to church at all. In addition, when newer generations do in fact venture out to try a Christian worship service, they look for and expect many of the elements that ironically the seeker churches have taken out of their services… Christian symbols, sacred spaces, and liturgical forms.

Does this invalidate those who want a contemporary service? No, of course not. What the postmodern air we are now breathing suggests, however, is that the era of the one-size fits all modernizing project has ended. The carcass of the Enlightenment Project needs finally to be tossed into the ocean. In a disconnected, disjointed world, many people want to worship God in a way that is set apart from the world, that is a sanctuary from the world. Not to escape the non-Christians, rather, this is precisely the thing that the unchurched yearn for. They don't need another rationalist explanation of anything, what they feel is missing is the sacred. The church does its duty when it provides that which the world cannot, not when it tries to provide precisely what the world can.

Matthew Arnold, in mourning the loss of faith that he felt as a modernist, wrote:

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.

His poems, in a sense, offer insight from someone who was aware of the sacred but felt it was lost. He did not rejoice in that loss; it was not a loss that was merely the enlightened progression to perfection in human nature. In successive decades, we have forgotten that this loss was one that many early modernists felt was worth mourning even as they chose to abandon it. We seemed to think we ought to eliminate the sacred rituals too, even if we clung to the kernel inside that husk; those of us who had the theological structure to justify keeping that which Arnold mourns ironically rejoiced as we threw away what others would give everything to possess.

Maybe we need to realize that the husk is not always good to discard. Arnold, Tennyson and others — whatever conclusion they arrived at concerning faith in general — may have been better attuned than we to what even the faithful were discarding. They had the sense of the majesty contained in a true encounter of God through the sacred rituals of the Church. The rituals were not the cause of lost faith — the idea that rituals are what kill faith is absurd. Rather, those that abandoned the rituals did so because the church did not adequately hold on to the basis for those rituals.

Later, people misplaced the blame and felt it praiseworthy to discard the husk that “obscured” the the true kernels of faith, unaware that the true problem has not been that husk, but the worms eating away at the very kernels. But stripping away every husk only exposes the kernels to more and more worms.

Maybe the husk is worth reclaiming.