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Alan Creech
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why the liturgy helps > part one sites & things i like
abbey of gethsemani faith communities christ the king blogs i read
aaron klinefelter
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July 09, 2004
> 2:53 PM
why the liturgy helps > part two And on we go. I see it helping like this: you have a simple, organic, emerging faith community who wonders what to do. You have the church planter/leader/pastor of that community who has likely been trained (read: almost ruined) in a system that makes them the be all and end all of everything that goes on there. They must perform. They must get people to "come" to their thing. Then, they must keep them there by providing a rich worship experience and feeding them until they are fat little Christian piggies who can't move. There's a fair amount of pressure in something like that. "I've got to come up with something to talk about on Tuesday night!" "I've got to feed these people the Word!" "I have to come up with a system for discipleship!" AaaagghhHhhhhh!!! We be trippin'! One really practical way the liturgy can help is that it is a very basic structure that is simply there. You don't have to "come up with" it. You don't have to be the star. We can plug ourselves into the deep richness of something that has been there, to some degree, since the catachombs, and flow with it, letting God flow through it. I admit, for most evangelical Protestants this is a stretch in ministerial and ecclesiological philosophy, but I think a stretch worth making. What about the spiritual gifts? What about the fact that I am a Teacher and I must Teach or woe unto me? What is "the Pastor" supposed to do anyway? Oh Lord, we're back to that. Not going there presently, but trust me, it's waaay important how you answer that question. Teaching, as a gift, I believe, works more, well, organically than we have been, um, taught. There's more to it than developing "a teaching" for "a service" at a particular moment of gathering. It flows freely in the life of the community, as do the other gifts we have been given. So, the pressure is off - really, the pressure is off. If it doesn't depend on me, then I'm off the hook - in the way that I had been presumed to be "on the hook" before at least. Liturgy takes the pressure off. We meet on Tuesday nights and by default we pray together the evening prayer from the liturgy of the hours. We take some time in silence, we pray the Psalms and hear the reading of God's Word. We listen to what His Spirit says to us through that Word, and we share with each other what we hear - and we talk about it - we work it out in the community. As a Teacher, I end up teaching sometimes, when God's Spirit uses that gift through me. Sometimes others do. We encourage each other. We turn our gaze on Jesus on the Cross - the Lamb of God who takes away the Sin of the world, in the Eucharist, the great Sacrament of Thanksgiving, around which the meeting of Christian communities have been centered since the Apostles were munchin' on dates in Jerusalem. Is it exactly the same every time? No. As I said before, it's a skeleton, not the whole fleshed out body. We also hang out - that would be the great Sacrament of Fellowship - it's grace-giving. Sometimes we hang out, eat, and laugh more, sometimes less. But we have our skeleton. It helps to hold us up. It's trustworthy. This is not a new thing. Real helpful liturgy is not rigid. It's flexible, like your bones. It is alive and has blood flowing through it. If your bones were dry and rigid, they would break every time we took a step. So I'm not talking about some tight, lifeless, dry, inflexible skeleton. That wouldn't be very helpful would it? I'll answer for you, no, it wouldn't. So, that's not what I'm talking about. As such, this liturgy won't even look exactly the same wherever it is embraced. I think it will have common threads, some very strong ones, but may be implemented in varying ways. This doesn't mean reinventing something and calling it the ancient liturgy of the Church. It means finding that and interpreting it inside a living, breathing local community. OK, I may have tapped myself out for the moment on this thing. I pray it encourages someone. Peace and Grace be with you! Labels: catholic, church, emerging church, liturgy 0 Comments:| permalink | e-mail me | 
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