The Formative Role of Congregational Worship

"Sunday morning is the practice of a counter-life through counter-speech" -- Walter Brueggeman

Our ethical lives, as I've suggested in a number of posts lately, are best understood in a narrative that has key moments; they are full of defining events, as well as continual movement and development. Our personal plots, our characters' origins, climaxes, and dénouements, occur within particular settings that give shape and meaning to our stories. This is assuredly true of Christian tradition. There is a direct connection between the practice of congregational life and liturgy and the practice of Christian higher learning. The pursuit of Christian education must have as its end the good of worship because worship restores the practice of university learning to its original meaningful good.

Debra Dean Murphy notes that in worship, we practice being a certain kind of person; the same is true of classroom learning. True knowledge is committed to action, practice, habit, even ritual. For the Christian, such knowledge is at the heart of worship--it is doxological, Eucharistic, and liturgical. We are learning "to live by the story that has called [us] into existence." We cannot be outside the Christian story to truly experientially know it; instead, we must practice it.

True education is performative and therefore, transformative. Nisi crediertis, non intelligitis. (Unless you have believed, you will not understand.) Communion with God and his people and the pursuit of truth are not separate for the Christian--conversion is life-long because the relationship with God and others is life-long. True knowledge, then, involves desire for the other and is dependent upon the other (i.e. God). The typical pattern of congregational worship teaches us an alternative language that helps us resist the fallen powers of this world, which are expressed as false worldviews and as false social structures. This congregational pattern is participatory--it involves learning a language and a bodily habit. It involves learning to see, imagine, and practice the world differently than how our culture sees and enacts it. According to Murphy, in place of planned obsolescence, self-dependence, and a "myth of scarcity," Christian worship offers a pattern of ritual return:

1. Entrance: Gathering for worship and opening worship initiates us into another way of understanding the world, by its nature deeply physical. Its liturgical space, rituals, and scriptural and traditional imagery set us apart as a separate community.
   
2. Proclamation and response: The church in worship seeks a Holy Spirit-guided, mutual discerning of the scriptures as the Word of God. The Bible rightly interprets the world, instead of the reverse. Preaching and teaching are acts of holy imagination. They are also invitations to a corporate knowledge that begins by abiding in the triune life of God.
   
3. Thanksgiving and communion: All prayer has a corporate, transformative aspect to it, but we need to do a better job teaching ourselves what prayer does so that it can truly shape our identities. In the same way the "prayer" of the Lord's Supper is an expression of the mystery of God and, therefore, is essential to our identities in Christ.
   
4. Sending forth: The act of ending worship, especially with a prayer of blessing or commissioning, reminds us that our worship is our ethic; it is our condition rather than simply a source of ethical reflection. We are called to live out on a day-to-day basis all that our baptisms (i.e. our commitments to Christ) imply, and this is a life of worship in all its aspects--including the work of worldview transformation, the sharing of the gospel, and the work of justice in all its expressions.

We are formed and shaped by the practices that we submit ourselves to intellectually, emotionally, intuitionally, bodily, and socially, yet this pursuit of worship through education is finally dependent upon the Creator who transcends us and yet freely offers himself in Christ and in the Holy Spirit. Glen Stassen and David Gushee have labeled this triune character formation which is social and sacramental, and therefore, which is obedient in its liturgical dependence, as "[p]articipative grace." The cooperation of God's people with the in-breaking of his eschatological reign neither claims for itself a works-based righteousness nor acquiesces to moral passivity. Instead, it is the evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit on the heart of the faithful Christian. It is centered on the kind of virtuous habits the Christian internalizes and practices. It cannot be isolated as a topic for discussion only; it must arise out of internally reflective practices and commitments.

The actions commanded by Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, for example, are spiritually formative--they remake our hearts and whole persons when we practice them in grace. "Character is shaped in community, and that means churches must be communities, not mere preaching stations. . . . [K]oinonia . . combines the meaning of community and fellowship with the meaning of service" (Stassen 61). It seems to me that such an understanding can be embraced by both Catholic and Lutheran, by both Calvinist and Arminian. The debate as to whether God's righteousness is judicially designated or covenantally received, as well as whether it is infused or imparted, justifying us before and/or during the process of sanctification, certainly impinges on this question, but all these positions can accommodate the practical reality that (to quote Bono of U2) grace "she travels outside of karma."