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Ten Core Convictions: Interview with John Witvliet
John D. Witvliet is director of the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship and professor of music and worship at Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary. As the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship presented its ten core convictions on the occasion of its tenth anniversary and its new grant from the Lilly Endowment, he sat down for this conversation about worship renewal.
The essentials in these ten convictions—God, scripture, diversity, hospitality—seem pretty agreeable. Why do you call them challenging and countercultural?
Most Christian leaders and communities would no doubt agree with our list of ten rather readily in principle. But these ten convictions can be—and, in our observations, are—enormously difficult to put into practice deeply and meaningfully.
All worshipers, for instance, would say cultural diversity is a good thing, yet the majority of worshiping communities, in a variety of cultural contexts, are rather homogenous. Everyone would agree that scripture is important, but often the churches with the highest theology of scripture feature the least engagement with it in worship.
Think of the many diet and nutrition experts who make their fortune on reminding people of what, in large part, they already know—that nutritious eating and exercise are the best practices for healthy living. Many people agree with that up front, but struggle to put it into practice effectively and consistently.
Perhaps something similar is true of worship. We know what good nutrition and practice in worship consists of, but we don’t always live up to it in practice. We need to be called to examine and re-examine our worship diet and our worship health.
Is this list—and your work as an Institute—Reformed or ecumenical?
Yes to both—an answer that we believe many of the 16th century Reformers would have appreciated.
We sense these ten themes would be near the center of any Christian congregation's approach to worship, whether they are Methodist, Pentecostal, Lutheran, non-denominational, or Catholic, to name just a few.
At the same time, in naming these ten convictions we have drawn on witnesses in some of the most characteristically Reformed sources—for example, John Calvin’s notable work on the glory of God and the role of the Spirit in worship. We suspect that the Reformed tradition has more to say about worship, and with more depth and profundity, than most Reformed congregations have begun to explore. John Calvin is out ahead of us, and we are trying to catch up to so much of what he taught.
Why is it that that such distinctively Reformed sources can inform a broad Christian discussion? For starters, remember that the Reformers insisted that they were serving the “one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.” The point of Reformation, then and now, is to strengthen vital Christian practice throughout the church.
We are extremely grateful for programs, partnerships, and grants that connect us with nearly every Christian tradition. In these partnerships we participate as a distinctly Reformed Institute. We also resist a least-common-denominator approach to ecumenism, in which distinctiveness is downplayed or set aside. But ultimately we celebrate that there is “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Ephesians 4).
This list, and this grant, will no doubt result in a continued steady output from the Institute of books, events, and Web features. Isn’t this all just a lot of busy-ness and activity?
It can be.
But let’s be very clear: We are much more interested in having a single congregation discover the life-changing joy and profound significance of authentic Christian worship than simply perpetuating conferences and publications for their own sake. All of our work is directed toward renewed vitality in Christian worship and living.
The most cherished responses to our work are not good book reviews or conference evaluations, but rather testimonies that somehow God’s Spirit has used a bit of our work to revitalize faithful, vibrant worship in a specific congregation.
Is it right for an academic institution to push an agenda?
There is no such thing as neutral scholarship. There is scholarship that intends to be descriptive, and we want to encourage that. But one of the joys of teaching and working at a church-owned college and seminary is that we do have an agenda: we are for the vital, knowledgeable, intentional practice of Christian faith in congregations. And we are also eager for description scholarship—from such different disciplines as history, ritual studies, anthropology, psychology—that can discipline our more prescriptive work.
Does this list overemphasize worship and isolate it from other aspects of congregational life and ministry?
We are deeply aware that this is indeed one of the great temptations. One of our goals in programming is always to keep worship pointing to and connecting with every other aspect of congregational life and the Christian life, as we state in conviction #7.
Again, the joy of being at a Christian liberal arts college is that we have the opportunity to be acutely aware of how worship interacts with every aspect of culture, whether the sciences, the arts, or the humanities.
We see our role as exploring worship as one crucial component—a catalyst, even—of a community’s life of faith, but never as an end to itself.
Will this list fan the flames of the worship wars, since it says that so much is at stake in how we worship?
In churches that aren't asking these questions, these convictions may be very prophetic and provocative indeed! We do not offer them simply to make peace or a cease-fire in tensions about worship practices. We do hope they will help churches see their way through to the deepest, most fruitful conversations about the meaning of worship, and to realize that more stylistic concerns are, though important and pressing, actually peripheral.
Couldn’t a sum of money like this be better used to support missionaries spreading the gospel around the world?
The scope of the funding of the Lilly Endowment’s religion division is to energize American religious life as a whole. They fund projects related to every aspect of congregational life, including social witness and evangelism.
In addition, note that conviction #7 clearly spells out that we see how worship is inextricably interlinked with the full ministry of the church, including the church’s work of education, justice, and evangelism. Worship is a small but important part—and, in many ways, the catalyst or foundation—for the church’s ministry. When worship is strong, it strengthens, not weakens, the church’s witness.
Is the Institute endorsing certain styles of worship?
Most fundamentally, no. The church is present in too many cultures all over the world for us to think that we can or should endorse a specific style.
Perhaps we can take comfort in the fact that we are regularly critiqued by contacts from a variety of traditions and styles for supposedly endorsing an “other” style they don’t like. In any case, we seek to move the discussion beyond style to the meaning and purpose of worship. We are asking every congregation to wrestle with these 10 convictions and the questions they raise. They will lead some to innovation in practice, and others to continuation of practices already in place, but everyone, we pray, to more spiritually nourishing worship.
At the same time, we know that in every event we host, we are practicing worship in specific styles and approaches. Our recent conferences have featured music led by pipe organs, jazz musicians, praise teams, and classical, folk, and gospel choirs. Overall, we are most resistant to forms of worship that are celebrity-driven. And we do feature a much greater appreciation for time-honored traditional practices, including early church practices for celebrating the sacrament, than many churches today seem to have patience for. When we do this, we are not trying to be nostalgic, but rather we are trying to discern, in the context of such a consumerist culture, what faithful, counter-cultural ministry looks like.