MAILING LIST 
Home > Resources > Interdisciplinary > Recent History of Christian Worship > The Last 30 Years > Transcripts
The Last Thirty Years: What We've Learned along the Way
Seminar at the Calvin Symposium on Worship
January 26, 2006
Host: John D. Witvliet
with Albert Aymer, Nancy Beach, Brian McLaren, Eugene Peterson, Larry Sibley, Joyce Zimmerman
Morning: Introduction and Personal Reflections: Audio / Transcript
Speakers:
John Witvliet (at 0:00)
Joyce Zimmerman (at 12:06)
Brian McLaren (at 25:36)
Eugene Peterson (at 35:46)
Larry Sibley (at 48:25)
Albert Aymer (at 58:55)
Nancy Beach (at 1:24:46)
John Witvliet: Good morning and welcome to you all. It's good to see a wonderful group here today and we look forward to a stimulating, instructive, encouraging conversation today. I'd like to begin by briefly introducing our panel. They will have a chance to introduce themselves through their own stories and reflections as the day goes on.
From Dayton, Ohio and the Institute for Liturgical Studies, Joyce Zimmerman. Brian McLaren, well-known author and listed on the program as from emergentvillage.com because he's going to be so many places on the planet in the next year that it is sure to identify him in one spot. Eugene Peterson comes to us from Montana for this trip here where he works in his ministry of writing that has profited and benefited us all so much. Larry Sibley from Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. Albert Aymer from Hood Theological Seminary, Salisbury, North Carolina. And Nancy Beach from Willow Creek Community Church outside of Chicago. Please join me in welcoming our panel for today.
At your tables, you will find a handout for the day that includes some reflections, quite a bit of material that we hope you will have the chance to read following today, and if you'll please turn now to page two.
The questions that are posed on page two will be for us the guide for our day's conversation. We're going to move through a time of reflecting on changes in worship practices to asking some questions about North American culture and the practice of worship to some explicitly theological questions about what the church in many different places has learned about the Bible's teaching about worship and about God's own character, and perhaps also what the church may have forgotten in the past thirty years. And then we'll end the day by looking ahead to the resources and virtues and insights that we'll need to guide our work in the next thirty years. The goals for today are outlined there very briefly on the top of the page.
To deepen our appreciation for the breadth of worship experiences nationwide and across Christian traditions; to model a process of theological reflection where we hold each other accountable to ask genuinely theological questions about God's life and revelation; to expose and test our own attitudes towards recent changes in Christian expression and life; to offer a very big picture of North American Christianity. I think it's fair to say that on the panel and in the room are representatives of so many different streams of Christian experience that often are not together in one room, and we hope and pray that today can be an instructive big picture look at North American Christianity; and also we hope along the way to discover some new resources for our own ministry, insights, but also resources of other kinds.
So with these goals before us, I would like to now lead us in prayer.
Truly, Lord God, the goals before us today are large and we need the insight that can only come from your Spirit's leading. We bless and thank you for each of these panelists and for the ministries that they represent. We thank you for the many expressions of Christianity represented in this room, and pray that you will help us even today to be the body of Christ, encourage each other, challenge each other in ways that build each other up. And may you receive all the glory and praise through Christ our Lord. Amen.
To introduce the first question, I want to take just a minute to observe that our attitudes towards change make a huge difference for day-to-day ministry. Over the years in our work at the Worship Institute, we certainly notice very distinct attitudes towards changing practices in the church. Some of you have heard this before because we've used this kind of language before, but we have come to identify these by describing two fundamental attitudes that we see, and there are wonderful exceptions to it. One attitude towards change in the past thirty or forty years is the attitude that is best summed in the hymn line, “Change and decay in all around I see.” Right there in Abide With Me sums up that line, “Change and decay” sums up a way of looking at the world. It's half-empty, or maybe a lot more empty than that way of looking that sees the last thirty years as a period of decline and a time of frustration.
And then there's the opposite attitude that we have come to call the “we once were lost but now are found” attitude towards change; that things used to be, practices in part of the church world that a given group were from, used to be filled with lack of energy and spiritual vitality and insight, and now have come to be filled with new fervor. And each of those attitudes may be completely accurate for a given congregation or tradition. But of course, left unchecked by themselves, they can also breed the extremes on both ends of the spectrum, which can easily lead to an attitude towards ministry that is fueled by either despair on the one hand or a kind of over-confidence on the other. A despair that becomes unable to see what God is doing through the church and in the church today. Sometimes, though, the overconfidence that comes out of the zeal can also lead to a kind of blindness to other ways God may be at work. So on either end of the spectrum there can be great dangers and often on either end of the spectrum, those attitudes spill out in the way we have worship planning meetings, or in the ways that congregations strategize about their future. Those implicit attitudes are as significant as the web sites and books we consult. They form the kind of undertone for all the work we do in the church.
So we hope today that we are able to steer between over-confidence and despair and to see the complexity of North American Christianity in a fresh way. As the day unfolds, our panelists have not been asked to be historians. They have been asked to reflect on their own experience, to bring their own pastoral heart and theological reflections to the table. But it might be helpful to do about five minutes of history, just five minutes before the day begins.
If you will turn to page four and five of the handout, you'll see an outline for actually a graduate course on the topic that we're discussing today. It's an outline that gives one way of understanding the complexity of change in North American Christianity. As the day begins, all I want to do is to call attention to a Roman numeral II. As historians of North American Christianity have been writing over the past five or ten years, there are five big movements that come to the surface. There are many books, by the way, about any one of the five of these movements, and very few books that describe all five altogether. Historians realizing the significance first of all of the charismatic movement in shaping North American Christianity that certainly had its seeds planted a hundred years or more ago with the Pentecostal revivals at the turn of the twentieth century, but gained new energy through the charismatic renewal of the 1960s, a renewal movement that to the surprise of many, was equally as prominent in Protestant and Catholic circles through the 60s and 70s.
Second, historians describing the significant new energy around the relationship of worship and evangelism. The biggest selling book in the 1970s on worship and evangelism was probably D. James Kennedy's Evangelism Explosion. And yet, it had very little, if anything, to say about worship. Evangelism was door-to-door by and large. And course, that has changed drastically in the past thirty years so that worship and evangelism concerns are intertwined in very different ways across the Christian perspective, but a significant change.
The liturgical movement, which has reshaped worship in Christian traditions perhaps in surprising ways, it's important to see, making on the one hand Roman Catholic worship more accessible and opening other Christian traditions to historic, symbolic practices with a sense of importance around celebration of the Lord's Supper and such practices as the Christian year and lectionary.
The ecumenical movement that had its significant energy in terms of trying to achieve institutional unity across Christian traditions, but in some ways is represented by the fact that we're all together in this room today.
And then movements that were aimed at restoring confessional identity. Movements whether among Baptists or Reformed or Lutheran or Roman Catholic or Episcopalian or others that have aimed at recovering the purity of a given confessional tradition.
There are other ways of looking at the history, but I think it's fair to say that these five movements shape the context of our reflections throughout the day and might provide a helpful way of framing some of the discussions that we'll share.
And now, we're going to hear from our panel. And during each of our sessions, both before and after break this morning and before and after break this afternoon, I'll be posing a question – it's right off the handout there on page two – to each of our panelists and we'll allow them to share a bit of their own story and reflections and introduce us to a whole different part of the church world in North America.
I should also say up front that while we represent very different communities, it's also important to say that we don't represent nearly every Christian tradition and every type or significant pattern of Christian worship, so we want to be honest to that fact as the day unfolds as well.
So the first question for our panel very simply, “In your experience, how has worship changed for your congregation, denomination, or tradition, and how do you see the pattern of changes nationally, ecumenically?” We'll begin with Joyce Zimmerman here and simply pass the mike right on down the row.
Joyce Zimmerman: Thank you, John. I'm Joyce Zimmerman, the director of the Institute for Liturgical Ministry in Dayton, Ohio. We'll repeat the introductions maybe once and then you'll have it. I am an adjunct professor at Atheneum of Ohio, the Roman Catholic Seminary in Cincinnati, but I spend most of my time publishing for Liturgical Press and doing national conferences. So that gives a little bit of my background.
When John invited me on to the panel, one of the first things he said was address the issue of renewal from the viewpoint of Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy from Vatican II.
One of the things that has always fascinated me about Sacrosanctum Concilium and even as part of the national Roman Catholic reform dialogue, I'm amazed at how often the document comes up, not from the Roman Catholic delegates, but from the Reformed delegates. While this is an internal church document, it is indeed a very public document, and probably has been the renewal blueprint for many churches way beyond the Roman Catholic Church. If any of you do not have a copy of it, I want to give you a couple of resource web sites. I think the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy is still on one or both of them in English for free download. It's a fairly long document, I warn you, but it's there. For U.S. documents, an excellent web site is www.usccb.org. Once you get to that, go to either “Publications” or “Worship”; kind of navigate yourself around and most of our U.S. documents are there right after they are promulgated for a number of months for free download, so it's a great resource for free documents, and I think the Constitution on the Liturgy is still on there. The other web site is www.vatican.va. It takes you to Rome and Vatican City. The first window you probably want to punch on is the English – it will give you some language possibilities. We have a number of international students here, you might choose another language. I certainly go through the English channels. And once you get on to that, you can navigate through publications and whatever, but a number of publications are available on there. As far as we understand, if it's on the web site and you can download it, we're not violating copyright mandates, so that's where that stands.
I would like you to please turn to page fourteen in your booklets. Being the teacher that I am, I can't talk without aids, and so I prepared a number of worksheets, one for each section today. I'd like to begin with a little bit more perhaps extended comments on the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy.
The battle-cry, if you will, of the council was, “back to the sources.” What the council fathers were trying to do, the council opened in October 1962 and closed in October 1965. One of the few times I've had the privilege of causing John to blush deeply was last night I asked him, “When were you born?” And it came out of the blue and I caught him off-guard. He's a post-council child. And as I teach, I'm aware of how post-council many of the folks in front of me are, and I'm looking around this room and I'm going to say probably close to half were born after 1965. I won't have you put your hands up, but probably close to that. I will date myself and probably be a little red; I was in college during the council. The amazing thing for the council, I'm seeing a couple of nods, some of us are old enough, the amazing thing with the council was that every morning or every evening in our national news in the United States, the first five minutes were on what happened in the council when the bishops were in session. For a religious phenomenon to have that kind of an effect on civil society, I think, is remarkable. I was a novice during much of the council and a member of a religious congregation, and in those days the novices had no contact at all with the “outside world”. We were supposed to be holy, so we were literally removed: family, T.V. was a non-issue, newspapers – they didn't exist inside the novitiate walls, but I had a very astute novice directress who somehow found a T.V., God knows when back in those days, and we were permitted to watch T.V. five minutes at the beginning of every Huntley Brinkley broadcast to catch up on the news of the council, we actually were more interested in the commercials because it kind of gave us a sense that we had a world out there but it was quite groundbreaking.
“Back to the sources” meant, as John really said in his introductory remarks, let's go back to the original inspiration of the church, not necessarily the Scripture, but certainly to that early apostolic time, the early patristic time. With that initial charismatic inspiration, the church was trying to find her feet in following Christ. That was really the goal of the council. Talk about spectrum on the panel here, within the Roman Catholic Church today we have probably at least as broad a spectrum, in that we have a number of us to the extreme, I'll mix them up, to one side that is very inspired yet by the council and recognizes that we have barely begun the work of renewal. We have done much adaptation in our worship, but very little renewal. That work, that desire of the council remains to be done. Then we have the other spectrum in Roman Catholicism that wants to go back to a period before the council. Actually, we've had some break-offs from the church who consider the council heresy and it should be simply disregarded if we are to be truly Catholic. And so within Catholicism we have an extremely broad reaction to the council right now. Mainstream, and certainly officially the council has been constantly reiterated as the founding blueprint for our worship renewal.
I have listed at the top of page fourteen there some of the key concepts that come out of the Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy, which I felt could be particularly helpful for this ecumenical group. Church's sacrament – the paragraph numbers there are multiple where a number of places in the Constitution this is raised. The Church's sacrament. For so long, from Charlemagne one in the Catholic Church, we focus on our Seven Sacraments, in place already by the beginning of the 13th Century, defined by the Council of Trent in reaction to the Reformation.
In 1963, Edward Schillebeeckx, the Dutch theologian, published a groundbreaking startling book, Christ, the Sacrament of the Encounter With God, where he reiterated both Christ as the sacrament of God and the church is the sacrament of Christ, and we ourselves are sacraments of the church. Totally blowing open our whole notion of sacrament, beyond seven discreet moments to understanding a way of life.
Paschal Mystery – I'll speak a little bit more about that this afternoon. It's one of my favorite themes to talk about.
Paragraph seven, the presences of Christ, where for so long in Roman Catholicism we focus the presence of Christ strictly on the consecrated bread and wine and the reserved Christ in the tabernacle. This was a startling paragraph, in that it recognizes the presence of Christ in the presiding minister. It recognizes the presence of Christ in the Word. It recognizes the presence of Christ in the assembly, and of course, in the Eucharistic species. That paragraph, recognizing the four liturgical presences of Christ, is grounded in another document that comes out of the early 1940s and Pious XII, the Mediator Dei, where he actually recognizes that I counted up in there and Mystici Corpus, two encyclicals from that time, I counted up something like twenty-two presences of Christ that are mentioned. The presence of Christ in a loving couple, married couple, who is trying in their vocation of marriage to discern the will of God and change the world. The presence of Christ in our care for the poor, the sick, the downtrodden, the orphan, the widow, the sojourner to use good Old Testament Psalmist language, and so on. So this paragraph simply opens up for us the whole sense of the presence of Christ, which for us Roman Catholics, was quite startling.
Paragraph eight, it brings us nearer to the Eastern churches, and that is that all of our worship today is united with the heavenly worship, which means that all of our worship has an eschatological thrust, that we have a foot in this world as well as a foot already in the next world. I think that paragraph has not been explored sufficiently.
Paragraph ten, a phrase that I'm sure all of you have heard: “Liturgy is the source and summit of the whole Christian life.” And I want to reiterate what John said, it's amazing how many documents come out, how many conferences there are where worship is still somehow not understood to be the center. It's what we gather for each week. It's what we are all about.
I'll raise this in the next section, popular devotions, which for some denominations represented here are not quite the same as for us Roman Catholics and some of the other liturgical denominations. Full conscious active participation, I'll talk about later on. I've already said a little bit about the Word in liturgy. You might want to take a look at those paragraphs, particularly those where your entire worship service is focused on Word.
Paragraph twenty-six, something startling and new for us Catholics, the whole body worships. We're still learning that one.
The two paragraphs on vernacular I put in not because it involves most of the folks in this room, but I simply want to call your attention to the reality that in the Constitution, the council fathers never allowed for a total vernacular liturgy, that is, liturgy in one's native tongue. Remember, we come from a long background of Latin liturgy. They envisioned English, or German or French or whatever, in the liturgy, but never a fully vernacular liturgy. Our first hybrid books came out in 1969 where we had both English and Latin. By 1971 we had a full English liturgy. So it gives a sense of how quickly, once the heart of folks is touched, how quickly renewal can really move forward way beyond what the council fathers envisioned.
Later on today we're going to be talking at length about the issue of re-culturation, again, a whole new issue for us Roman Catholics.
The divine office: I point you to these paragraphs, particularly paragraph 100, where for a long time in Roman Catholicism our daily prayer became Mass, and what we recovered is the value of the weekly rhythm of Mass and a daily prayer of morning and evening prayer which some of the Protestant denominations have never lost. And then something that has always been important for us and is now being found by many non-Roman Catholic denominations and that is the importance of the rhythm of the liturgical year.
Below that, we've come a long way, but I will simply allow you to read through that as the day goes on. If you've got questions, you can come to me. One of the reflections I've done often with Roman Catholic groups is to look at where we are today. What have we gained in renewal in the last forty years? What renewal do we still need to look at? So you might find yourself amazingly in some of those two columns, either where we are today or perhaps you still need to get there and then perhaps, where you need to go as well, or maybe you are where we wish to go, which will create some very interesting discussion. So I invite you somehow in all your free time this day to take a further look at this particular sheet.
Thank you.
Brian McLaren: Good morning, everybody. My name is Brian McLaren. It's great to be here with you. A few just brief comments. This is an interesting week for me because I preach my last sermon as senior pastor of the church that I've been involved with for twenty-four years this coming Sunday, so this is a good time for retrospective for me and twenty-four years is almost thirty, so this is a good exercise and exciting and interesting and a nostalgic time on many levels for me.
I'd like to say a couple of things about my place, my vantage point and the kind of low church evangelical world from which I come. I'm a child of the Jesus Movement and its aftermath and maybe I would also say that I think a lot of what I've been doing in the last ten years has been trying to come to terms with being Christians in the aftermath of the Religious Right that I think is a far more significant reality than many of us realize, so that might cover a lot of what I say.
I'd like to say something about my perception from that vantage point about general changes in worship and then say a few things very briefly about my own congregation. Five significant changes that I've noticed. First, the theological shift in the last thirty years from defending liturgies as biblically mandated. I think most of our denominations, my own background included, basically would be in a war of liturgies and we would list Bible verses to say why every element in our order of service was biblically mandated, and I don't sense that too many people do that anymore. I think we all want to be biblical, but I think maybe we've moved beyond the idea that our particular liturgy is the only biblical way and that God has to hold his nose when listening to all the other denominations for all their failures to get it right like we do. I think with that has come some kind of reflection on each group's realizing that its particular liturgy has wonderful strengths and maybe some weaknesses too.
Second would be the realization that obviously the Roman Catholic Church, as Joyce has just said, has also grappled within the last thirty years or begun to grapple with that each culture needs to worship in its own indigenous language, which includes musical, verbal, visual, conceptual languages.
This is closely related to a third change that I think relates to the willingness of white formal colonial congregations to respect and learn from non-white congregations, where the former colonizers, who, for a long time wanted to replace the cultures that they dominated with their own, started to actually learn that they could have a lot of good clean fun and a lot of joy by learning from the people that they had been dominating. In many ways, the global rise of Pentecostalism in the last century I see as a resurgence of Christianity among people who refused to let their forms of worship be dominated by my Northern European mentality and approach. That includes use of the body as Joyce was just saying, expression of emotions, and the rest.
Next, fourth, would be a rise of the ancient future concept that Leonard Sweet and Robert Webber have emphasized, where Protestants, Catholics, Orthodox, Pentecostals, are sharing resources across old barriers. That to me is a phenomenally significant change and I think that Robert is right about that.
And then finally, for better and for worse, the influence of television and making public worship become more of a broadcast spectator show type event, that is characterized by more planning and excellence, which to me are good things, but sometimes characterized by less involvement, which is not such a good thing.
Now, just to take that and make that personal briefly in my own experience. When the church, the local church I've been involved with, an interdenominational church began twenty-four years ago, we were interested in renewing the forms that we had inherited. We had forms we didn't really question them, but we did want to try to update them or upgrade them a little bit. Maybe a software update was what we were trying to do, to get the music to be a little more peppy and speed things up a little bit and reduce the boredom factor, which was a good thing. I think as time went on, we decided that there was a lot about our forms that was problematic, and I think we went into a phase then of trying to borrow somebody else's model. Like an awful lot of churches, we looked at Willow Creek, and Nancy's here, as a model that had a lot of good things that we wanted to learn from. Our problem was that we were kind of like the guy who wanted to date three girls and couldn't decide which one to go steady with because we liked Willow Creek, we liked kind of the Vineyard charismatic model, and I have always been a lover of liturgy and so I was at heart a closet Episcopalian or maybe Catholic, so I would always try to sneak this stuff in and nobody liked it, but I was persistent.
And then I think we reached a point where we moved from imitation to integration, where we were trying to integrate a lot of these things, and instead of it being missionally justified, needing to feel that everything had to be chapter and verse justified, again, not losing a desire to be biblical, but losing a sense that the Bible mandated one form of liturgy, I think we then went to wanting to be evangelistically justified in everything we did and evangelism became the only justification we looked at.
And then I think we moved beyond that to want to be missionally justified, so we were saying what we do when we gather for public worship really has to fit in with our mission, and that mission includes evangelism, but it also includes spiritual formation and the formation of real disciples are people who are centered on God, confess their sins, etc., etc. But I would say in the couple of years, we have moved to a place of increasing dissatisfaction, even with the progress that we've made. I think we're grateful for our progress, but there are a couple of areas where we are profoundly dissatisfied, and I'll tell you one of them. We might come back to this later. There are all kinds of theological assumptions under our liturgical forms, and one of those theological assumptions is that salvation is primarily an individual affair about my own soul, my own sin, and my own eternal destiny. But when you're understanding of the Gospel, it begins to change so that you believe the Gospel has something to say about history, creation, and culture and all the rest, all other concerns come to the floor. One of them being, a concern for justice, which you find so widespread in the prophets and the Psalms, and we have found it almost impossible to find music, songs, contemporary or traditional, that talk about justice. So how do we sing about a God who cares about justice? And we find that those concerns just become troubling and make us dissatisfied with what we're doing.
Just as an example, you know, when we sing songs about being protected and secure and safe and God protecting us, that feels like a very different thing in the United States in 2006 to sing that than it would be if we were a poor congregation in Baghdad for example or in Dominican Republic. It's just a very different thing to sing about being safe and protected, and when we start being aware of those, I don't know if “political” is the right word but it's the word I'll use, political dimensions of everything that we sing, I think that we all have the feeling that we're unreflective about that and that we don't have good resources to help us move beyond. So that would be a little snapshot of our little…it's like a trailer on a movie of what we've been experiencing.
Eugene Peterson: Brian reminded me that we met a long time ago, I don't know, fifty years ago. We were both living in Maryland, and we had lunch with another friend down in the inner harbor of Baltimore and his memory is that we talked about writing and all I had to offer was how many rejection slips I had, and he thought that was encouraging.
Let me come at this from a little different perspective. I've always been very local. I don't have a big picture, but just how I entered into being interested in worship and thinking it was important. I grew up Pentecostal and that's a significant part of my life. It continues to be a significant part of my life. I grew up in the early, my mother had been a song leader for an evangelist when she was eighteen years old who was one of the prominent evangelists of the early Pentecostal movement. By the time I was born in 1932, she still carried those memories of all of that and still participated in it. She was a great preacher, singer, and so I grew up in a Pentecostal movement that is very unlike what anybody looks at today. We were all poor. Churches were shabby. The preachers were unschooled, I don't say uneducated, but unschooled, and brilliant storytellers. I think what was embedded in me through those early years was that everything in the Gospel was livable. There was nothing that was unlivable. You lived it. And so this great emphasis on experience but it was in that context, it was authentic experience, it was the way you lived your life.
My dad was a butcher in a little shop on Main Street in our little town in Montana. And my mother used to make me an apron, a butcher's apron, every year as I grew. I had my first one when I was five years old. Every year I got a new one. And I started thinking of that, I don't think anybody told me this, but this looked like Samuel's priestly robe. And I thought from quite an early age of my father as a priest. You know, we were sacrificing animals all the time in there. But he knew the names of everybody that came into that shop. He always greeted every customer by name. He knew about them, he dealt with them. He acted like a priest, he lived like a priest. He had an enormous influence on my life. Later on, as I looked back and realized who I had become, but that Pentecostal immersion in livability in the aliveness; we weren't so big on doctrine, we weren't so big on the social stuff. We were the underdogs in the social world, not a fight for us, we just submitted. But that livability, it's always livable, and that's in my DNA, I guess, and it's never left.
When I left home, I entered into what seemed like a larger world. I never thought that anybody but Pentecostals were Christians, and here I started finding Presbyterians and Methodists and even a couple of Catholics who were Christians (sorry, Joyce), and then I ended up without any design of my own, I was in seminary in New York City, I just wandered, it seemed like, into the Presbyterian Church. I later learned that there's a name for that – they have a name for it – they call it “predestination.” But at that point, I wasn't interested in being a pastor. I was going to be an academic, so I joined the Presbyterian Church, it seemed as good as anything else. I knew the Presbyterians didn't believe in the Bible and didn't believe in the blood atonement and were a little shaky on the Second Coming, but it didn't make that much difference because I was going to be a teacher. I was going to teach people Hebrew; a great evangelistic vocation.
But I did end up as a pastor and became Brian's neighbor in Maryland and started a new church. I realized as I was doing this that I knew nothing about being a pastor, but by that time I had been convinced that worship was the most important thing you do. So I was gathering fifty to sixty people in our basement in a Maryland suburb and I was going to form that congregation around the act of worship. And I had competition in the neighborhood, and my competitors had all kinds of schemes by which you get people into church and somehow that just didn't seem honest to me. I was just going to do it. They were going to come to worship God, not to get anything else. And as you can imagine, it was slow going. But we did. We had patience and we did gather one by one. I loved Pete Seeger's singing of “inch by inch, row by row, gonna make this garden grow”, and I felt that's what I was doing. That was kind of the new liturgical music for me at that point in my life.
So in order to teach my congregation how to worship, I had to learn it myself because my Pentecostal experience wasn't really formative in terms of worship, and my Presbyterian experience was, if the Pentecostals were just after a buzz, the Presbyterians were kind of specializing in snoring at that point. And neither one really attracted me very much. So I read a lot, I talked to some friends, and I fell in among the Catholics. St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore was looking for somebody to teach Bible and they couldn't find anybody, so one of their priests told them about me and so I was invited to become an adjunct professor and taught the priests Bible, but they taught me worship. I began to learn and was immersed in this long tradition of the church's life in worship. I became good friends with a Carmelite nun, and again I became aware of the whole contemplative tradition of that church. And so all of these things became formative for me as I was doing this.
But I never had a big picture. I really didn't. I was a pastor, I was trying to teach a congregation of eighty, ninety, a hundred people, a hundred fifty people how to worship. I had, as it turned out, I had the best congregation to do that with, because they didn't know anything. They were misfits in all the churches around and they quarreled with the pastor so they came to me because they thought I would be somebody who would understand all their gifts. And then they would bring people, their neighbors, who had never been to church or knew very little about it. I had a few Presbyterians from another church who were bored with that church, and now they were boring to people in my church.
All I mean to say is that I didn't have what you would call a really teachable congregation, which might have been the best thing in the world because I had to just immerse myself and with most people, listen to them, listen to their stories. Even though I didn't know much about worship, I knew that it had to be local and I knew it had to involve the participation of those people, their lives, the way they lived, their stories, their experiences, and so that's how I started writing books and getting all of them rejected for a long time, but I was learning a lot. I was learning how central this act of worship and formative it was. We were able to build a church. It was a wonderful thing.
I learned everything about architecture that I could, and we built a magnificent place of worship that was expressive of what it meant to be a Reformed Christian in suburban America. In Baltimore, they have a huge, huge cathedral that they built just before we built Christ Our King, the cathedral was St. Mary the Queen. It was huge and a magnificent place. We had a Lutheran church which was very, very innovative, about ten miles away. And the seminarians from St. Mary's Seminary used to come out to look at our new church and let me lecture to them about church architecture. It seems foolhardy at the time now.
St. Mary's was a fortress. It was just a huge fortress, a magnificent fortress but it made a statement in the middle of Baltimore. The Lutheran church was a cave. It was a cozy place, but kind of a place to hide. It was a Missouri Synod Lutheran Church, so they were used to hiding. They kept things close, and you retreated into a place like that. We built a tent. It was round like our chapel this morning, it was round, a lot of light, a soaring thing. It was inexpensive. It was the kind of thing it looks like you could take it down and move it to the next town if you had to. But I was trying to teach people how to live in a culture which was fast-changing. We were doing something that was earth-mapping or earth-orienting, that's not the word I want, maybe heaven-orienting, but making a culture, shaping a culture which was able to survive in a hostile world which no longer had a solid tradition behind it because none of these people knew anything, Presbyterian or whatever else they were. They were footloose. They were typical suburbanites.
Well, I think maybe I've said enough. That's a start. You know who I am, how I got here, and now I'm worshipping in a Lutheran church, so where's the tradition for me?
Larry Sibley: Isn't this fascinating? All these stories. I'm Larry Sibley from Philadelphia from Westminster Seminary. I was a pastor for a few years and InterVarsity worker. I tried my hand at Logos bookstores and magazine publishing, and finally I landed at Westminster about twenty-five years ago.
In order to talk about the congregation where I worship, I have to move back a ways in history. There were two pastors in the city of Strassburg in 1538 – that's before any of us in this room were born – involved in the renewal of worship in the sixteenth century, in the reform of worship and the renewal of worship. What they did independently of each other, I think, as far as I can tell, but they identified four elements, four basic themes, four central necessary elements in the liturgy. The Word, and prayer, and the meal, and alms.
One of them was Martin Bucer, and he pastored a large German congregation. The other was John Calvin with a congregation of French Huguenot refugees. This is what Calvin said about it in his Institutes, in speaking about Acts 2:42. “Luke relates in the Acts that this was the practice of the apostolic church, when he says that believers 'continued in the apostles' teaching and fellowship in the breaking of bread and in prayers,' ”. And then Calvin goes on, “Thus it became the unvarying rule that no meeting of the church should take place without the Word, prayers, partaking of the Lord's Supper, and alms-giving.” What Calvin did with this was to develop a paradigm for the Sunday service. There were to be those four elements present, the reading and the preaching of the Word in the language of the people, the prayers in the language of the people, the Lord's Supper, and the sharing of goods, principally through alms-giving in the service.
Bucer and Calvin fleshed this out in a liturgy that they shared, one in German and the other in French. When John Calvin moved to Geneva in 1541, he took that liturgy with him and adapted it to the local culture in Geneva. It became the Geneva liturgy, which ought to be the heritage of the Presbyterian and Reformed world. In order to further his agenda in that same period in the late 30s and early 40s, John Calvin published four books in French. Normally, you would write in Latin in his day so that everyone in Europe could read whatever you wrote but he targeted his writing on the French people and particularly the unschooled French people. A Short Treatise On the Holy Supper of the Lord, A Form of Prayers, which is that liturgy, a catechism, and then he translated the Institutes that he had been working on in a series of editions, but translated one of them into French.
The interesting thing is that they printed a lot more of these than they could ever sell in Strassburg and Geneva. They went west, smuggled into France and were promptly banned in Paris. One intriguing way in doing this smuggling – they have a sampling of it over here in the meter center – is an Italian version of this catechism that is bound in the back of an Italian novel so that the censors when it went across the border would flip through the pages and say, “Oh, this is a novel” and in would go the catechism along with it. Well, in spite of that good start, Presbyterians have lacked a liturgical center since the middle of the 17th century. In a hundred short years, the Bucer-Calvin tradition was set aside and a directory approach was used, the Westminster Directory for Public Worship. And Presbyterians now have in their book of documents the descendent of that, the current version of the Book of Public Worship or Directory of Public Worship, and you'll find this in all the Presbyterian denominations in one form or another, but they're all the great-grandchildren of the Westminster Assembly.
In the United States, to fast forward just a little, the Presbyterian practice in this country was influenced very heavily by frontier revival worship and so it led to an order where everything leads up to the sermon. The Lord's Supper is infrequently observed in most Presbyterian churches, quarterly is the often pattern. A few bold souls have moved to monthly, and I'll tell you about some others later today.
So in many situations today, Presbyterian churches, particularly the conservative ones that I know the best, are almost indistinguishable liturgically from the Evangelical Free Church down the street and the Free Church tradition or the Evangelical, the Baptists, what have you, except perhaps for their Calvinistic theology, if they make a point of it, and probably a little more stuffy than those other Evangelicals.
One way to put it is that Presbyterians seem to be recovering frontier revivalists, struggling to get over that but not knowing where to go. So in the last thirty years, one of the trends has been to deepen the frontier tradition through front door evangelism and combining the Sunday meeting with an evangelistic agenda in varying degrees, just following the road that Charles Finney laid out during the time of the revivals of the 1840s.
There is a countermovement, and I'll talk more about that later today, but the congregation where I worship, I'm a seminary professor so I don't pastor a congregation any longer but I worship regularly at this one, where we use an adaptive version of the Geneva liturgy. So we've reached back to Bucer and Calvin and we've adapted it to twentieth and now twenty-first century, but it's recognizably a child of that tradition. We have the Lord's Supper once a month. Most recently, the pastors have been following a program in their Communion sermons of exploring all of the facets of the Lord's Supper that they can find, so they have broadened the focus from the usual penitential meditations on the great sufferings of Jesus to seeing the nourishment that is in the Meal or the community among the eaters that's in the Meal, and how the sharing that proceeds from the Meal to the poor is part of the meaning of it. So we're in the midst of this movement either to deepen the frontier tradition or to find ourselves back in the Geneva liturgical tradition.
Albert Aymer: Thank you very much. By now you may well be exhausted, but let me crave indulgence to share my brief thoughts with you.
First of all, let me say that how I see worship has a lot to do with my formative years, and I'm sure the same is true with many of you. I grew up in a home in which my father was an Anglican and my mother was a very devout Methodist. Sometimes I jokingly say that my mother must have walked with John and Charles Wesley because in a hymnal with all the nine hundred hymns, she probably knew more than half. And in my growing up days, we attended church three times on a Sunday. There was Sunday morning worship, there was Sunday afternoon Sunday School from three o'clock to four o'clock, and then there was Sunday evening worship at 7:15, and we didn't have a choice. Often times when people ask me for my resume and I send them stuff, they look and see the schools I attended and the degrees I earned and think that's who I am. That's really not who I am. In a significant way, my understanding of the most important thing we do as Christians is to worship. And by the way, I learned that in my growing up days. The most important thing we can do as followers of Christ is to worship.
My understanding of worship, my assessment of worship, every Sunday I go to church, has a lot to do with my formative years. Now let me tell you about those formative years quickly, and then I'll tell you to answer John's particular questions, I'll give you some five things that I have observed. I do not pastor a church now. I am president of the Hood Theological Seminary, one of the fastest growing in this country, and it's not a seminary of my own denomination. A funny thing happened to me when I came over here a second time to do further studies. Coming over here as a British Methodist and doing some work in the United Methodist Church, the United Methodist Church wanted me to do some work for them and asked if I would work for them and I promptly said, not unless you ask my church permission. But I also said, let me first ask my church permission. So I wrote to my conference and wrote for permission to serve the United Methodist Church, and the permission I sought was to be seconded to the United Methodist Church. I'm sure all of you know that word. Well, they seconded me to the United Methodist Church, and when the New Jersey Conference received the letter, they immediately interpreted it to mean that I was transferred, because the word secondment is not in common usage, at least in the United Methodist Church. So as a consequence, I became a United Methodist, and then had the awkward situation to write to my conference and say to them, “Look, I'm transferred into the United Methodist Church, and according to our discipline, it's not appropriate for me to be in more than one conference at the same time.” And to add insult to injury some eleven years ago, I took up an invitation to head up a seminary, which is the only seminary in this country of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in North Carolina. But I'm quite at home. I'm at home because it is the church.
Let me tell you how my upbringing impacts my understanding of worship and liturgy. Some of you may know that Wesley was a very devout Anglican and died an Anglican. One of the things that John Wesley did when Methodism came across the pond over here was to abridge the Anglican liturgy, dear old Cranmer's book of worship. And he sent that abridged liturgy over the colonies for use in the Methodist societies. Where I grew up, we used Cranmer's liturgy every Sunday. We chanted the Psalm for the day. Nobody read the Psalm, and each Psalm had a different chant. I don't mean sing a song, I mean chant the Psalms as you read them in the Bible. In addition to chanting the Psalms, we chanted some of the ancient canticles, the Divinitae, the Te Deum, the Jubilatae Deo, which is a Psalm, the Benedictus, depending on the season of the church's year. We were following the seasons of the church's year from my infancy, so this idea of lectionary is nothing new to me. As a matter of fact, I've been trying to insist and encourage the students in my seminary to observe there is such as a thing as a lectionary with lectionary lessons too.
My understanding of worship is significantly fawned by Cranmer's liturgy, and so when I go to worship even at my ripe old age, my formative years tend to come into play as I assess what I am experiencing and what I am hearing coming out of a culture where people dance a lot. We are the creators of calypso music and reggae music, but I find it very difficult to deal with calypso rhythms and reggae rhythms in church, because that's not my orientation to worship. There is something about the holiness and otherness of God that prevents me from wiggling my body in church. I mean, young people can do that and that's fine. I'm just telling you where I come from. I hope you have some patience with me. If you're going to chant a Psalm, I'm with you. If you're going to sing the Te Deum Laudamus, I can sing that with my eyes closed. If you're going to sing any hymns, I can sing, I know the words of so many hymns, sometimes I'm quoting a hymn and people look at me and say, “Where did you learn that?” And so I come from that kind of tradition and background, my father being Anglican, my mother being Methodist, growing up in Cranmer, what I didn't get from my father, got from my mother and I really got a lot from my mother. And then, being a Methodist minister in a British context until I came to this country and served the United Methodist Church in the Mission Board, at the God Box in New York, served Drew University for twelve years as associate dean of the theological school, and for now twelve years as dean-president of Hood Theological Seminary.
I go to church every Sunday, but not always any one church. Well, I go to a United Methodist Church more often than not, but I'm known in Salisbury as the first Methodist-Presbyterian you have, because the pastor of the main Presbyterian church in Salisbury did his doctorate with me when I was at Drew, and he's now retired and I told him he can't retire and I'm still working, and I was his dean, so he now works for me. But when I go to church every Sunday, there are times when I come back and I wonder, why did I go? I come back often times perplexed and disturbed and distressed, but more times than not, I come back rather hopeful. And so let me tell you some of the hopeful signs that I have observed. Maybe this afternoon I'll tell you some of the concerns that I have.
One of the hopeful signs for me as one who worships regularly every Sunday with my background is that I'm encouraged by the revising of liturgy in such a manner that makes liturgy intelligible and meaningful to worshipers, yet preserving our historical heritages. You could really imagine why I'm keen about the preservation of our historical heritages. I'm one of those who often times hasten to say to our students in seminary and to some pastors, you all conduct worship as if worship was something that started last week. You forget that we are part of the vast host of saints of those who have gone before and that even now that as we worship God, we worship God in the presence of that vast company of unseen believers who surround us and are clapping their hands as we sing the praises of God. I have a great sense of the communion and fellowship between the church celestial and the church terrestrial. And there's nowhere in my Christian expression where that sense strikes me more forcibly than in Christian worship. Look at some of Cranmer's liturgy, especially the liturgy of the sacraments where you begin to celebrate and dig into, to celebrate God with a host of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, and every time I hear that part of the liturgy, I can sense my grandmother and my mother and all the saints of God who have preceded me but who are still here surrounding me in an unbroken fellowship. Because the fellowship of the church transcends even death and the older I've become, the more I'm conscious of that reality. We're not just there in time as if we are a brand new creation. There is a sense of continuity between the church now and the church in the past, and hopefully between the church now and the church that is yet to come. Sometimes I wonder what sort of church we're passing on to those coming after us, but I won't go on to that right now. I may talk about that this afternoon.
A second hopeful sign I see is the introduction of several new and meaningful songs. I'm not talking about the seven-elevens. The seven-word song, sung eleven times, gets me all the time. And sometimes when I'm tired of it, I turn to folk and say, “You think God is that illiterate that God didn't get it the first round?” I'm talking about those new songs that are really well thought out and are grounded solidly in the tenets of our faith. They're stuff we believe, and for me, our worship should reflect those things. We should not somehow leave the depth of our faith behind when we come to worship. Our unity, our songs, we should be singing our theology and singing Scripture, because that's how we learn. And that's the legacy, I think, we will pass on.
A third hopeful sign for me is the more meaningful involvement of the laity and the conduct of worship. There was a time in my growing up days when the entire worship service was conducted by the ordained pastor, the minister, the reverend. What I don't like is when I go to church where laity are asked to do stuff for which they're not prepared. Sometimes to read Scripture they have not rehearsed, and they don't have a clue as to what the writer is saying, and they read the Scripture because it becomes a formality. Or where they're asked to say a prayer and you hear the same old clichés. In some of our free church tradition where we feel we should never read prayers, we should not have written prayers, we should speak the prayers from our heart, we get lots of all these typical clichés and a lot of things you get in the black church on Sunday morning when somebody gets up to pray, you get, “Lord, we thank you for waking us up this morning!” You go to any black church and somebody's praying and it's all, “Thank you for waking us up this morning and setting us on our way! And Lord, we thank you for just coming by here!” And what's different between that and reading liturgy? How do you help people to understand that? Meaningful participation of the liturgy requires, it seems to me, training. Lots of training. Training to the extent where sometimes I think we need to bring the liturgy in the church when the church is empty, have them read and sit down and help them how you project your voice, where you place the emphasis. There is nothing more irritating to me than people reading a passage of Scripture and they're placing the emphasis on prepositions and conjunctions. It just irritates me. But having the laity participate meaningfully in worship is one of those things that I celebrate.
John, this morning, it is kind of good to see, I didn't know if those young people were lay or clergy or students of the seminary, but they were well-prepared and it was refreshing. I was worshiping, but I was also observing. That's the nature of my life over these many years. I observe a lot. The folk in my shop, by the way, they say, “You see him there? He doesn't notice everything, but there are few things that escape his notice.” And when you're president of an institution, life gets that way. You have to see everything. And just worshiping this morning for me was a delight to see…you need to tell those young people that some old fogey said that he was delighted at seeing how they conducted worship. Oh, I know it before folk tell me so I say it of myself, I'm an old fogey.
A fourth thing that I have observed, and this becomes very important because this is how I grew up. We are recapturing in the United Methodist Church where I worship, a big church, big, predominantly white church, we are now recapturing again the awesomeness of the conduct of the sacraments. It's no longer perfunctory and ordinary and casual. There is something about mystery in the sacraments. I know we want to make everything so absolutely intelligible and clear and plain that we forget in the worship of God in the sacrament there is a whole lot of mystery. You try to explain to someone what is different between sipping a little bit of wine that the priest allows the wine to touch your lips, and eat a dry piece of wafer or piece of bread in church over against sitting at home in the evening with a nice glass of wine and some crackers and cheese, what makes the one sacrament and not the other? There's something of mystery and no one has been able to explain it to me. It is something I do by faith. I grew up on an island surrounded by sea, so we swam a lot. We played lots of games in the sea. As boys, one of the things we used to like to do in the sea was to dunk one another and sit on the person's head to see how long it would take to drown the person. Not totally quite that way, but we sit on the person's head in the sea. What makes that not baptism? Because when we sprinkle some water on an infant in the fountain at the church, or we take them to a fountain at the church and we duck them under, what's the difference? There is something of mystery, and it's not ordinary. There's something awesome about these rites, and we are capturing that again. For me, that is so special. I still go forward for communion with my hand outstretched to receive the elements. I still like to kneel to receive the elements. It's a posture for me of recognizing that the One who says to me, “This is my body”, by the way, that's something I fuss a lot with my students and other professors, I don't want to have chapel re-do, by the way, we have chapel every day in our seminary. It wasn't so until I got there. Every day, we break for chapel, and every month we celebrate the communion. I don't like to hear somebody say to me, “Take and eat. This represents the body of Jesus.” That's not what Jesus said. “Take and drink this. This represents the blood of Jesus.” We're trying to explain what is mystery. Every time I read the Gospel, “Take and eat this. This is My body. Drink this. This is My blood.” And this element of awesomeness and mystery to this great celebration is something we need to recapture, and we are recapturing and I celebrate that.
And finally, not finally, lastly. I usually have a last and a final. You pastors know what I'm talking about. Some of you have many lasts. There are signs of hope, real signs of positive hope in attempts, I find, to bridge in worship the contemporary with the traditional. Don't throw out the baby with the bath water. To bridge the ancient cultures out of which our tradition and liturgies have come with the modern culture in which we today worship God. You don't have to negate the one in order to observe the other. This attempt, this morning was good for me. John, it was really good for me to be in chapel this morning. Is it “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven”? It is good to hear that ancient hymn of the church, but it is good to hear the opening song too. It was good to hear the last song, “O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come.” You don't have a turning of the year, we change from one year to the other and don't sing that somewhere along the line. That's written so long, but it's so relevant and so meaningful, even to today. And I was glad to see that and the way in which I was looking at all that's taking place, John, and thinking what I can take back to my shop and how can I help these three hundred or so students in preparation for ministry? How can I help them to bridge these things that are considered unbridgeable?
Well, that's my last. I'm not going to tell you my final. That's it.
Nancy Beach: Thank you, Albert. We're moving from a beautiful accent to a terrible Chicago accent. I love his voice. I am clearly the least educated person up here. I'm surprised I didn't have one of those nightmares last night, you know, when you didn't study for the test. I was thinking about that show on “Sesame Street” when they say, which of these things doesn't fit in this picture? But I came mostly to learn from the others who are up here. I'm very struck by our stories, because as others have commented, it's amazing to me, we come from so many different backgrounds and experiences and yet we are brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. That always moves me, because we focus far too often, I think, on our differences and we have so much, so much to learn from each other. It's really good to be among you.
This thirty-year thing intrigued me because the Willow Creek congregation just celebrated its thirtieth anniversary this past fall and I was part of the church from the very beginning. I like to tell people I was two years old when it started, but I really wasn't, but it did grow out of youth group at my parents' church, not too far away from Willow Creek. So I've seen this whole adventure from its roots. My role in the church has been for over twenty years to lead what we call the Arts Ministry, which includes the music and the dance and drama, and any use of the arts. I also serve there as one of the teaching pastors. I teach about once a month at the church.
But I was reflecting back on the thirty years, and one of the things you have to understand to understand where Willow is with worship and what our journey has been is to understand how it was birthed or what our intention was. Like many churches, we didn't know we were going to be part of a movement. We had no thought of that at all. It was a reaction. It was very much a reaction to what many of us had experienced growing up. It grew out of a very genuine concern about our friends who were far from God. I mean that with all sincerity. We became captivated by a love for Jesus Christ, and we were all in our high school years or early twenties and we looked at our friends, and we couldn't imagine bringing them to the kinds of churches we had grown up in, to be very honest. So, we were trying to create an experience, most of you have heard this terminology for what we called “seekers.” And we were just saying, what could we do on a Sunday morning that would have the potential to be anointed by God and be life-changing for our friends. But at the same time, we recognized that we needed to have a very meaningful experience for believers. So you need to understand that Willow has a two-pronged strategy that very few churches, I understand, do in this country. We're certainly not prescribing it for anybody else. But from the very beginning, we said, we're going to have another experience. Because our friends, if they ever will come to church, would probably choose to come on Sunday morning, we're going to have this second experience, because believers historically have been willing to meet in houses and a variety of places at various times of the week, we're going to sort of sacrifice in a sense that Sunday morning, and it won't be a complete worship experience. We're going to do that on Wednesday night. So from the start, we've had two experiences. And Wednesday night is when we celebrate the Lord's Supper. Wednesday night is when we dive into God's Word with much greater depth. Wednesday night is when we speak to the congregation as if this is our family. We assume that the people who come on Wednesday night are believers.
That is not to say that our Sunday morning experience does nothing for a Christian. By God's grace, I came to know the Lord as my Savior when I was only seven. Rarely do I go to a Sunday morning experience and not walk out with having something touch me, being challenged in some way. It is not a non-worship experience, so I don't want to paint that picture either. But it is designed from beginning to end with people in mind who are not already part of the faith. So we think about our friends as we are designing it, and we try to avoid the kinds of clichés or assumptions about their experience, and we try to design something. We all have these kinds of friends, that's really important. This isn't an imaginary friend. This is a neighbor, a coworker, we all sit in meetings when we plan our services and we say, well, I don't know if that will work because I would love it but the friend that I'm bringing, let's think that through. So we think it through from their perspective.
But here's what happened. We were a bunch of young know-it-alls. I would guess that many of you who might have known us back then might detect that and we thought we had a corner on evangelism, etc. We were very humbled by many things. About seven or eight years into this, even though we had this two-pronged experience, Sunday morning and Wednesday night, we were putting so much of our energy and resources into the Sunday morning seeker experience, which if any of you do this you know it's just very costly in terms of time and energy and all of that, and Wednesday would roll around, and we just had what I would call now, sort of thrown together song times that we called worship, but really weren't. And we sort of measured if Wednesday went okay by how good the teaching was. If it was a good message from the Bible, okay, we had a good night. We had to humble ourselves starting with our senior pastor, Bill Hybels, in the early 80s. We said, you know what? We don't know very much about worship. We really don't. God has blessed us. We're baptizing hundreds of people, there are new converts to the faith, this Sunday morning thing is really working, but when it comes to worship, we have a lot to learn. So, we went to school on it. By that I mean we asked for help. We went to other churches where we said, now that church seems to really have learned something about worship, or that church is very engaged and we have a lot to learn. We began to teach about it. We found out we didn't even have a Scriptural understanding, really, of what corporate worship as well as personal worship is supposed to be about. So we began that journey and we're still on that journey. We haven't learned everything there is to learn.
But here's what I've seen the biggest changes since we've started. I'm just talking about our congregation. I am not pretending to be an expert on the wider church world, although there are almost twelve thousand churches now in the Willow Creek Association, which is not a denomination, just a loose collection of churches. Those are the churches that I would be the most familiar with through our conferences, etc. But at Willow Creek in suburban Chicago, first of all, I celebrate the fact that there is a far greater level of engagement of our congregation. I can't speak for everyone, but if you're in the room and you looked at our worship together compared to twenty years ago, I am so thrilled with this progress that God has helped us lead. I would say that there's a greater awareness from our congregation that God is our audience and that our worship leaders are not the point, and they are facilitating something, they are bringing us into the presence of God, but they are not the performers of worship. There is a greater sense for most people that I am here to offer something to God. I'm not a consumer. I'm not here to critique, to walk out of here and say, what do you give that one, an eight or a nine tonight, or a two or a three, or whatever. I see progress in all of that.
I also think that we have a much broader view these days of what corporate worship includes. I think we were too narrowly focused only on music. That's certainly a primary tool that I'm sure all of us use, but these days we realized that worship experience includes our prayer time, our silence. I love the moment of silence in chapel this morning. Our offerings, and various art forms beyond music including video and dance and visual art and drama, etc.
Another thing I celebrate is a greater integration at times of the teaching and the worship experience. I would say in our early years, it was very much a part one and a part two. Unlike the church of my youth, which was an evangelical non-denominational, my whole experience has been non-denominational so I didn't even know the word “liturgy” until I got to graduate school, so I am from a much different background. Even so, the church where I grew up, there was no connection in the first part of the service to what our pastor was going to teach about. You would think that he had never discussed anything about what he was going to teach, and that's okay, but there was absolutely no connection. In the early years of Willow, I would say that we felt there needed to be a connection, but it was still very much a part one and a part two. The arts part of the service prepared people, identified the issues, hopefully brought us into the presence, a taste of the transcendence of God, and got us prepared, and then we had the teaching. These days, there's a much greater integration of the teaching and the arts. They're woven together in many services, the message itself, meaning the spoken word because the whole thing is a message, but the teaching part is often in segments and there will be art forms that illustrate. This, I think, responds to the level of attention of people. There's much more application and response following teaching, so I celebrate that.
Just a couple more quick things. Many have mentioned physical expression. Our pastor comes from a Christian Reformed background right here in Michigan. Many of us came from a Protestant background, non-denominational, but where there was literally no physical expression. I mean, any hand gesture was an out-of-body experience that freaked people out. And these days, I would say that there is individual expression, which I celebrate according to how people are made and how they're wired, but there is room for that. There are also times when people choose to kneel, or maybe nobody from the front said, let's stand, but somebody decides, I can't sing this song sitting, I need to stand. You just see a variety there. I think we have a way to go still, but I celebrate the freedom that I see.
Years ago, our pastor was the primary what you would call the worship leader, partly because we were so behind in this whole arena that we thought he needed to model this but he's not a musician and that's okay, but it got a little awkward sometimes, just musically speaking. Now that role is more often a person with a combination of musical and pastoral gifts, is more common for us. In the past, if you've ever attended a Willow conference, especially if you did that only a decade ago or fifteen years ago, you know, we would describe the Sunday experience and the Wednesday experience as incredibly distinct, and now we would say in our experience in suburban Chicago and I can't speak for anywhere else, but we really believe the seekers in our area have changed. We are no less passionate about reaching them, but we believe we need to be students of the culture and students of what is going on. There would be more of a blurring of the experience. We offer on the weekends a greater taste of worship. There are moments of guided prayer and moments where a true seeker may not yet be ready to fully understand, but we believe we are inviting them into an experience. It's much more interactive and less spectator oriented on Sunday morning. So there's a little bit of a blurring. It's still designed though, very, very much, with that guest in mind. I think that's the main changes that I see. I don't want to speak for all churches, but I am encouraged. I have lots of reasons to be hopeful because I see far more houses of worship where people are not just going through the motions and where I can tell. I'm talking about a wide variety of kinds of churches. I just finished a sabbatical, and one of the best parts of my sabbatical was visiting many, many different churches, many of them in my own town. I went several times to the local Episcopal church, and I went to the Lutheran church, and I went to some charismatic churches. Churches I've heard about and maybe even met some of their leaders but because of my role on Sundays, never really had the freedom. I was thrilled because these were all very different, many different styles of worship and all the rest, but I would say that overall, I'm very encouraged because I see people showing up again and again with less of this consumer mentality and more of a desire to come and make that hour on Sunday count, and walk out of there somehow different from when they walked in. So I have a lot of reasons for hope.