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: Cultural Insights: Audio / Transcript
Speakers:
John Witvliet (at 0:00)
Nancy Beach (at 3:15)
Albert Aymer (at 14:48)
Larry Sibley (at 25:42)
Eugene Peterson (at 39:38)
Brian McLaren (at 44:20)
Joyce Zimmerman (at 52:15)
John Witvliet: If you will please turn in your handout to pages 7 through 9. One of the most helpful documents we've found in our work with congregations in really different parts of the world, is this short statement by the Lutheran World Federation. It's a statement on worship and culture, and it was developed by Lutheran Christians from Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Europe, North America, reflecting on how worship, the posture should reflect towards culture. And in this document, they make back four basic claims. It corresponds with the section headings beginning with the second one there towards the bottom of page 7.
The claims are simply this: All Christian worship should have some key elements that are trans-cultural, that are practiced in every time and every place. Next page. All Christian worship should be responsive to its local culture environment. It should be contextual. Third claim: All Christian worship practices should also reflect a countercultural approach to aspects of a given cultural habitat that simply don't square with the Gospel. There should be a prophetic edge too. And finally, healthy Christian worship embodies a kind of cross-cultural sharing that reminds us all that the church is much bigger than any one congregation in any one time and place.
For the end, they make the claim that those four virtues are best reflected not in different congregations, each congregation sort of choosing which one it wants to live by, but rather in all congregations, in each congregation as we all practice the "in but not of the world" dance with culture that the New Testament invites us to join.
That document, in some ways, informs the next question. It's the question on page 2. How has our North American cultural context provided a habitat for all of these changes that we've been describing? And how has worship changed in our experience and ways that have embraced the dynamics of culture? And how has worship changed in ways that have resisted? That's a pretty open-ended question, but my hunch is that as with this morning while we'll hear very different perspectives, you might also hear some surprising common themes. I was thinking this morning that there is some historian, you know, in the year 2050 who will be writing a book on the history of Christian worship from 1970 to 2006, who's going to pay a lot of money for the tape of today's session, because they're going to be able to do almost their whole book on the basis of the insight and wisdom of all the experience represented here.
We're going to start for this on the other end of the panel and ask Nancy to start some reflections on the cultural habitat on worship in North America.
Nancy Beach: I'm going to jump right into how I think, at least in our community, worship has changed to embrace the changing dynamics of culture. I believe that, first of all, there is a reaction to so many religious leaders from various pockets and denominations disappointing people in the culture. There is an increased cynicism about the authenticity of any of us. I believe that many people walk into any one of our churches with a degree of having their arms crossed and looking up and saying, are those people for real, do they really believe what they're saying, and do they live it out Monday through Saturday?
And so as a result, I think in many churches, I celebrate the fact that there is a greater deal of accountability going on among church leaders. I also think that there is greater openness with the congregation. There is less of an erection of a barrier of “we're different from you” kind of thing. There is more of a sense of "we all by God's grace can be forgiven" and there is a confessional piece to it. I really do believe that we've had to face this in our community near Chicago there is just increased cynicism about the authenticity. So we look at that and really sharpen one another with that reality.
I also see that we're embracing the fact that in the culture there is an increase in and sense of communication from so many different art forms and all of our senses. The church where I grew up was very much all about what you heard. The talking word and music, but there was really nothing visual about it. Now, that's not true for some of you in other traditions, but in my non-denominational church, there was very little in terms of symbol. There was no awareness, really, that the people learn in different ways. I think we're embracing the fact that we know people have different learning styles. I recently learned of a painter in Nashville who grew up in the church and then left the church, and he was sort of dragged back by his wife. He was very honest. He said, “I have ADD like a lot of artists. I can't learn the way most churches want to teach me.” His church was studying the book of John, the Gospel of John and the arts leader of this church challenged this painter and said, “Why don't you paint your way through the book of John?” So on his own he did thirty paintings. He does oil work, just beautiful paintings. One night at two o'clock in the morning painting one of the scenes of the book of John, he realized that he really did not know Jesus Christ. He realized that he had never ever truly committed his life and even understood the truth. And with tears in his eyes he was telling us this story. The church at the end of their series on the book of John displayed all thirty paintings around the room. They weren't all literal. People who were looking for every little story or whatever weren't going to see them, but they were his expression of his experience of the book of John. I look at that guy and I say, how many of our churches would he find accessibility to the truth? Because he needs the truth every bit as much as a person who can respond better to the spoken word. I celebrate that.
I also believe that music styles are a constant reflection of our changing culture. I was just joking with one of our people attending here that I see God laughing at those of us who started Willow because we were a reaction, and now in the age I am now, I am in meetings with young twenty-somethings telling us that they don't like our music and our communication is irrelevant to them. I sit there and I try to be open and everything about the emerging culture and the post-modern influence. I've read a lot and I'm in dialogue with them and a lot of them are my friends, but the joke's on us. It's a cycle. I love looking back at history. Some of the hymns, even the ones like what we sang this morning were considered radical and just about thrown out of the church when they were written. I love reading those stories. What is precious and traditional and important to one generation, we have to be open of new forms, new ways of expression, but when I visit our twenty-something ministry called Axis, I celebrate the connection they're having with the people of their generation, but I also stand in the back and I have to say some things don't change. I see the common threads too. I really believe that we need to be open-handed. I agree so much with what Albert said, trying to find that blend of the rich heritage of our past, whether it's our recent past or hundreds of years ago with what is new and what is fresh and what will communicate most effectively to the next generation.
How has worship changed to resist [culture]? Well, I think one of the hugest changes in our church is, no big secret, is the unbelievable influx of technology and information. Some of you are tapping on your Blackberries even as we speak because you're bored or whatever. This is an enormous change, and we all recognize it. I think that the way we resist that is I look at the hour on Sunday and I say, that is one of the only times for some people in their entire week that they stop, and giving them the gift of silence, helping them reflect on their life and issues of the heart and spirit, is one of the most incredible gifts, modeling that for them. Hopefully, then they will carry some of that into their week. The truth is, a lot of them haven't yet done that and they don't have those kinds of disciplines in their life. Sunday morning may be one of the only times that they actually stop the noise and the bombardment that we all face. So I think that's one way we resist.
I think we fight the increased pace of our culture as well. I think we have to be so careful to stop over-programming our people. We're on a rampage right now to figure out what we can stop. What can we simplify? How can we get people back into their neighborhoods and time with their families, etc., and not living at church, and that's a big movement. I also think that at Willow in suburban Chicago, the demographics of our area within fifteen minutes of Willow when we started the church thirty years ago, it was about 98% Caucasian, I would say. I think that's the right figure. Thirty years later, we have at least 15-20%, closer to 20% minorities in our fifteen-minute radius. We're trying to learn what it means to be a multicultural church. That's a lot different than just making sure that up front you have a few people of color. That's not a multicultural church. We have a long way to go in learning what that means. We now have a weekly Spanish-speaking service. It's actually launching. It was once a month because we didn't have the resources yet. Now we have a leader for it and a team, and this Sunday they're launching, it's called “Casa de Luz” and it's every single Sunday, and so we're so excited about that. We're trying to intentionally add board members and staff members, people from various minorities. That is a big change, and the resistance is to resist the tendency in our culture to only be with people who are like us, obviously, and to embrace the opportunity for connection and community with one another.
I know everybody else has stuff to say, so let me limit my thoughts here. The other thing is this trend, maybe it's nothing new, I don't know: those of you who have been around longer might say this is nothing new. But this “it's all about me” kind of mentality in our culture, this self-absorbed, and actually in some ways increasingly isolated trend. I think church by its very nature, I celebrate this. That's what you and I are all about, fighting that, because coming together wherever you do that, however you do that, that coming together goes against the grain of our culture. Helping people connect to a community. We are, again, on this wave about the neighborhood. I couldn't agree more with what Brian had to say about issues of justice and the poor. Our church has never been more passionate about getting beyond the walls of Willow. That's what my husband leads. It's so much fun at our house because I'm all about the weekly services. He frankly could care less about that. He has always been about the under resourced, and leads our ministries in the Dominican Republic and Costa Rica, and currently the big move is to AIDS. In 2005, our church was unbelievably generous, and that's one of the things we're celebrating so very much, the amount of giving to the hurricane relief, and to the tsunami relief, and to AIDS was absolutely staggering from our congregation. Huge progress, but there's so much more to be done, and there's a lot to be done just locally. So we go against the tendency in our culture, again, to be “it's all about me and what I'm storing up in my house” and I'm going to become a true servant and a person who really cares about issues in this world and about justice.
We're partnering with other churches. One of the other things we're celebrating, and this has been a very natural thing, an intentional thing but it's grown quite naturally. We used to be pretty isolated as a church in our community, to be honest. We didn't know much about the other churches in the community, and that's changed. There's an intentional gathering of church leaders that Bill Hybels is a part of and has now become really close friends, I was with the two of them the other day – it's unmistakable, with the pastor of the largest African American church way on the south side, almost to Indiana, of Chicago. It's called House of Hope, and his name is James Meeks. James has been mentoring us in what does it mean to be a church that cares about issues of justice. He's a state senator in addition to being a pastor. He does that because he realizes there are some things only a church can do. There are other things that have to change in our government, in our structures, etc.
So I've talked enough. But we're very excited about going against some of these trends in our culture. I think, we say it all the time, the church is the hope of the world. I think the people in this room, we are the ones who can go against these kinds of tendencies and be a place of light and truth and hope.
Albert Aymer: Thank you, Nancy. I'm inclined simply to say, “Ditto” to all that Nancy has said and then pronounce the benediction.
Let me just speak one corrective. During the break, someone said to me, “You have an accent.” In case you don't note, I don't have an accent. You have an accent. And the other thing I want to say is, to my greatest delight as we took the break, one of the participants came up to me. I kept looking at him and feeling, I know this person. And he reminded me that we go back some years when he did his doctorate at Drew when I was the dean of the program, Dr. Davis. And I'm thrilled to see him here. He is also one of the sons of Wesley, so I'm not so lonely after all.
As Nancy said to you, first of all, let me just say this. When we talk about American culture, as one who has come to this country from outside, there is really no American culture, at least no one American culture. There is a diversity of American cultures. If you move among the various groups in this country as I have had to do and I have done, you quickly learn that there are differences in culture among these groups. And you quickly learn, too, that some things are quite acceptable among one group may not be acceptable in another group. You don't go to an AME Zion church and call the bishop by his first name. That is not acceptable. In the United Methodist Church, you seldom ever call the bishop by his first name. As a matter of fact, you seldom ever call the bishop by the names he has been given. You call him something else, depending on how you feel at the time. Some of you are a little bit slow. You may be hungry already.
We are a diverse culture in this country, and I think that's one of the things that makes America unique. And that's one of the things that we need always to be mindful of, and to accept and to affirm. This is one of the challenges in the United Methodist Church and many of your churches that attempt to be multiracial and multicultural. What happens when you bring people of different cultures into the same congregation? Those of you who pastor congregations where there are people of different cultures, people of different races may know what I'm talking about, and it is a challenge sometimes to meet the needs of all these different people because of the differences of our culture. Our Asian people, our African American folk, our Caucasian people, and there are others thrown in, people like me for instance. And so, the challenge in worship is, how do you make worship meaningful? And the church in which I attend, there are not too many people who are very different so it's easy enough to do that, but we're mindful of the fact that in Methodism across the board we try to be multicultural. How does our worship address the needs of all these different people? That's a challenge, and I don't know how you do it. Maybe you can tell me.
A second observation I have is how our culture impacts the way in which we order our worship, the services we put together. I have been noticing more recently in the churches. By the way, I go to the Episcopal church and the Lutheran church as well. I'm really kind of a hybrid between the United Methodist church, the Presbyterian church, the Episcopal church, and the Lutheran church. I've noticed in most of these congregations that I attend, one of the tendencies today in the ordering of worship is to start off the service with the announcements. Friends, there's nothing I find more inappropriate than that, but you all know better than I do, it's getting that stuff out of the way. For me, it's not stuff to get out of the way, it's part of the work of the people of God. If the announcement isn't that, then it has no place in the service. We start now with five minutes or whatever of announcements, and you walk into church ready to praise God like this morning as we did in chapel and the first thing you sit down to is what's going to happen next week, what potluck thing is going to take place somewhere else, and what group is going to meet, and that's the last thing I want to hear when I arrive to worship God on a Sunday morning. But it's part of our culture to look at some things as not being as important as some other things, so we get those out of the way so that we can attend to the most important things. I guess I'm suggesting that that's a cultural thing that has caused us to order worship the way we order worship.
Saying that, to a third thing that I've observed and I had to get accustomed to when I came to this country. We're a fast-paced society, especially if you live in the Northeast as I have lived for a number of years. We're just fast-paced. We're going at a rapid rate all the time and we're clock bound. We're very time bound, and even when it comes to worship, we're constrained by the time. Let me tell you, if you're invited to preach and you get carried away, and your last point can't get to your conclusion fast enough, folk will begin to let you know that it's come twelve o'clock. We're programmed, and we program our worship services that way. Sometimes you see us hurrying through to get through for that one hour that we give to God in that worship experience. I understand all the constraints with that, believe you me, I watch time too like crazy. But we're so time bound that we dare not step over that twelve o'clock or else some deacon, some officer in the church, somebody will start complaining that we've gone too long and all the other folk have gotten to the Holiday Inn, what do they serve on Sundays, buffet on Sundays before this congregation can get to it. We have a big Holiday Inn buffet on Salisbury, either that or the country club buffet. By time you get there, all the good food is gone.
The last thing I would say, which is a good sign, a good thing about culture. One of the nice things about American culture is an element of egalitarianism. That's one of the things I like about America. You come out of a British culture where you have stratification of class, usually based on one's material resources or one's education. In American, there is a greater sense of egalitarianism, and that creeps over in many of our churches still in terms of how we conduct worship. The pastor is not just the one person who can do it, and we bring laity in and help them to feel that they have as much right to lead us all to the throne of grace, to me it's a good thing. Those are my little comments on this. I have perhaps other things to say, but let me stay at this and pass you over to Larry. He has something more profound to say to you.
Larry Sibley: Or perhaps more obscure. In your booklet that you were given, back to the Nairobi Statement, page seven. In the middle of that paragraph 2-1, this is a phrase that John read earlier, but I wanted to go back to it. The fundamental shape of the principal Sunday act of Christian worship, the Eucharist is shared across cultures. The people gather, the Word of God is proclaimed, the people intercede for the needs of the church and the world, the Eucharistic meal is shared, and the people are sent out into the world for mission. That's the transcultural core of what worship is. I wanted to set that down next to some remarks in a book by Albert Borgmann that I've been reading recently that put the finger on the aspect of technology in our culture. The book is called Power Failure, Albert Borgmann. It's published here in Grand Rapids by Brazos a couple of years ago. Power Failure: Christianity in the Culture of Technology, or my interest this morning is really worship liturgy in the culture of technology. In that book, there's a lot of fairly heavy going about technology and how it works, he's a philosophy professor. But he brings it all home in the eighth chapter where he talks about the power of the Word and the power of the Table, two of the central things from the Nairobi statement. To get at that, he uses some material from Norman Maclean, the author of A River Runs Through It from Montana, Montana's going to speak next, on the culture of the Word.
He grew up in a setting where the Bible was read after the meal in the home, and so that's one of his memories of the power of the Word, the family reading together. Another memory that he has of the young men of the town, meeting on the steps of the bank in the evening to tell stories, Montana stories, to each other.
Another aspect of the power of the word. And then he observes, Maclean observes, families no longer read together or tell stories together. There's a sound gap in family life. This vacuum, nature abhors a vacuum, this vacuum is filled by the technology of television stories. On a typical evening, fifty-four million people and the number may have climbed by now, watch prime time novels, either on television or through a VCR or DVD. This is delivered by transmission devices, senders, studios, script writers, utility grids, manufacturing facilities, research and development labs producing a commodity, commodious because of the comfort and the convenience of it. You just slip it in, push a button, and you don't have to walk down to the bank and tell stories on the front steps. But the interface of the technology has changed it, and the vacuum is filled and yet not filled.
The culture of the table, Maclean talks about the careful preparation of the meal, either daily meals or festive meals, celebration, the work that goes into preparing, sitting down together and eating before the reading and storytelling after a meal. This, of course, has been invaded also by the commodious flexibility and variety of foods that are bought ready-made, stored safely and easily prepared in an instant supported by the machineries of agriculture, industry, supermarkets, cars, refrigerators, microwaves, another aspect of commodification and convenience.
On a recent Saturday, my wife and I, our five children are scattered around, so we enjoy the comforts of our home pretty much alone except for grandchildren that invade regularly to our great delight. But anyway, on a recent Saturday morning, Lois made an omelet. Usually it's just scrambled eggs, but this morning it was an omelet, and made muffins. For lunch, we had fifteen-bean ham soup, which had been in the freezer for months. It had been my job after the Christmas ham to take the bone and beans and spend three or four hours in focused activity making sure the soup emerged the way it should. We warmed up some rolls to go with it, and we had canned peaches afterwards in a tin can from the supermarket. That evening was a pork roast and a mince pie that Lois had made. These were all very festive. Our weekend meals tend to be that way because of the relaxed time, but they were also ordinary.
Set that down next to the task of a weekly Eucharist. One of the barriers in many congregations is to move in that direction is look at all the work it's going to take and the extra time to eat together around the Lord's table. Borgmann points out that in many ways, the effect of technology is beneficial. The burdens of hunger, disease, and confinement are lifted by this device paradigm, and no one would want these afflictions to return, but we have to recognize that we live in a world that's patterned by this device paradigm to the point where we really do not make choices about what we're going to do all too often. The device paradigm with its interstate system, long commutes, neglected families, neighborhoods, and inner cities, something that Nancy was talking about that the Willow Creek community faces, of the neglected family living in this device paradigm. When we finally come home, Borgmann says, late and exhausted greeted by a well-stocked refrigerator, a preternaturally efficient microwave and diverting television, there is little choice when we fail to cook a good meal and summon the family to the dinner table.
Well, for Christians, it's just a short step from the culture of the word to the Word of God, and from the culture of the table to the breaking of the bread. So, part of the question that I want to put to you this morning, is what challenges does all this commodification propose to the central things of the Word, prayer, the meal, and alms? Or to the Word, the prayer, the bath, and the meal that Nairobi talks about? How can we make these things large and strong?
On page 9, the call, the challenge to the churches is put in just those terms. “We call all member churches to recovery the centrality of baptism, Scripture with preaching, everyday celebration of the Lord's Supper, as the strong center of all congregational life and mission.” And then, as the authentic basis for contextualization. So often what we have to do is to clear up the spring, as Robert Frost said, so that the water can run free, so that these central things can be strong and central. It's a struggle to know how to use technology as a servant so that it doesn't overwhelm the service. This morning in the chapel service, there was a lot of technology, but it was not what overwhelmed the service. It was a servant for us rather than something that overwhelms. But I've been in services and I'm sure you have where all the technology really obscured the word, replaced the meal, and didn't really send us into the care of the world.
Just some principles from Scripture about how we can handle any cultural influence, but this one particularly. In the book of Isaiah, there are a couple of passages in Isaiah 2 and 25 that talk about the nations coming into the mountain of God to be talked about in the Word in Isaiah 2, and to join in the great feast on the mountain in Isaiah 25. The nations are welcomed with their cultures into this feast of the word and the meal. In Isaiah 60, the coming of the nations tells about their gifts coming and being acceptable on the altar of God. So there should be a strong welcome to the gifts of our surrounding culture and technology is one of those gifts. We don't build a wall against the culture, we welcome the culture into the congregation. And if it's multicultural, we welcome all those cultures. Then there is also a critique of the culture that is necessary and when you get to the twenty-first chapter of Revelation when the situation of Isaiah is echoed with all the nations bringing their gifts into the city, the critique is offered that nothing unclean will enter there. The gifts and the worship of the people of the world and by extension their cultures are welcome in the assembly around the table, at the bath, around the word, and in the prayers, but nothing unclean is welcome. There is an evaluation critique, and rejection of the unclean, the unsuitable. I didn't come with answers for that, because the answers are always local. But I think that's the dynamics of balancing the central things that show up in Nairobi and the challenge to do this in a way that makes them strong so that the water runs free and people are bathed in these good things.
Eugene Peterson: Let me just underline something Larry has said about Albert Borgmann. I'll just say amen to what his recommendation is that you read him. This might be an overstatement, but let me just overstate it to get your attention. I can't think of a single writer more important to pastors and persons who lead congregations in a life of discerning holiness than Albert Borgmann. He is an absolute master of diagnosing the nature of technology and showing us how to make choices there.
Let me take a little bit different tack, and say that I think the most important attitude towards culture for Americans and American pastors leading congregations, is to be highly suspicious of it. It is toxic. It is the devil's own work to take our culture, and without us knowing what's happening, to include us in his strategies. It depersonalizes, it functionalizes, it commodifies. One of the major themes in our Hebrew Scriptures is to fight against Baalism. Baalism was the most popular religious expression in the Canaanite world, and it was always, always more popular than Jahwehism. More people served Baal than served Jahweh. And you know why? Because it was a very attractive culture. It promised you everything. It promised you success. It promised you fulfillment. It promised you crops, it promised you fertility. And the prophets were unyielding in their condemnation and warning against Baalism, and the alternative was not very attractive. I mean, Baalism had all this wonderful stuff going on, prostitutes and wine and success and ecstasy. And what did the prophets give in response? The Word of God. Not just the Word of God, there were celebrations, there were feasts. There was the whole sacrificial system. But the whole prophetic element of the Old Testament was a way to learn how to live sacrificially before Jahweh, not self-indulgently before Baal.
I mentioned I had a friend who was a Carmelite nun and I had conversations with her, and in the conversation one day, I said, “You know what the hardest part of the Lord's Prayer for me is? The most difficult phrase there?” She said, “Of course I know!” I said, “How do you know that?” She said, “You Protestants. You don't know anything about evil. You know everything about sin, but you are so naïve about evil.” I think we're very naïve about the culture. Now, I'm a pastor, you're a pastor, most of you, many of you. And our task is to know the local culture, to know the culture of this congregation that we have. To know their stories, know what they're up against, but our task is to help them discern their way through an evil, infected, devil-dominated culture. And I don't think we take that seriously enough. It's a toxic world out there, and it's not all bad. But it's the devil's work to take what's good and twist it just a little bit to take our eyes off Jesus, divert us from a life of sacrifice, get something out of it, get what we want out of it.
Brian McLaren: Thank you. I first wanted to just play a bit with an assumption behind the question that I think all of us are aware of that if we're working within a time span of thirty years, it can be very tempting to assume that thirty years ago we were not compromised to the culture, and how have we compromised with it now?
One of the things I would want to do is go back to 1976 and talk about how we were compromised with the culture then, and go back fifty years to 1956, how we were compromised with the culture then, etc., etc. So the idea that we were ever at a point where we somehow were blissfully living above a culture, I think, is self-deceiving. It seems to me we have some people who feel they're on the top of the slope looking at how everyone else is sliding down, but probably the truth is we're always all in the middle of the slope, trying to make our way up and all the rest. I think this is part of our struggle. It's one of the great values, I think, of having intergenerational conversations like this. I think those of us who are older, we can remember how things were and we can see losses and dangers that younger people maybe who are infatuated with the moment, don't see those dangers, they just see the excitement of the moment. But I think the younger can look and see ways that the older have become comfortable with enculturation that they came of age in. So that's just something to think about and a great value for conversation like we're having these days.
I'm just going to list six things about our current cultural moment that I think all of us are aware of, but I'll just put a name on them. One of them is, we're all trying to worship God and trying to lead congregations in worship in the aftermath of the rise of the religious right. That's a very significant thing over thirty years. Phenomenally new context to do worship. To sing “Onward Christian Soldiers” in the aftermath of Pat Robertson is a very different world.
Secondly, we're also in the aftermath of the collapse of the secular left. So with the loss of the secular left, whatever we think of the secular left, there aren't really any voices for the poor significantly speaking in our culture. So we are left with various forms of corporatism, so this is a new situation. Thirty years ago, we were very formed with people of faith feeling the onslaught of secularism, especially the secular left.
Third, I think we're in the aftermath of September 11th, and the ways that nationalism and fear have invaded our churches and now have a very warm welcome in many of our churches. It seems to me there are things we have to take very, very seriously. I believe both Albert, and actually now I can't remember now who said this, but someone used the word “unclean” a few minutes ago. It strikes me that there's an unclean kind of nationalism that can sneak in. It was Larry that used it. There's an unclean kind of nationalism that can be very, very at home in our worship. I noticed this. I get sort of a shiver run up my spine when we use a lot of songs, especially a lot of contemporary songs love to use the phrase “the nations”, of course, taking this word from the Psalms, which seems to me is a word that for the Jews meant the Gentiles, which means us. But I always notice when we sing it in America, “the nations” means everybody else. That's strange.
Number four would be, we're in the aftermath of the conquest of consumerism. I'm sure this will come up a number of times during the day. The pervasiveness now, Wendell Berry describes, a bypassing of the community where publics do business with individuals, it seems to me has deeply, deeply affected our understanding of worship, where worship is so much about Jesus and me and about the blessings and pleasures and goodness of feeling loved and important and where God thinks about me above all else, it seems to me that consumerism has won everywhere and we worship in this conquest. This is very much what both Larry and Eugene are addressing in a very important way.
Fifth, we're in the aftermath of the Internet. I think for many of us, none of us understand how far-reaching this will be, but let me give one quick example. The Internet invites us, I think affects us in a whole range of ways. Some positive, some negative, some, I'm sure, mixed. But one of the ways it affects us is that we spend more and more of our lives in virtual reality and the phenomenon of the unchurched Christian is a global phenomenon. Many of you have read Alan Jamieson's book, A Churchless Faith, about New Zealand, and George Barna has come out with another version of this about the American situation. I see this in all of my travels around Europe and America. The number of people, maybe a little bit like Albert said, they come home from church enough Sundays thinking, why did I go? And they just stop going and they gain their spiritual resources the way they gain everything else on the Internet. This, to me, speaks to the importance of a corresponding hunger for actual reality as opposed to virtual reality. Just as Larry mentioned, the almost sensuous pleasures of a home-cooked meal. The reality of wine and bread, skin, wheelchairs, and coffee, hugs, tears, coats, coughs, and all the rest that happen in actual reality that never happen in virtual reality. This to me is something we have to pay a lot of attention to.
And finally, in the aftermath of religious broadcasting, which is phenomenally increased in its power in the last thirty years. It strikes me that none of us can preach today without being aware that our people in their drive time were listening to preachers on the air. And somehow, what is heard on religious broadcasting is normative. It has an effect on the kind of music that we sing, because there's a consumable quality of broadcast music. It can't be that good because it needs a limited shelf life so that the next round of product can come through. I think these are some of the things that would flow from what Eugene said about being suspicious about a lot of these things in culture. This is not a good time to write classic music that will be sung three hundred years from now, because it won't get any airplay. Or if it does, I mean, think of the best hymn in the world if it was played thirty times a day during drive time, maybe it would not be appreciated as well. So, all of these things, I'm sure we could add to the list, but this is where we're doing ministry in this context. Every time we gather for worship, we have all these things going on in the background.
Joyce Zimmerman: I come from a denomination whose worship structure goes back to the second century, so when I'm asked in my national conferences what is the biggest problem facing the Roman Catholic Church in the United States right now, without hesitation I say, the issue of enculturation.
However, how that's being played out in the church and how it's being addressed by particularly the academics in the church is another whole issue. Largely precipitated right now in the United States, we are about one-quarter Hispanics. We make the mistake of thinking by having Spanish-speaking liturgies and by paying attention to some of the Hispanic devotional customs, we have solved our problem. What we are coming to grapple with now is the issue of enculturation goes much deeper than simply adding to our ritual things that so to speak talk of culture or come from culture. There's another whole psyche at work in the issue of enculturation.
I did my doctoral dissertation around a methodology that attempted to look at the Eucharistic rite and determine what is essential for what is to happen in the Eucharistic rite, and then how can we write Eucharistic rites in local communities that respect that essentialness so that we have one Eucharist in the whole church, at the same time that rite comes out of the cultural psyche of the people. Like most doctoral dissertations, mine failed, but I think the question is the right question.
If you would turn to page 15 in your books please, and I'll take a little bit different take on this: our United States bishops have responded to the cultural question from the viewpoint of a highly liturgical structured church by saying that we need to pay much more attention to devotional prayer. In the United States Catholic Church, we have learned to make a distinction between liturgical and devotional prayer that probably does not apply to many of the denominations represented here, but I hope my remarks and my distinctions will at least get you thinking. I'd like to begin with the top part of that page. By the way, for my four sheets, if any of this is helpful, you may feel free to reprint in your own situations without any further copyright permission. One of the things that has helped us is to understand that liturgy itself is a subset of worship. Liturgy is a much more particular kind of experience than worship. Worship is the broader experience, so I have included there, which you can read for yourself, some of what I consider the attitudes and stances towards the divine that make for worship. But when we speak about liturgy, we are speaking about a much narrower kind of an activity. And in fact, officially we define liturgy as a celebration of the seven sacraments and the liturgy of the hours, our daily morning and evening prayer. So we have very specific rites which we define as liturgy, and we do this because we understand the activity of liturgy is much more specific than the activity of worship. Liturgy is for us the enactment of the pascal mystery, making present in the here and now and drawing ourselves into Christ's life, death, and resurrection, sending of the Spirit. It is an exercise of our own baptismal priesthood.
I've been calling for years now for a book dedicated to the notion of the priesthood of the faithful, and I'm happy to say that Dominican father Paul Philbert has come up with a very pastoral book published by Lit Press if any of you want to take a look at that up here, feel free to come up and look at it. It's the first general statement, I think, on the priesthood of the faithful, which for us is a highly clericalized church, is a huge movement forward. What I find interesting is his thread throughout the book how, while we exercise our priesthood within the liturgical rite itself, that priesthood is not completed until it is exercised in our daily life. So one of the cultural issues we're struggling with is the relationship with the forty-seven and a half minutes we spend together on Sunday morning, and yes, we are very timed, and what happens the other days of our life.
The distinction between liturgical and devotional prayer as I said is not a distinction that is helpful for many of you, but it is critical for us because we tended to solve our enculturation question by bringing devotional elements into the liturgy so that what liturgy is to do is largely blurred. There is a wonderful document that is available on the Vatican web site called “The Directory on Liturgy and Popular Piety.” You might want to download it. It's very long. It has an excellent description at the beginning of the theological relationship of liturgy and devotional prayer. But more importantly and more interestingly, there's a huge historical section where it goes through various devotional prayers from all over the world and gives their origins, background. I learned about tons of devotions that I had never heard of. It's called “The Directory on Liturgy and Popular Piety,” and there is a commentary on that by Liturgical Press. That's downloadable from the Vatican web site. What we need to do in our enculturation question is respect how liturgical prayer enacts the pascal mystery. I'll talk more about the pascal mystery in our theological reflection. And then, respecting that, what we've come to learn is that our Sunday Eucharistic celebration cannot be the only prayer life of our folks. Or, for those of you who come from denominations where Sunday and Wednesday tend to be your formalized prayer times, that is not sufficient. That indeed prayer is something that belongs for daily life.
For us, it's in our daily prayer tremendous openness to the kinds of forms that that will have, because it's not regulated by the church in the same way. The two texts I have written at the bottom give the criteria for authentic devotion. Not regulated, our devotional prayer then can specifically address the affective prayer needs, and the necessary focus of myself personally in the prayer that liturgy itself does not, can not, and should not, and what many of us are saying is that if we don't have a solid devotional prayer life in place that leads to and from liturgy, then we force liturgy to do what liturgy is not supposed to do.