Vital Worship
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Trinitarian Worship: This doctrine makes a difference in how you worship
Philip Butin on How Trinitarian Worship Revitalizes Congregations |
What makes worship “work”? Is it the music, the preaching, your mental effort to connect with God? Gordon T. Smith and Philip W. Butin are among a growing group of scholars who say that consistently and explicitly naming and invoking the Trinity in worship inspires renewal.
When Gordon T. Smith pastored an international interdenominational congregation in the Philippines, no one expected worship to be all one flavor. "It was a rich experience to be part of a fellowship where we learned so much from each other," says Smith, a pastor, author, and theology professor.
He'll never forget briefing one couple before their baby was baptized. "They were Lutheran and reminded me that in their Lutheran practice, baptism always includes making the sign of the cross in oil on the child's forehead. It's a sign of the Spirit's providential protecting grace against the wiles of the Evil One."
This fragrantly tactile reminder was part of Smith's journey to a deeper appreciation of the underlying Trinitarian framework of worship. He and other scholars, such as Philip W. Butin, explain that how churches teach the doctrine of the Trinity makes a huge difference in how they worship.
Tapping into deep longings
Smith grew up and became a pastor in the Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA). It’s a free church tradition that, like many evangelical or nondenominational churches, views baptism and the Lord’s Supper as ordinances, not sacraments.
Smith says that in CMA history, the emphasis is on the human act—of witnessing to God’s greatness in baptism and of remembering God’s grace in the Lord’s Supper. In practice both ordinances point back. Baptism reminds the believer of conversion. Communion reminds believers of Christ’s death. Smith says neither action has much sense of Christ being present in the event.
“I am what I am now because of realizing the deficiencies of that perspective. As a young pastor in my 20s, reading the Church Fathers awakened in me an appreciation of something broader, richer, deeper, more complexed, and more nuanced than my own heritage,” Smith says.
 What is most nourishing about the way your church practices the Lord's Supper? |
While earning his doctorate, he did a course on liturgy and eventually wrote A Holy Meal: The Lord's Supper in the Life of the Church and edited The Lord’s Supper: Five Views (September 2008). These experiences convinced him that “good theology, including liturgical theology, is done ecumenically.”
When he presented a paper at a recent Wheaton conference, Rediscovering the Trinity: Classic Doctrine and Contemporary Ministry, Smith talked with fellow CMA members who were very enthused about Trinitarian worship.
Smith views his current calling as educating ministers and “tapping into longings already there and placed there by God. There’s a huge palpable desire for worship that integrates heart and mind. We are weary of cerebralism that does not integrate affect and weary of sentimentalism that has no theological substance,” he says.
Recognizing worship as dialogue
 Which visuals in your church remind worshipers about the Holy Spirit's enabling role in worship? |
Helping worshipers tap into a longing for embodied worship begins with agreeing what worship is.
“Everybody needs to understand what we’re trying to do, what this means, and what it is not,” Smith says. He’s worshiped with many congregations that—because people are sitting in rows, looking at skilled musicians on something called a stage—think of worship as similar to attending a performance or football game.
“We’ve made a one-to-one correlation between a certain kind of emotional contour and the presence of God. People think, ‘As long as we’re happy and clapping, then we must be content. And if we’re content and happy, then God must be here,’” he says.
As a theological and liturgical scholar, Smith has talked with many worship leaders who are “getting that something’s wrong if their only criteria for worship is what makes us feel good.”
He suggests instead that pastors and worship leaders think of worship as a dialogue.
“Every element in the worship service needs to be understood in terms of dialogue. The key entry for this whole conversation is to have a sense that Christ is present in real time—calling us to worship, enabling us by his Spirit to worship, and speaking to us through his Word and the sacraments. Every element of worship is God speaking to us or our response,” Smith says.
Understanding worship as dialogue is far more than semantics. “The biggest, most significant piece is that we no longer view worship as our accomplishment, something we are trying to mount up to offer to God. It is, first, an act of response to God’s initiative towards us and, second, our participation in worship and fellowship already happening within the Trinity,” he explains.
Changing worship habits
 James Fissel's painting "Trinity" hints at the embodied horizontal and vertical elements at work in Trinitarian worship. © 2008 James Fissel | Eyekons |
Smith urges pastors to take responsibility for liturgical leadership. “It’s typical to give the so-called ‘worship’ part of the service to church musicians, usually contemporary pop musicians. Often they don’t realize that the sermon is as much part of worship as the songs are,” he says.
A typical call to worship in the free church tradition would be “Welcome. We’re glad you’ve come. Let’s turn around and greet each other.” Smith explains, “It’s an entirely horizontal act of one human welcoming another human. There’s no reference to the name of Christ, no sense that Christ is the One who invited us here…or that the primary actor in worship is not us, but Christ.”
When, however, worshipers see themselves as called to enter worship that is already going on within the Trinity, then “preaching becomes not one person trying to persuade other people to be more godly and more Christian. Rather, it’s explaining the Scriptures so the people of God can hear Christ speak to them and feed them.”
In the paper he presented at the Wheaton conference on Trinitarian worship, Smith said he understands why congregations think of baptism and communion as their work. It’s because they’re trying to preserve the doctrine of justification by faith.
Ironically, in seeing baptism, communion, and worship as our works of faith, believers may “inadvertently establish” a justification by works. They miss out on how God offers even more than a way to know or think about the gospel. In Christ, God offers, “slowly and incrementally,” embodied ways for us to identify with Christ.
“Then the Lord’s Supper is not so much us thinking about the bad things we have done and resolving never to do them again. Rather it’s accepting that Christ now is inviting us to this table, feeding us and gracing us for the life to which he calls us,” Smith says.
Philip Butin on How Trinitarian Worship Revitalizes Congregations
 Phil Butin says that God's interpersonal communion within the Trinity is the "basis, pattern, and dynamic" of what believers share in prayer. |
You’ve probably noticed something about worship. “We all know there are times when the Word is more profoundly proclaimed and profoundly heard,” says Philip W. Butin, president and professor of theology at San Francisco Theological Seminary and author of The Trinity.
Butin says it would be a mistake to draw a one-to-one connection between certain actions and deeper worship. Still, during his 25 years in church ministry, he has noticed a dynamic that consistently leads to worship renewal.
It starts with naming and practicing Trinitarian worship. And one of the best ways to join worship already going on within the Trinity is to include a prayer for illumination before the Scripture reading and sermon.
Unitarian or Trinitarian?
 What's the difference between trying to make your worship reach God and joining God in worship? |
While attending Fuller Seminary, Butin and his wife, Jan, worked at a large Presbyterian (PCUSA) church “that had a tendency to think of and do worship as a human thing. You know the kind of upper-class excellence—a choir with paid leads in each section.
“We often had a sense that worship was very horizontal and really happening on a human level. We’d seen the same thing while serving other churches in youth ministry and Christian education,” Butin says.
Meanwhile, he was developing a theological interest in the doctrine of the Trinity as his life’s work. That interest began in a systematic theology class on Christology and soteriology given by James B. Torrance, whose book Worship, Community, & the Triune God of Grace is a published version of those lectures.
“Torrance talked about Trinitarian worship as the Christian alternative to what he sometimes called ‘Unitarian worship’, where it’s a human interaction with God, but the mediation of Christ and enablement of the Holy Spirit are ignored.
“We really taught our congregations that it took the Spirit within us to empower and undergird and motivate our worship. People begin to see that worship is not a human offering to God. It’s not just us here and some Unitarian God up there that we have to figure out how to make contact with by the beauty of our prayers and music or the power of preaching or the earnestness of our faith,” Butin says.
Instead, he explains worship as a divine-human interaction, a process of God’s grace being revealed and the Holy Spirit helping worshipers receive and respond to that.
Being explicit about dynamics
 A worship leader's simple explanation can make a big difference in how worshipers experience congregational singing. |
“It takes time, but people look to their ministers as models of how to think and speak about and experience God. As the reality of the Trinity permeates the congregation’s conversation and vocabulary, perceptions of God begin to honor God’s triad nature,” Butin says.
The Butins discovered that consistently using the language of the Trinity reveals a dynamic of profound worship. They often added a sentence or two of introduction before each portion of worship so people could understand the liturgy in context.
These introductions were often as simple as saying, before a song, “It’s the Holy Spirit that works in us to awaken our hearts to God’s presence within us. Let us offer up our praise to God through Jesus Christ.” Or, before communion, a minister can say, “We’ll now pray the Trinitarian great prayer of thanksgiving,” and then launch into the sursum corda: “The Lord be with you….And also with you....Lift up your hearts….”
“A worship leader opens up these dynamics by making them explicit, so if the Holy Spirit’s working in the congregation, people know it’s happening,” Butin says. Instead of coming to worship as an hour-long duty, worshipers sense that God is always waiting for and working toward a deeper connection with them. They ask to be opened by the Holy Spirit.
Prayer for illumination
 Praying for illumination before reading Scripture and preaching can make a profound difference. |
The Butins found that when the preacher and congregation consciously pray the prayer for illumination, “that whole Trinitarian dynamic is explicit…and God’s truth and power is somehow released into the situation.”
In the paper he presented at a recent Wheaton conference, Rediscovering the Trinity: Classic Doctrine and Contemporary Ministry, Butin explained that liturgical scholars have found prayers for illumination among 4th century Syriac and Egyptian liturgies. John Calvin, Martin Bucer, and William Farel made it a practice. The prayer for illumination can also be sung, perhaps with Ken Medema’s “God of the Word.”
“The human preacher and the human congregation intentionally pray together that by the Holy Spirit, human speech would become God’s Word spoken through the preacher to the congregation. They pray that in this unique event, in this gathered Christian community, in this time and place, the triune God would be Speaker, Word, and Breath,” Butin told conference participants.
He linked the Apostle Paul’s 2 Corinthians 4:6-7 “jars of clay” metaphor to the prayer for illumination. Praying that human speech will become God’s Word—spoken through the preacher to the congregation—helps worshipers live into the pattern of Christ’s incarnation. They begin to see that “divine revelation is most profoundly, authentically, and characteristically communicated by the Spirit in and through ordinary, created, mortal human words and leaders.”
Worship planners most often place the prayer for illumination before the Scripture reading and sermon because the Holy Spirit can make both come alive.
You’ll find 37 examples of prayers for illumination in The Worship Sourcebook, including this one based on John 12:21: “Lord God, we wish to see Jesus. By your Spirit’s power, give us eyes to see his glory. Through Christ we pray. Amen.”
Another, by John D. Witvliet, is especially easy for children to understand: “God, the Bible is a very special book. It is so big and so old. What do these old words mean for our lives today? Please send your Spirit, so that we can understand your Word. Amen.”
Text by Joan Huyser-Honig
Photography by Steve Huyser-Honig
Listen to audio interview excerpts from spring 2008:
- Gordon T. Smith on why some churches feel uneasy with sacramental theology, 4:03.
- Philip W. Butin on Trinitarian worship change in congregations he pastored, 4:34.
Read and review one or more of these books for your church library or newsletter:
- A Holy Meal: The Lord's Supper in the Life of the Church by Gordon T. Smith
- The Lord’s Supper: Five Views, edited by Gordon T. Smith
- The Trinity by Philip W. Butin
 Andrei Rublev's "The Holy Trinity" symbolizes the divine communion that we can join in worship. Source: Wikimedia Commons. |
Essays presented at the 2008 Wheaton conference, Rediscovering the Trinity: Classic Doctrine and Contemporary Ministry, will be published as a collection. Till then you can explore this recap in parts one, two, and three by blogger Jendi Reiter.
Check out Calvin Institute of Christian Worship resources for Trinitarian worship. Feel free to use or adapt ideas from Reformed Worship for planning a Trinity Sunday service or sermon series on the Trinity or explaining why Trinitarian language matters in worship.
Reading The Shack, a surprise bestseller novel that allegorizes the Trinity, prompted Christianity Today editor at large Collin Hansen to review other Trinity analogies. Blogger Timothy Challies generated lots of comment with his lengthy theological review of The Shack.
Just for fun: open up two browser windows, one for the Evangelical Free Church of America, www.efca.org, and one for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, www.elca.org. Search the same terms on each site—worship, sacrament, ordinance, baptism, communion, Lord’s Supper. What conclusions can you draw from the relative strength of each term on either site?
Read “Baptism, Eucharist, and Ministry,” a Faith and Order paper published by the World Council of Churches in 1982. Many churches use this document, also known as “the Lima text,” to create liturgies for World Communion Sunday.
James K. A. Smith urges Reformed Christians to be more Pentecostal and expect the sovereign God to surprise them in worship.
Browse related stories on “in between” words, Lord’s Supper practice in Reformed and Presbyterian tradition, planning contemporary worship, and vertical habits.
Feel free to print and distribute these stories to your worship, council, education, or youth committee meeting. These questions will get people talking about Trinitarian worship:
- Recall a time when you were surprised, blessed, or challenged by a Christian worship practice that was different than what you’re used to. Explain why your congregation might want to adopt this practice.
- Discuss what’s the same or different between Smith’s understanding of worship as dialogue and the way your congregation worships. How might you (or would you even want to) help worshipers see Christ as leading the worship?
- What is the connection between Trinitarian worship and the sacraments?
- What advantages or disadvantages do you see in naming the Trinity more often in worship? Which first steps could you take to correct any imbalances in how often your worship mentions Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?
What is the best way you’ve found to explore the dynamics of Trinitarian worship or embodied sacraments? Please write to us so we can identify trends and share your great ideas. Whether you do these or any other things, we’d love to learn what works for you:
- Did you catalog the songs used most often in your worship and notice which persons of the Trinity they mention? If so, did you make any changes in song selection?
- Which methods—including education, bulletin or screen explanations, more attention to “in between” words, involving the preacher or more members in worship planning—have worked best for creating renewal through explicit Trinitarian worship?
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This article was first published by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, http://www.calvin.edu/worship/stories/