Transformative Liturgy

By Brett Donham

In October I participated in the most transformative worship service in my life. It was held in the St. John’s Memorial Chapel of the Episcopal Divinity School. I say “transformative” because it demonstrated possibilities of imagination and creativity that I had not experienced before. I say “participated” because, although I had very little formal role in the service I felt fully engaged, moved, and impelled by the liturgy. This was not a typical passive experience in a church. All senses were engaged; sight, sound, intellect, and emotions.

We gathered around a Baptismal font filled with water. The presider, Stephen Burns, started the service by having us repeat portions of the Baptismal Covenant following which, as we moved past the font to our chairs, we baptized ourselves again from the water in the font. Seating was arranged in choir form in the nave with parallel rows of chairs facing each other across the nave. The pulpit was at one end of the space and the altar at the other end. We faced one another as a community with the action taking place first at one end, then at another and sometimes in the middle. Lessons were read from one end and the choir led by Ellen Oak supported us in hymns from the other end. The trustees stood where they were seated for their commissioning. The hymns had a greater variety and more intensity than what I was used to. At the Eucharist we all gathered around the altar. The prayers were loosely based on the standard rubric but seemed more personal. During Communion two large drums sounded with deep sonorous tones that seemed ancient and deeply fundamental to who we were in relation to our God and to Christ.

Last week I had a similar experience at the annual service of Lessons and Carols held also in the Chapel. The seating was arranged in a V arrangement, half inclined towards the center aisle and half inclined towards the altar. The choir, sounding better than I can remember, was arranged in a shallow arc on the steps to the apse. A few of the hymns were traditional, sung by the whole gathering, some were Medieval sung in Latin by the choir and some were duets or solos. The sources of song ranged from the full congregation in the middle of the space, to the apse, to the organ loft and to the rear of the Chapel. The readings ranged from traditional to poetic. At one point Ellen started a song at the west end and slowly walked with dance movements to the east end, uniting the various sources of sound. While the music and the readings ranged over thousands of years, there was a unity and artistic wholeness in their selection. The Virgin Mary was a frequent theme.

For me it raised the question, “why can’t all services be like these were, feeding us in so many ways?”

The diocese of MA is experiencing modest growth in members of the Episcopal Church, but much of the country is seeing a slow steady decline. With few exceptions, not many people between the ages of 16 and 56 are going to church any more. One reason, among many, is that the typical Sunday service is frequently boring and takes place in a building that smells musty, is dark, and whose layout stifles creativity, energy, and life.

The new worship team at EDS of Miriam Gelfer (Dean of Students and Community Life), Ellen Oak (Director of Music), and Stephen Burns (Associate Professor of Liturgical Theology and the Study of Anglicanism), appear to have a vision to change all that and we are starting to see manifestations of the exciting possibilities. Ellen and Stephen are experts in creative liturgy and the imaginative use of space to enable it. Miriam has brought them together in an atmosphere of joy and creativity to make it happen. Miriam’s high standards and appreciation for excellent music are key ingredients. These experiments are not 1970’s feel good, hang banners and all will be changed, efforts. Rather, like the Lessons and Carols service, these experiments are being tried with thoughtfulness, integrity as well as spiritual and aesthetic wholeness. They appeal to all the senses and the intellect. The truly exciting news is that these experiments have the potential to change the Church and to make it again an exciting and life giving place for all ages to be. Seminaries are where this change must begin because seminaries have the flexibility and the obligation to immerse their students in new wants of being in community.

Not all these experiments will be entirely successful, but enough will be that EDS can build enough credible models to influence the entire church. Just as important, EDS will be sending forth graduates with a thirst to make worship more engaging and armed with examples of how to do it.

Brett Donham is the former chairman of the EDS Board of Trustees and highly regarded architect who founded the firm, Donham & Sweeney in 1967. The architect firm has designed new religious buildings such as the Wilson Chapel at Andover Newton Theological School and renovated others including St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Brookline.

My Heart is a Raging Volcano of Love for You

By Kevin G. Thew Forrester

What if liturgy and prayer reflected at-one-ment rather than redemptive violence? Love rather than retribution? Embrace rather than condemnation? Forgiveness rather than judgment?

My Heart Is a Raging Volcano of Love for You reflects my experience of liturgy and ministry as being of a single compassionate whole. The liturgical life of the church is the deep well from which ministry draws its divine vitality.

From the divine well flows the grace to freely serve. Otherwise baptismal ministry quickly devolves to egoic attempts to save the lost world.

I believe that a challenge before us as Christians is that we live in a time of much cultural change and fear. The predominant mythic-literal ways of understanding ourselves, God, and church are in transition.

As created beings, change and evolution are part and parcel to our life as creatures of God’s creation. And yet, it is also true that the break of the 21st century seems to have ushered us into a teeming flow of accelerated changes.

As the church in worship of God, engaged in baptismal ministry, we cannot help but be affected by the cultural whirlwind. However, perhaps we may perceive within the shifting winds a divine invitation to revitalize and reform our tradition.

The eucharistic liturgy of baptism especially celebrates the Living Font from which flows our Trinitarian call as Christians to seek and serve Christ in all persons, to love our neighbors as ourselves, to strive for justice and peace among all people, and to respect the dignity of every human being – divine invitations of life that flow from the one Holy Source.

In the book, My Heart Is a Raging Volcano of Love for You, I explore how meaningful and authentic baptismal ministry cannot take place apart from liturgical renewal. The images of God and Christ and church and world and self inexorably shape our sense of dignity, our notion of justice, and our image of neighbor. How we celebrate in our worship greatly determines how we serve.

To paraphrase ancient wisdom – lex orandi, lex vivendi. This pithy affirmation points out that the church has traditionally recognized that worship and life are inextricably connected, one reinforcing the other; for better or worse.

In this second volume of my At-One-Ment series I develop new forms of prayer and liturgy that draw upon our ancient catholic tradition in dialogue with our contemporary, postmodern, cultural context. These prayers reflect what I describe as an integral sacramental experience and vision of life, which invite us beyond both the individualism of modernity and the fragmentation of postmodernity.

We need to realize that the liturgy at its heart is a shout, a song, a whisper, a plea, a thanksgiving, of love. We long to be united with the Beloved who ceaselessly gives us birth and calls us home. We cast about for words that might begin to express the cry of our soul to receive the divine kiss whose moisture gives us life.

My Heart Is a Raging Volcano of Love for You is an invitation to transcend the destructive redemptive violence of conventional atonement spirituality enshrined in prayer, liturgy and hymnody. Through conversation with mystics of both east and west, I invite the church to creatively express itself in prayers and liturgies flowing from our gracious at-one-ment with God, the Font from which flows all life.

Here are collects for Years A,B,C. Here are new liturgies for Great Three Days. Here is new expression of baptismal living reflective of ancient tradition, postmodern science, and our interfaith world. Here are prayers of a progressive Christianity with ancient roots.

* The Rev. Kevin G. Thew Forrester, Ph.D., has served in the Diocese of Northern Michigan for the past ten years. He is the author of Leadership and Ministry within a Community of Equals (InterCultural Ministry Development, 1997) and I Have Called You Friends (Church Publishing, 2003).