Proclaim! is about taking this work seriously. Specifically, this is a book that holds the belief that our liturgy—our collective and public worship of God that participates in the mission of God by inviting us to share in dynamic love that exists within God—is intended to so thoroughly saturate us in God’s grace that we radiate grace and love in the world. Public worship is itself an engagement with God’s mission and propels us into the world empowered by the Holy Spirit to continue our engagement with God’s mission. The coming together of the community of the faithful around Word and sacrament sits at the inflection point between being gathered and being sent. Something happens when we come close to God. Like Moses, like Mary Magdalene, like Paul, coming close to God has consequences and the invitation we are offered in public worship is to not leave the same way we came. Being gathered and being sent are two sides of the same coin of God’s mission of reconciliation.
It is called Proclaim! for two reasons. First, the fact that we gather at all, especially on a Sunday, makes a public statement about what we believe and how we view the world—through the lens of our Lord’s resurrection. Regardless of how others see the world, disciples of Jesus Christ are invited to see the world through the ongoing reality of God’s new-making. Second, how we worship makes a proclamation about who we are, whose we are, and how we are to live in the world. The patterns, the rites (words), and rituals (actions) teach us to ask a different set of questions than we might otherwise ask and to make a new set of connections between God’s ongoing work and our daily lives, thereby strengthening our ability to bear witness to the resurrection of Jesus Christ as apostles sent by God into the ordinariness of our world.
As a leader in a faith community, I am aware of the incredible paradigm shift this book will be for many. The shift from faith as a set of ideas privately held by individuals who perform their personal piety before the God of their own understanding back to the idea of faith as an ongoing life lived before God within which the regular gathering of an individual with the collective community of faith is an essential component to engaging in God’s mission is immense. I happen to also believe that it is key to participating in God’s mission. As Bishop Ian Douglas, Bishop Diocesan of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut, says repeatedly, “God has always had the Church God needs to be about the mission of God. The question is, will we be that Church?” To be that Church, I believe it is important to reclaim public liturgy as something more than a collection of individual relationships with God. Public liturgy must say something about God, not only to those in the room, but to those not in the room. It must speak the truth of God’s reconciling love and break through the din of apathy, the cacophony of prejudice and oppression, and dreadful chords of isolation and alienation that threaten to break apart the fragile bonds of humanity.
The purpose of this book is to help make disciples out of people for whom public worship is either rote and unremarkable or tedious and inconvenient. This book draws connections between the practices of public worship and aspects of our ordinary lives in order to help us engage in public worship and private prayer with more attention and intention. The Bible suggests that we live in a paradox, that the kingdom of God has both come near to us and is easy to miss as we walk past it unaware. My hope is that this book will help us pay attention to the ways the kingdom of God comes close to us in public worship and shows us how to recognize the signs of it elsewhere, thereby making us participants in God’s reconciling work. To do this, I’ve arranged this book to first explore what I mean by “God’s mission” and then to explore the various ways the individual parts of the service of Holy Eucharist, the primary service of public worship for many Episcopalians, breaks open a new facet of God’s mission.
My understanding of worship is shaped by regular practice of the Holy Eucharist as outlined in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. If you are familiar with the pattern of the Eucharist, this book will feel familiar to you because it uses that shape in order to provide a new interpretive lens through which we might see the liturgy differently. If you are unfamiliar with this pattern, this book might serve as a roadmap for that experience as well as an invitation to navigate the pattern in person in community. Regardless of whether you share the Eucharist weekly, monthly, or at some other interval, Christians across denominations gather, listen, respond, remember, share, and go. The idea behind that pattern is to not only serve as a formation tool for those interested in deepening their understanding of the Eucharist, but also to highlight the eucharistic shape of our lives—the ordinary and often unremarkable ways we gather, listen and respond, give of ourselves, and ultimately share grace with one another in ways that destroy injustice and invite us to experience episodes of God’s reign. Even if you do not regularly share in the Holy Eucharist, you can benefit from understanding how the rituals and rites associated with this liturgy illuminate practices of peacemaking, community-building, and justice-seeking in our lives.
This book is for people who are deeply interested in revival—personally and in their faith communities. It is for practitioners, planners, and students of liturgy. It is for spiritual seekers, those who, like myself, found the Episcopal Church after a period of wandering and who want to go deeper. It is for those who are interested in the work of peacemaking and justice in the world and who are unsure about the intersection between the work that is the passion of their heart and their relationship with God, who is the lover of their soul. It is for those who want to engage in the spiritual practice of evangelism, but aren’t sure they have the tools, knowledge, or awareness to engage that work meaningfully. My hope is that this book will invite you to consider deeply where you see connections between our worship and the world, to discern what this connection asks of you, and then to make choices that propel you in the direction of God, who is already out there in the world making all things new.
I am grateful for the work of Ruth Meyers, particularly her book Missional Worship Worshipful Mission, which has been an amazing guide through my thoughts. Having met Dr. Meyers a few years ago at a conference on prayer book revision in Sewanee, Tennessee, I was heartened by her encouragement to continue thinking deeply about this intersection and what resources a renewed life of the Spirit might offer me. In addition to the Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, her book, which follows the pattern of the Eucharist, along with Derek Olsen’s Inwardly Digest, serve as the theological grounding for this book. I encourage you to read both of them as well.
I remember that day all those years ago when I took my first steps into an Episcopal Church. I could never have guessed in that moment, but that day was the beginning of a new phase of my journey with God, one that has continued to change and shape me for the work to which God has invited me. Change is hard, and formation is oftentimes painful, but the result is a life that is more attuned to purpose and mission, one shaped around the reality of the cross, and one that sounds like the gospel.
This stuff works.
The Christian life can be more than mere words and ritual. It can and, in my opinion, should be about being found by the love of God and then choosing to respond to that love by growing up into it, into what Paul the Apostle calls “the full stature of Christ” (Eph. 4:13). Liturgy opens us up to the “breathless beauty” of the “singing of angels,” an experience that Howard Thurman suggests places a crown over our heads that we will spend the rest of our lives trying to grow tall enough to wear (Howard Thurman, Deep Is the Hunger). Changed lives cannot help but proclaim the Good News of God in Christ—in word and deed.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He