I wanted my congregation to experience the renewal I had experienced—a deeper commitment to Christ, a more vibrant devotional life, a deeper awareness of the hand of God at work in the world around us, and a conviction about the power behind the truth of the gospel—and I knew that the only way to do that was to pray. Often. I came to know intimately what Rabbi Edwin Friedman means when he talks about what it means for a leader to change a system. It is tempting to think that change in a system happens by the fiat of a charismatic leader, but I have found that the change in systems occurs when leaders commit to changing. When a community’s leaders—lay and ordained—make up in the minds to be different, the community will follow suit. As members of a community, we are ultimately only capable of changing ourselves and then inviting others to be changed as a result. The revival we seek must be cultivated in ourselves before it can ever be experienced in community.
I also picked up on something else. Our participation in public worship—however constructed—is unfathomably radical. It is a protest against the prevailing powers of this age that seek to dehumanize and degrade. Worship is a resistance against narratives of inescapable divisiveness, estrangement, isolation, and secularism. When we worship, whether we know it or not, we are representing the entire Christian community gathered across the world in storefronts, cathedrals, chapels, dorm rooms, and taverns. We are also connected to Christians who have gathered across time in catacombs, houses, in the desert, and on mountaintops. Public worship is a declaration of the reality of a new world, one that is all around us and constantly adventing upon us. When we worship God as a community of believers, we affirm our belief in the freedom of that new world and our freedom from the bondage of this one.
When we hear the story of the Exodus, we often hear God telling Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Let my people go!” What we miss is the statement connected to that demand, a statement that puts that demand into context. God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh, “Let my people go, so that they may worship me in the wilderness” (Exod. 7:16, emphasis added). This demand is repeated several times and is met with Pharaoh’s obstinate refusal to relinquish his control over the Hebrew people. At one point in the story, after the fourth plague, Pharaoh makes a bargain. He will allow the Israelites to make a sacrifice within the land of Egypt. Moses rejects the bargain, stating that the kind of worship that the Israelites are being asked to do would be “offensive” to Egyptians. Pharaoh comes back with another bargain: the Israelites could go outside of Egypt, but not too far. Moses seems to agree to this demand, but as soon as he leaves, Pharaoh changes his mind. He seems to know that there is something about this God of the Israelites that won’t be satisfied with momentary freedom. This exchange reveals something about the nature of worshiping the God of the Exodus—whatever else God seems to be concerned about, God is concerned about freedom. Social movements through history have shown us that once you fan the flames of freedom in the hearts of the oppressed, it may dim, but it will never be extinguished. Pharaoh knew this. Dictators and tyrants throughout human history have known this. Aware that the jig was up, God’s demand of Pharaoh by way of Moses changes after that exchange. “Let my people go, so that they may worship me.” God didn’t need to stipulate “in the wilderness” anymore because it became clear that to worship God was to leave slavery and oppression behind.
Looking back, I wonder if the transformation both churches desired—and I think might be desired across much of Western Christianity—can be found in understanding worship as the exchange of one world—one that is dying—for another—one that is being made new. The Exodus narrative teaches us that the worship of God requires a shift in location. It is difficult, impossible even, to authentically worship God while participating—even passively—in dehumanizing, oppressive, and violent systems. To worship God, we must be willing to stand outside of those systems, to see them for what they are, to see the ways they are doomed to destruction, and then, if we must reenter them, to do so with greater clarity about the ways the mission of God calls us to engage them. If this is how we understand public liturgy, then it can never simply be “the work of the people.” It has to be something more or else it is powerless to stand against the otherwise overwhelming tide of slavery that mutates and manifests in every generation.
The idea of liturgy as the “work of the people” was popularized during the liturgical renewal movement of the mid-twentieth century when churches became interested in expanding the voices present within the Eucharist beyond those called to ordered ministry. The wisdom behind this move is that worship is something we all do. Prayer and worship aren’t the sole possession of a few ordained people with the rest of us left only to passively participate as spectators. As our current prayer book rightly states, “The entire Christian assembly participates” in the worship of the Church (BCP, 13). Ruth Meyers astutely points out that although the purpose behind liturgy as “the work of the people” was to decenter liturgy as the work of the clergy of which the people are only spectators, “by not also turning our attention beyond ourselves to the need of the world for God’s reconciling love, continuing to think of liturgy as ‘the work of the people’ impoverishes our celebrations” (Missional Worship Worshipful Mission, 29).
In its original Greek context, “liturgy” or leitourgia referred to the public work a citizen might do for the community, particularly in terms of a public works project sponsored by an affluent citizen to benefit the masses who were not as affluent. As Meyers points out, over time the word gradually assumed a more spiritual tone with it eventually coming to mean “service, whether rendered to God or to the community” (Missional Worship, 27). A truly Christian understanding of liturgy reaches its climax when we understand Jesus as liturgy. Jesus is God’s leitourgia for the sake of the world. In his self-offering, he was giving something to humanity that we desperately needed but had no way of getting on our own—reconciliation. If this is true, if sending the Son of God into the world for the sake of the renewal of Creation is God’s greatest “public works project,” then what might it mean to understand ourselves—our worship, our prayer, or lives of discipleship—as continued participation in God’s continued self-offering? What if every single time we gathered in Christian community to pray and worship, we also continued to make present the mystery of God’s love for our communities, for those in need of loving community, for those in need of reconciliation, for those whose lives are in desperate need of meaning? What if we became aware of the power that animates the Christian community and the grace that compels us to bear witness, not only to the resurrection 2,000 years ago, but to the pulses of newness that emanate from the empty tomb? What if worship led us to ask one question over and over again: how is my freedom in God, given to me by God’s own self-offering, inviting me to share that freedom with others by giving myself away for the sake of those I don’t even know?
We’d have revival.
In response to my community’s need for formation in the prayer book tradition, I invited a few members to read Derek Olsen’s Inwardly Digest. As a runner, I appreciated Olsen’s use of athletic metaphors for the discipline of prayer and worship. Like training for a 5K, developing a vibrant devotional life requires constancy and commitment, even when it becomes dull. “You can’t manipulate the Spirit,” Olsen writes, “and you can’t manipulate long-term formation. The point of a solid devotional practice is not momentary surges of emotion; long-term formation and transformation is measured in years and decades. Sometimes good and worthwhile devotional practices