A few years ago, CPT's Bulletin of Ecclesial Theology focused on liturgy, worship, and spiritual formation, inspired by James K. A. Smith's Cultural Liturgies series. Smith's premise is very simple: Christianity is not a set of doctrines but an identity. Identities are formed by cultural immersion. Corporate worship was always intended by God to be a locus of Christian/biblical culture. More churches should appreciate that.
In other words, people are shaped by their experience of participation in corporate worship just as they are shaped by any other cultural participation. People who operate successful stores understand this, and thus they intentionally design everything from the layout to the color scheme to the lighting to the checkout aisle. Shouldn't churches care as much (or more) about the cultural experience they create for everyone who joins them for corporate worship?
Obviously, the answer should be yes. And most churches already do this in some spaces. For example, let's consider the sermon. My guess is that just about everyone who reads this site is familiar with homiletics or rhetoric -- you know that communication is more than content, that someone who reads a transcript of your sermon will have a different experience than someone who is present when you preach it. The act of preaching helps establish meaning. Every preacher understands and appreciates that.
Then why don't we have the same appreciation for the rest of our corporate worship service and the environment in which that service takes place? We should, because our service and environment shapes the culture of our church.
To many pastors, the worship service outside of the sermon is a kind of black box. Elements are listed on a bulletin, buttons are pushed in a tech booth, people sit down and stand up, then everyone goes home. The extent of pastoral leadership is a review of the titles of the songs and a check to ensure that enough time has been allocated for the sermon. That's not good enough. (To be sure, some pastors are much more involved in the planning of a service, but involvement does not always equal leadership.)
Think about your church's culture or identity. It is heavily shaped by the values of your leadership and congregation. Ideally, you have done the hard work of aligning those practiced values with what your leadership structure believes they should be. (My church, like many, has recently gone through the revitalization process -- clarifying core values, analyzing our calendar and budget, creating a long-term plan for campus improvements and maintenance.) And every time you consider a new ministry, a staff change, or even new paint, you think about how it reflects (and affects) your church culture.
All I'm suggesting is that you should do the same thing with your corporate worship service.
Your worship service has a "look and feel". It may or may not reflect your church's values and culture. If you want it to, you need to employ something I'm calling a worship hermeneutic. In biblical hermeneutics, we learn the tools we can use to study and understand the biblical text. Our worship hermeneutic does the same thing for the experience of our worship service. But here's the additional step -- whereas we cannot change the biblical text, we can change our worship service (or, at least some of us can), and thus our worship hermeneutic is also the tool by which we apply our church's values and culture to our worship planning and design. Does that sound complicated? Well, it can be. Aligning your worship service with your desired culture should not be as simple as changing your set list or projector (if you think it is, I'll list some books below that should convince you otherwise). Further, the inherent subjectivity of the process can be frustrating.
But let's start here. It should not be hard for you to take on the mantle of a guest and imagine your way through last Sunday's worship service. In your mind, park your car, come to the sanctuary, find a seat. What do you see? Who talked to you and what about? What "happens" during the service? What rubrics are used? (For this purpose, "rubric" refers to the "how" of the actions taken.) What priorities are implied? What vision is cast? What do you walk away with?
Once you've done that, create a parallel list of questions. Think about the answer to those questions from the perspective of your church's values and culture. What kind of experience do you want a guest to have as they arrive, walk through your campus, and enter the sanctuary? What interactions do you hope they have? What should they take away from their experience? What do you want them to learn about your church, your tradition, your perspective? That's essentially how a worship hermeneutic works. The extreme value of such a hermeneutic is that it helps you understand what questions you should be asking. For example, if the Lordship of Christ is a core value for you, perhaps you should ask if people go home thinking about how good the music was or how great our Savior is. If the Great Commission is a core value, perhaps you should ask how people are reoriented outwardly during the service. And so on.
Through basic intentionality, you can help your church's corporate worship experience reflect your church's values and culture. That is the application of your worship hermeneutic.
But how do you come up with it in the first place?
If you want to follow the rabbit hole all the way to its bitter end, I recommend to you the wonderfully obscure field called liturgical hermeneutics. It took inspiration from speech act theory (J. L. Austin), phenomenological hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur), and philosophical hermeneutics (H. G. Gadamer). But it also never really took off. You might think of the field as the study of written liturgical texts, but it was basically created to identify the rules of interpreting the performance of worship. The written texts (if used) are a part of that, but the physical actions, the dress, the environment, the pacing, and everything else are a part of what was to be interpreted. It's so subjective that it never got the traction it needed.
Authors continue to approach the idea from their own perspective. Two in particular demonstrate the enormity of the task (and its criticality). Gordon Lathrop uses "liturgical theology" in his books, Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology, Holy Ground: A Liturgical Cosmology, and Holy People: A Liturgical Ecclesiology, to answer all of the questions inherent in a liturgical hermeneutic from his Lutheran perspective. Jamie Smith uses "cultural liturgies" in his books, Desiring the Kingdom: Worship, Worldview, and Cultural Formation, Imagining the Kingdom: How Worship Works, and Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology, to talk about the same things from a wider, philosophical approach. I strongly recommend those books, but they won't necessarily help you identify the worship hermeneutic for your church. There's just not a one-size-fits-all checklist!
But that doesn't mean we give up before we start!
Jamie Smith focuses on concepts like "practice" and "habit" for the goal of Christian formation. I say we use practice and habit as the starting point for learning and applying a worship hermeneutic in our unique churches.
Now, let me submit that I'm a part of a Southern Baptist congregation, and I'm approaching this from the perspective of a worship leader and not a pastor (I live in the nuts and bolts). In the Free Church tradition, that means freedom of worship -- that God has placed responsibility for worship on each of us individually, which is expressed in our fundamental unit of the Christian life, our church family. In my church, that means I have a lot of "say" in our corporate worship planning. If you're not in the Free Church tradition, this might seem strange, but I can decide every element of the so-called order of worship (songs, scriptures, prayers, etc.) and who does what. It's a lot of power (and Southern Baptists have been slow to admit that we have not provided the best training in the proper use of that power; it's not uncommon for a Baptist church to find a nearby college student who can play the guitar and give him/her complete freedom in putting together the order of worship). For me, studying texts means studying the lyrics of potential sons for the purpose of deciding if it is appropriate for my church to sing in a worship service.
To establish the right "habits" in worship, I "practiced" applying my church's core values to every decision that went into the worship service:
the elements of the order of worship,
the technology reinforcing those elements,
the people leading those elements,
the environment shared by the congregation,
the symbols present in worship,
and so on (timings, appliances, travel, and everything else).
My goal was first to establish how/why things were the way they were when I started the process, second to establish how things were interpreted/understood by the congregation, and third to establish the gaps between what was and what should be. A lot of church members gave input to that process. And then we began the very slow process of making changes -- but those changes were only made when I could clearly explain how the change reflected our church's values. And we are still just scratching the surface after years or progress.
Do you need to replace your bass amp? Your worship hermeneutic can help you. Do you need to replace the bulbs in your projector? Your worship hermeneutic can help you. Given enough time, applying your value to worship decisions will become a habit. Describing your habit is your worship hermeneutic (and obviously that won't be a simple checklist).
To close, let me turn my attention to the pastors who read this article. You need to work with whichever person(s) responsible for the nuts and bolts of your worship services. And this doesn't have to be hard. Make sure those persons understands the core values of your church. Evaluate their knowledge by asking them to explain the process behind certain decisions. Over time, they will understand your perspective on church values, and you will understand how those values can apply to a worship service.
Warning: appreciate the difference between your church's values and your personal preferences. Failure to do so will derail your church's worship ministry.
This resource is part of the series Made Like Him: Reflections on Formation and Gathered Worship. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Matt Ward is an Associate Pastor at First Baptist Church in Thompson, GA. He holds a PhD in Baptist and Free Church Studies from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is a member of the St. John Fellowship of the CPT.
