Worship in the Shape of Scripture

Revised and Updated

Russell F Mitman

• Publisher: Pilgrim Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780829821161
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Worship in the Shape of Scripture—first published in 2001—is a practical resource for worship planners and leaders that provides guidelines for applying homiletic concepts to all areas of worship planning. Due to its success, it has been revised and updated.Mitman demonstrates how the structure of worship is (or can be) rooted in Scripture itself. He raises essential questions and reflects on broad themes for worshiping congregations to consider for the sake of faithful praise. Foreword by Marva J. Dawn.

ONE

Releasing the Word in Worship

“Creating Sermons in the Shape of Scripture” is the subtitle of a collection of articles and sermons by several homileticians edited nearly a quarter century ago by Don Wardlaw under the title Preaching Biblically. In the introduction to the collection, Wardlaw wrote,

The form of the contemporary sermon necessarily works from union with its content, namely, the Word of God in Scripture. . . . The sermon shape should derive itself from the content it seeks to embody and express. The passage of Scripture undergirding the sermon carries implicit signals for ways the sermon could form itself. Sermon form, then, becomes a hermeneutic in itself, releasing the scriptural Word among the hearers through the liberated expression of the preacher.¹

Wardlaw was writing for preachers about preaching. Yet, I ask, is there also a liturgical hermeneutic that will release the scriptural Word among the community through the structure and expressions of the total worship event? Is it also possible to create entire worship services in the shape of Scripture? Are there inherent signals in the scriptural passages that suggest ways in which liturgical expressions and actions could form themselves?

In the working lexicons of most pastors, parishioners, and seminary professors, preaching is conceived of as a praxis of ministry devoted to the delivery of sermons. “Preaching” to those engaged actively in the art means first of all — depending on denominational, ethnic, or local traditions — putting together something to say in about twenty minutes on Sunday mornings. Or, to those more passively engaged in the preaching moment, it means putting up with something of about twenty minutes in length that is identified in some church bulletins as “sermon” or “homily” or “message” or by any other synonym designed to imply that this should be a not-too-long, but long-enough, and certainly a pleasantly endurable experience. Further, “preacher” is the one designated to do this twenty-minute thing, although in some traditions “preacher” also involves a longer job description. And in the places where preachers are prepared for preaching, most often homiletics is taught as the art of sermonizing.

Until the escapades of some TV evangelists in the latter days of the twentieth century tainted public perceptions, America has had a love affair with preachers. America’s moral conscience has been shaped by preaching. Today in certain ethnic and racial communities, even amid a pervasive secularization of the culture, preachers command a shaping presence. The central role of the pulpit — if one reads American history from an East Coast perspective — is preserved in the architecture of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Protestant meetinghouses and churches that were duplicated from eastern ports to the western prairies. Although there were some practicalities arising from the lack of central heating and electronic sound amplification that forced architectural consequences, in most churches the pulpit was central because it was for preaching that people came to church on Sundays. Sometimes sermons were long on Sundays, and deacons with feathers on the ends of poles were deputized to awaken the dozing faithful.

Then, by the middle of the nineteenth century, something new began to capture the American Protestant mind and heart — something my mentor, the late James Hastings Nichols, who taught church history at Princeton Theological Seminary, labeled “Romanticism.”² Romanticism has received many definitions, but perhaps one that fits best in discussions on worship and preaching has to do with romanticism as an appreciation for those realities that lie on the experiential rather than on the doctrinal side of the theological spectrum. Inspired by Schleiermacher’s translation of religion into experience, the emphasis in worship praxis in some churches after 1850 moved from the conceptual to the perceptual. The word “liturgy” began to enter the vocabularies of some Protestant seminaries and their seminarians. While the Civil War was being fought on Piedmont battlefields, the war over liturgy began to be waged in seminaries and churches by those who were for it and those who were against it. Those who were for it were labeled “high church”; those against it, “low church.” A new kind of historicism enabled professors and pastors to look more benignly at the thousand years between the patristic period and the Reformation, and they rediscovered some liturgical practices that the prejudices of former generations had forgotten or anathematized.

The architectural consequences of the romantic movement were that stained glass began to replace colonial clear panes, center pulpits were pushed off to the sides, “altars” replaced communion tables and were nailed against the east walls, and worship took on a linear perspective colored more often by aesthetic than liturgical motivations. Whereas the colonial-period churches often were configured for congregational seating around the pulpit, which often was on the long wall, by the late nineteenth century church naves were getting longer, narrower, darker, and more European in their furnishings. Chancels sometimes were added to extend the meeting rooms, and pews were reconfigured perpendicular to the long wall to fit aesthetically the stretched-out space. Especially during the church-building boom following World War II, many sanctuaries were built or renovated according to what the prevailing architectural fashion called “altar-centered,” that is, with the altar or table against the back wall. Preachers began to appear in ecclesiastical attire, depending on how much was tolerated by denominational and congregational canons of appropriateness, and sometimes they even oriented their prayers toward the back-wall altars. Choirs, too, were vested and were divided by cathedral-like chancels across which both choirs sang and organ pipes spoke at each other without the acknowledgment that there was a congregation gathered somewhere at the other end of the building. The goal was the creation of a “church-y” feel and look.

The vernacularization of the mass by the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s spilled over into Protestantism. Protestant liturgical scholarship rediscovered that eucharist is not an occasional appendage to the worship service but integral to each Sunday’s celebration of Word and Sacrament. Roman Catholic priests all at once found themselves needing to preach and sometimes asked their Protestant clergy friends if they could borrow commentaries on the Scriptures, some of which were known to have exceeded their shelf-life and were layered with decades of dust! The liturgies on both sides began to reveal that the ecumenical church had recovered an understanding of the unity of the Word read from the Bible and preached from the pulpit. Clergy and congregations were surprised to find that in some of the denominationally sanctioned liturgies the sermon got pushed early in the order of things, right after the reading of Scripture.

Accompanying the liturgical activity that produced a plethora of new denominational prayer books, library shelves of alternative and experimental liturgies also were printed in all sizes, shapes, and colors. “Relevant” was the catchword of the 1970s, and it was felt by many that even the new denominational liturgies had not taken the liturgical revolution far enough to enable worship to be relevant to a generation labeled “flower children.” One Pennsylvania church began to advertise its early service on Sunday as “relevant worship” and prompted some of us to ask whether the second service therefore was “irrelevant”! Other churches began advertising “contemporary” worship services utilizing alternative musical styles and liturgical expressions that in more recent times have been adapted and canonized by the church-growth movement. Worship leaders began to be bombarded with all sorts of new liturgical materials designed to make the Sunday morning experience more appealing to a rebellious generation that had little love for tradition. Paperback collections of new songs and prayers appeared in all sorts of strange sizes and colors. Some congregations published — frequently without securing copyright permission — their own three-ring-binder alternative hymnals. One pastor neighbor, overwhelmed with the flood of new resources, pleadingly asked me over the backyard fence, “But how do I put it all together?”

Although the liturgical renewal movement had discovered the unity of Word and Sacrament, sermons based on old assumptions often were simply inserted into the slots the new orders of worship assigned. Then in 1971 an obscure professor of Bible in a small southwestern seminary published a book titled As One without Authority. In the introduction to this small volume Fred Craddock asks, “The Bible is rich in forms of expression, . . . whereas most sermons, which seek to communicate the messages of that treasury of materials, are all essentially the same form. Why should . . . the multitude of needs in the congregation be brought together in one unvarying mold, and that copied from Greek rhetoricians of centuries ago?”³ Craddock’s call for a turnaround in preaching was the harbinger of a larger renaissance in preaching that has been occurring ever since and that has opened the way, I maintain, to some new approaches to crafting and doing liturgy as well.

For centuries preaching in the Western world had been premised on Enlightenment understandings of human reason, that is, on “marshaling an argument in logical sequence, coordinating and subordinating points by the canons of logic, all in a careful appeal to the reasonable hearer.”⁴ Today, when information is readily accessible electronically in the privacy of one’s own Internet browser, “hearer” may be transformed into “reader.” Professor Gail Ramshaw muses in her introductory textbook for the study of Christian worship, “If religion is largely information, then we can access it without having to assemble with others on Sunday, and much in our society suggests that information is the road we must take to reach what is good.”⁵ If the religious quest is perceived merely as the private pursuit of information, then it is still captive to the same rationalism that scissored much of the New Testament from Thomas Jefferson’s Bible and reduced much of mainline American Protestant worship to exercises in positive thinking and lectures in right living.

The work begun by Craddock and continued by others has been to wean preachers away from trying to deduce the truth of God by rational argumentation, to an inductive approach uniting both the form and the content of the sermon and centering on the listeners’ (plural and corporate) experience of the Scriptures. Gail O’Day writes,

Preachers readily turn to Scripture for the subject of sermons, but that is not enough. The Bible offers much more than the subject matter for preaching. Preachers also need to turn to Scripture for the decisive, shaping language of sermons. . . . To preach the gospel, we must know and be shaped by the primary language of our faith. We must enter into the language of Scripture, listen to what and how that language speaks about God and our relationship to God. We must listen to how the Bible itself proclaims the gospel and allow our preaching to be reshaped by the Bible’s preaching. . . . I want preachers to think about the Bible not as a source to be mined for its content, but as a model that can provide both warrants and metaphors for what preachers do.⁶

The task of the preacher as interpreter, Craddock explains, “is not to transform, explain, apply, or otherwise build bridges from the text to the listeners. Rather, the task is to release the text upon the listener’s ear by translating it into the language of the listener.”⁷ “It will be true,” Barbara Brown Taylor affirms, “not at the level of explanation but at the level of experience.”⁸ She continues,

There is another way to preach, in which the preacher addresses the congregation not as mute students but as active partners in the process of discovering God’s word. The sermon traces the preacher’s own process of discovery, inviting the congregation to come along and providing them with everything they need to make their own finds. The movement of the sermon . . . finally leads both preacher and congregation into the presence of God, a place that cannot be explained but only experienced.⁹

Fred Craddock, Barbara Brown Taylor, James Forbes, Barbara Lundblad, and others, both in their discourses about preaching and in their own sermons, prompted me to ponder: Is there another way to do liturgics? Can the same mode of inductive interpretation in the creating of sermons also inform the crafting of liturgy in the shape of Scripture? Can the same process that leads toward an assembly’s encounter with the Word of God in the sermon also enable them to experience God’s presence throughout the whole of the worship event? Is there a way that the discoveries in the field of homiletics also can inform the tasks about which liturgics are concerned so that the two disciplines, often seen as separate and even warring against each other, can be brought together in the common task that worship leaders face each week in the preparation for worship? These questions initiate the conversation that is the subject of this book.

Scripture as the Text of Worship

The primary texts that are the concern of homiletics and liturgics are not just any old texts from the classics in literature nor from the most up-to-date list of best sellers nor from the codex that the latest “ism” has declared to be politically correct. The source-texts for worship and preaching are those texts canonized as the Scriptures in the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments. One seminary professor was asked by a student, “But why must I preach on the Bible?” Apparently the student either was absent from the church history class when the Reformation concept of sola scriptura was discussed or had not yet encountered Professor John Burgess’s definitive treatise Why Scripture Matters.¹⁰ The texts that confront us are the texts of Scripture that the community has accepted as the regula fidei,¹¹ and the presupposition is that these texts will become the source for this encounter with the Word of God in the community’s worship conversation with the texts. Throughout the history of the Christian experience there have been unresolved debates over what books should be included in or excluded from the canon. Depending on which doctrinal and/or ecclesiological camp a certain tradition within the church finds itself, the counting of canonical books varies. To enable the church to deal with the historical and ecumenical tension over the canon, Burgess provides the following advice:

We are not free to alter the canon on our own; any alteration must be a confessional act of the church. But [at the same time] we must always be open to the possibility that we have misjudged which writings truly set forth Christ. God’s self-revelation is larger than our efforts to define it canonically.¹²

Obviously in the community’s liturgical actions these canonical texts will be juxtaposed with other texts — hymns, homilies, prayers, and other verbal and nonverbal expressions. Yet the normative and definitive texts will be those of Holy Scripture. The Scottish tradition of the “beadle” who carries the Bible to the pulpit at the beginning of worship is a nonverbal way of declaring which texts the church considers holy and therefore will be opened for this commun...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Dedication
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Preface to the Revised and Updated Edition
• 1. Releasing the Word in Worship
• 2. Engaging the Scriptures
• 3. Shaping the Event
• 4. Transposing the Texts
• 5. Orchestrating Worship
• 6. Doing Liturgy
• 7. The Seven Last Words
• Appendix 1: Music for Congregational Use
• Appendix 2: Accompaniments
• Notes