Reciting mindlessly prayers written by a dead guy hundreds of years ago feels so ... inauthentic
Granted, no one has ever said precisely that to me, but I have heard that sentiment in more than a few forms over the years. Lately I've been reading James K.A. Smith's You are what you love, which is a more up-to-date and accessibly-written version of his Desiring the Kingdom, which I read in April. Anyway, I think I'll write a review post or two about the latter book in particular, but today I wanted to pick up something from the former that really stood out to me. (All my quotations today are from You are what you love)
Smith is talking about worship, i.e. the gathered practice of the church, and how this is/ought to be a set of practices that recalibrates our hearts to their true end/goal/desire/love - God. This is a counter-formation and a re-formation of our beings, over and against the way rival practices orient and calibrate our hearts to different visions of the good life, of what humans are meant to live for.
And so, one of his starting points is to ask the question of who is the primary agent in worship, that is, is it God who's at work in and on us, or is it we who are the locus and centre of activity. For Smith, that answer is that it is/ought to be primarily about God, God's story, God as the primary agent. And against this we can see that many of the patterns of contemporary evangelical worship are driven by a conceptual framework, mostly implicit, in which I am the primary actor. It's not, as he says, simply about contemporary versus traditional, new songs versus hymns, etc.. In fact, if we think of it as simply about styles or forms, we can miss that the question is a little deeper than that.
When we tacitly assume that we are the primary actors in worship, then we also assume that worship is basically an expressive endeavor. p74
This is the first rung on the ladder of his argument, and it's worth following with me. Because I think very many of us do, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, think that when we gather for worship, especially in the singing, we are expressing worship to God. There is a sense in which this is true, but there's another sense in which this is leading us astray. Because we live in a culture that has a very, very high value placed on expressing one's self identity. So, in all sorts of other parts of life we "express ourselves", mostly through capitalism consumption of brand products, but anyway.
When we think of worship in this way, then we also assume that the most important characteristic of our worship is that it should be sincere. pp. 74-75
Rung #2. We are conditioned and trained to think that expression has to be sincere, because otherwise it's not really a true expression of our innermost beings, our hearts, "who I am". Hence my made-up quotation at the start. How could something written down by truly "authentic" if it's not spontaneous. This, let me say, is an endemic belief among certain groups of charismatics and pentecostals who are tacitly committed to the belief that the Holy Spirit can only work in the unplanned and spontaneous, and that if you plan to much, you crowd out the Spirit and leave no room for his work. Really? Like, the third person of the Trinity can be stymied by overplanning?
Is the recital of creeds, prayers, etc., open to abuse in the form of rote-speech by those whose hearts are not in it? Absolutely. I don't want to dismiss that, nor do I think Smith does either. But the running to the opposite extreme leads us to #3:
But this creates an interesting challenge because sincerity and authenticity tend to generate a penchant for novelty. p75
So the expressive paradigm demands sincerity and authenticity, which leads to the need to always be 'new' and hip and relevant and the effect of this becomes that we continually discard anything old and traditional and stale, and where do we source the 'new'? We continually remake worship to contemporary cultural patterns. But when we do that, we are (i) never cool, (ii) shaping our worship around the liturgies of alternative narratives. E.g. we are far too prone to adopt practices that implicitly cater to consumerist capitalism, turning church into a brand commodity designed to sell us a self-fulfilling experience of church.
so many of our worship services are little more than Jesufied versions of secular liturgies. p.79
When you get to the top of this ladder with me, I hope you see what I see. It's not just about seeing the value in traditional services or in liturgy per se, it's recognising the how and why of expressivism as a category that explains why we so often feel that liturgy 'doesn't work' for us, and also recognising that this itself is a dangerous place to be, because what is driving that view is a set of practices that places me at the centre of worship, and the end, and God at neither.