Emerging Worship is about Who Gets to Play

Ryan Bolger starts a recent post with the above title this way:

I remarked recently that I had attended a near lifeless traditional church. More recently, I attended a traditional service that was filled with life. What was the difference? It really came down to who got to play and who didn't.

For me, this issue of who gets to play, and when and where they get to play, has been a huge part of the re-shaping of my own understanding of worship. The other issue is whether we worship God together as one people, or simply come together to stand alone before God.

In a recent listening to a Regent summer school course by Valentine Cunningham entitled The Making of the Protestant Mind, the idea of man as an individual alone before God was developed as part of the emerging Protestant ethos immediately following the Reformation and during the growth of the Enlightenment era. In reflection, I could see just how ubiquitous that idea was in my spiritual environment and just how much that idea had shaped (or mis-shaped) my own personal and spiritual development. Perhaps that is why I find the liturgical emphasis of worshipping together as one people so refreshing and full of life.

One of the things I'm still reflecting on and trying to come to grips with, though, is the obvious value my current community places on having a space where you don't have to play — where you can come as you are and not be required to do anything or be anything that you are not, or that you may think you are not. That characteristic has been an important initial aspect in the spiritual path of many of our people, and is understandably deeply appreciated and highly treasured. And I certainly want to honour that.

And yet, I'm seeing that there is a very fine line between having a space in which you don't have to play and having a space in which only the elites get to play — and many of the ways of doing things that support the former contribute to the latter. In the long haul, though, I'm afraid that regardless of whether the format of worship is liturgical or freeform, traditional or contemporary, seeker oriented or believer oriented, worship in which only the elites get to play is going to have a strong tendency toward becoming lifeless. Which, of course, means that it will no longer truly be worship of the very living God.

Does the brokenness of our current world mean that true acceptance and true community in worship is something we can only long for in the age to come? Or is there a way that we can create a space that is truly welcoming to those for whom church and religion had been abandoned as being both lifeless and oppressive — and who therefore resist anything that smacks of ritual or requirement — while still allowing for, and indeed encouraging, a true coming together as one people in our worship of God, worship in which the all the people get to play?