Pre-Reformation Worship

This morning I was listening to Andy Crouch interacting with a group of worship instructors. One of the observations he made concerned John Calvin's view of worship as being the action of the Holy Spirit moving through the actions of the people. At the time of the reformation, medieval worship had pretty much become the domain of the priesthood — the priests did everything and the people were merely spectators. Part of the reformation was a return of worship to the people, both in terms of a return of the Word to the people by the use of vernacular translations and expository preaching, and a return of acts of worship.

The observation Andy made was that in many churches today, the situation is very similar to pre-reformation worship — the priests have simply exchanged their vestments for microphones.

In looking back over almost 50 years of church attendance, I can see that there has indeed been a slow but steady movement toward this "pre-reformation" worship. At the time, I didn't notice it. Perhaps that was due in part to the so-called "frog in a kettle" syndrome — if things change slowly enough, you don't notice them until you're dead. But perhaps it was also due in part to the fact that for much of that time I was one of the "priesthood" — I didn't notice the ways in which our ways of "worship" was both permitting and promoting the disengagement of the people from the act of worship and turning them largely into spectators, because I was still busily engaged.

But it is not only in the acts of worship that we have moved back to a pre-reformation state. The place of the Word in our worship has also changed — where once the Scripture was the main thing, and the sermon was its servant (even if done poorly or boringly) as were the songs, now the talk and the music are the main thing and the scripture, if present, is their servant.

Part of this movement may be related to another observation that Andy made: it is almost impossible to enculturate an incarnate message in a culture that is itself not incarnate. North American culture in the 21st century has no real flesh and bones meat (in greek: carne) to it — it's a mass culture that exists almost only on a screen.

Of course, Western culture has not really been incarnate for a long time — before the advent of television and other mass culture media, much of Western culture had become largely cerebral — certainly Western theology has been almost exclusively cerebral and not incarnate for a very long time. The good, if late, impulse to bring theology into the indigenous culture has occurred precisly at the point when that culture has moved to becoming even less engaged with the materially "real".

Between the two factors, we've become unable to see any connection between an old and very earthy story and the virtual reality of today's culture. So just as the pre-reformation priest kept the Bible away from the people — convinced as they were that the people could never understand it, and didn't want to anyway — so too many of our present day priests are careful to keep the Bible safely measured out in small doses, pre-digested for the masses.

For me, the question now is this: do I try to rejoin the "priesthood" in order to gain some measure of participative worship, or do I instead stay with the people and try in some way to subvert the trend of the past 50 years? To be honest, I have no idea which direction to go.

Kyrie eleison