Mission Shaped Liturgy?

Matt Stone picks up a nice section from Andras Lovas on Mission-Shaped Liturgy, in which there is this:

worship leaders, being preachers in a more traditional setting or musicians utilizing contemporary songs, are put in the centre, in front of the congregation. This placement on the stage might bring the false notion that worship is the act and performance of the leader for an audience. It happens even more drastically when worship is confused with evangelism. When the church's worship is put into the service of evangelism it becomes people-centred and loses the correct focus, which is the glory, love, grace and justice of God. The church does not worship God because it wants to attract non-Christians, even if worship does have a missionary dimension.

The problem is so often the slide from recognising that there can be a missionary dimension to worship to trying to build on that. As soon as that happens, it is only a short hop to turning worship into a presentation to 'outsiders'. We have to recognise the principle of obliquity applies here -there are some things that you can't 'get' by aiming at; they are only by products of something else. So the secret is to design liturgy/worship to enable Christians to honour God and to renew our commitment to God, and to do so in a way that connects with the wider cultural context. If we do that, the oblique result can be that it is worship that 'makes sense' to outsiders and which enables them to glimpse the reality of God in their Christian friends and companions. Of course, we need to be wary of the difficulty that any group of people can develop a set of in-house norms and behaviours which can begin to lose connection with the wider culture. That's where a danger sets in which can give rise to worship sliding into presentation -that is from God focus to non-Christian people orientation. This happens, I suspect, because there starts to be an awareness that 'full-on' Christian worship in the subcultural idiom as it has evolved, may not be as culturally resonant with outsiders as to make an easy-enough understanding of (or at least comfort with) what is taking place. So the urge to explain and to invite them starts to take centre-stage and Christians find themselves being 'fed' by a string of evangelistic messages. No wonder we have a problem with developing disciples!

Of course, this does not mean we should 'design' worship without a mind to the wider cultural context. But we should not design with a view to speak to that wider cultural context. We are supposed to design worship to enable people to relate corporately with God and to receive, corporately, from God (whether that be a word or a gift or some other boon or rebuke). The implication of the latter perspective is that we recognise what people bring into worship, including from their cultural formation, and try to help them to 'speak' their culture before and with God. This in turn helps the formation of mature Christians who have a 'vocabulary' for relating to and understanding God which can resonate in the beyond-church culture. That is probably the most important obliquity. And note, it comes from seeing worship's place in Christian formation and by keeping the central focus on relating to God.
Journeys In Between: Mission Shaped Liturgy:

Ps. The Hopeful Amphibian post referenced in my original post, if you follow back to it, seems to have disappeared. 'Obliquity' has a couple of meanings, there's an astronomical meaning (the 'proper' one) and the sense I'm using it in this post and can be seen more fully explained here.