Nouslife: Worship as community Drama -a review

03 August 2019

Worship as community Drama -a review

One of the premises of this book is that we should look at what people do and how they experience worship, not just do theoretical mind games about it where we think and talk over the heads of those who are the majority of participants in worship. It is how the texts and actions that are authorised or imposed by wider bodies are actually 'received', inhabited, resisted or overturned that is important and indeed the reflexivity and interaction between those things. And that creates the possibility that what is intended by a liturgical committee or a writer may not be how it is understood. This liturgical point is the reflex of interpreting cultural artefacts more generally not as top-down endowments of meaning but as bottom-up improvisations of meaning. Until we understand that as worship -leaders we run the risks of disconnection, formalism, petty rubricism and /or misunderstanding. Implicitly, this set of studies of worship occasions involves a kind of study of the events as cultural artefacts. And in my book that's good. It's not the only thing we might want to do or to say, but it is a necessary and often neglected thing to do.

I really enjoyed the phenomenological approach. Looking at concrete acts of worship and what actually goes on rather than seeing them as basically texts which happen to be 'performed' or through the lenses of theology or of the liturgical correctness police. This is important because in reality worship is the intersection of texts, people who have a cultural and church background, theology, practicalities and artefactual availabilities. It was interesting too to see the acts of worship being considered as having a place in discipleship or Christian formation of communities and individuals.

The start was with televised RC masses and these are a really interesting window into theology and a set of questions. From there, a not illogical move to masses in Notre Dame cathedral with the further issues of congregation and setting and explicitly raising the question of faith and culture. Since both were televisually accessed there is also a helpful discussion of the cultural differences in setting and also in theology relating to the channels each was aired by. I found this compare and contrast of RC output in the USA and in France also quite enlightening about the diversity of RC approaches. That said, there remains a fundamental critique of the continued reproduction of hierarchical attitudes through deployment of signs and symbols in the liturgies.

The presentation and consideration of research by Willow Creek church in church life and spiritual growth was really interesting and helpful in introducing a way of thinking about and assessing the discipleship effects of different congregational ways of operating both in worship and more widely -including decision-making and authority. The case-study involving a radical RC USA-black-culture church was eye-opening and raises many questions beyond the scope of the book. It does serve as a great illustration of brave creativity in enacting a thorough understanding of a culture using its own richness to determine how an inherited tradition from another culture might morph to serve the expression of worship in another. And therefore of the kind of challenges this can pose to inherited ways of being church or doing church. Because of the author's own personal history, the RC Church is the test case for the discussion of authority, church governance and congregational participation. The implicit message, as it came over to me, is that centralised authority is a dead hand on participation and Christian formation.

There was some observation of papal masses which were contextualised in the wider picture of RCC politics. I wasn't always convinced that it was all needed to help understand the masses though it does serve later in the book to help understand the way that liturgical correctness works in the RCC. On the other hand, discussion of camera shots here and in other places is good in helping to understand the way that messages about the mass are also conveyed by these means of editorial choices. There was also a consideration of the way that crowds responded to and, in fact, made use of the cameras and, indeed, smartphones.

In essence, this is an academic thesis modified for publication. That's okay, but it isn't a popular work and there is a good bit of space given at the start to methodology, justifying the approach and explaining the format and process of presentation. As a part-time academic it feels a bit like reading a dissertation -which essentially, I think, it is- I just triggers the marking reflex in my and I want to put things in the margin and comment on the development of the argument.!

For me, this is an important observation, not only for the RC Church.

The issue of faith and language needs to be raised, not only in terms of linguistic translations but also in relation to cultural traditions. Today the Catholic liturgy is celebrated in the vernacular, i.e., the local languages of around the world, but many people still feel that the liturgy is foreign to them (p.73 paper, p.82 pdf)

It was good to see liturgy not only viewed and assessed as a textual or quasi textual affair, but with an eye on things like orality in culture. As an Anglican where the phrase 'lex orandi, lex credendi' is often trotted out, it was interesting to see some discussion of this in relation to the RCC and the historical origin of the phrase. The conclusion though seems to be what I have tended to take from it, that how we pray and what we believe are in dialogue and one informs the other. For Anglicans this tends to support the idea that our doctrine is actually in our prayer and so the prayer book is more definitive than doctrinal statements (that's poorly put but I hope you get the idea) and to generate an emphasis in theology on pastoral or practical theology.

The idea of presider or celebrant as mystagogue is helpful. The role is to lead people into mysteries such as the peace of God, the Lordship of Christ, vocation, I'm going to be reflecting on that for some time to come.