Creating Missional Worship, Fusing Context and Tradition by Tim Lomax

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Seem to have read a run of books about worship and mission recently – which have been interesting as much for the points when I disagree with them as when I agree.

One of the questions prompted (as opposed to asked) by Lomax, and a lot of what is sometimes call “Alternative” worship, is whether there is a difference between a “ritual” and a one-off “symbolic” action. Lomax, like many, uses the term “ritual” to cover one-off actions that add “colour” to times of worship, but places them in the same bracket as actions repeated over years, even generations. The power and potential of a one-off symbolic action and an oft-repeated, time-honoured, action can not be taken as being equivalent.

When Lomax gives examples of “contextual” worship/mission these seem to all involve a resource rich middle-class Church providing some form of supportive activity to a needy “other”. I would not want to appear to question the need for the Church to be active in the support of the “poor” or others who are disadvantaged and / or marginalised within society – but I worry about the assumed power dynamics of “us” doing things for “them” which might actually work against their empowerment. I also worry that we might act as if the middle class, the comfortable, have no needs of their own – maybe the Church finds it is easier to address the material needs of the “other” than address, or even acknowledge, the spiritual needs of its own?

In considering tradition, Lomax is helpful in pointing out that you need to understand the “why” of a tradition if you are go to perpetuate it with integrity – sometimes the “what” will in fact have to change in order for you to be faithful to the “why”. Lomax claims that tradition used to be contextual, but I am not quiet sure I agree – isn't the definition of tradition the point when it has migrated from the context of origin – that we continue to hold something dear beyond its direct response to the world around us? To define tradition as Lomax does appears to leave it at risk of becoming a feather blown endlessly in the wind.

Lomax is probably in direct opposition to Pridmore's conclusion when he decides that “traditional liturgical texts may be an unhelpful barrier to many in worship” - noting as many as 5 million adults in England are “functionally illiterate”. Lomax feels that we need to provide simple and short texts. But even his quote from the National Literacy Trust points to the fact that it is obtaining information from “unfamiliar sources” that can cause problems. There might be a need for simple texts, but there is a greater need for familiar texts – while we think about the needs of those will limited literacy too often, I feel, writers of liturgy assume that means these people are also unintelligent. I am not sure it is literacy that makes are inherited texts inaccessible – illiteracy in England when Crammer complied the Prayer Book was far great than it is today, and yet Crammer's words were lived and breathed by generations – so there is something else going on.

Lomax asks “Have you ever left an act of worship feeling that you weren't allowed to be yourself...?” and suggests giving worshippers the opportunity to express “what is in their hearts and minds in their own way?” My problem is that in most of the times when I have felt worship was most limiting myself expression were the times when we were told to “share with your neighbour” - most contemporary worship is unrelentingly upbeat, where to admit you are miserable can feel like a serious transgression, while it is hardly fair to “dump” the rage in your heart on the unsuspecting stranger sat next to you. Our liturgical tradition at its best, like the psalms, gives us words of joy and of sorrow, speaking of our delight in the Lord but also our anger at him too.

This is one of those books where its heart is in the right place, but it is just on a different wavelength from me.

Playing with Icons by John Pridmore

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Through this exploration of various memoirs, John Pridmore offers insights into the spirituality of children, and indeed the spirituality of the adults we grow up to be.

Part of this is to draw attention to the ways in which children tend to be more focused on the present while adults fill their heads with nostalgia or worries about tomorrow. Pridmore quotes Philip Simmons that “...the present moment, entered into fully, is out gateway to eternal life” - the more we are able to inhabit the present the more we are in fact inhabiting eternity.

The world children live in can be full of myths and imagining – but as Picasso said “Everything that can be imagined is real” - the richness of their world is not one to be dismissed as fantasy.

Reflecting on the encounters with “church” that are recalled, he writes “If as a young child I am given to understand that I am not yet fully one of the Christian family, then, however much I am entertained in church by kindly and well-meaning people, I will know in my heart that I am not really wanted.” This is usually deployed as an argument for including children in Communion, and while I agree with that, I worry that it is seen as a quick fix – you can receive Communion and yet still be alienated from the community – there is a need for a more all embracing response...

But he goes on “Adults, who are on the whole free to avoid the company of the egregiously unpleasant, forget what it once was to have been at their mercy.” but I am not sure how many adults are really that free? In lots of ways the choices of adults can be curtailed – by education, mobility, economic power etc. and when they are, often it will be without the hope that can sustain the child – the child can look forward to growing up and escape – adults may feel the limits of life have become fixed.

Pridmore uses the memoirs to construct a world of enchantment – a power for spirituality and religion that is not rooted in the rational. He is also, possibly accidentally, providing a case for the defence of the Prayer Book.

For example, when he quotes Anne Treneer “Yet though not a naturally religious child, I am glad I was taken to church regularly, initiated into the Christian faith, and helped to participate in the profound poetry of the Christian year. Though inattentive, I came insensibly to know the liturgy word for word, and to live in the double rhythm of the earthly seasons and of man's noblest imagining”

In another place he has Francesca Allinson recalling a friends account of Adam and Eve “She described the Fall as a lovers' parting: there was God, great and yet aching, impotent for all his Godhead to beget love except on the same terms as mortals, buying it as dearly as they... The story whether its events had actually taken place or not, bore within it its own truth of existence”.

And so he reflects “The stories are thrilling but so too was the language in which they were once told. In our contemporary anxiety to render the text of the Bible into a language which is readily intelligible – an anxiety amounting to paranoia, so addictive is the compulsion to produce ever more translations – we have forgotten that the intelligibility of sacred texts is not all that matters about them, certainly not to small children. We have seen [from examples of encounters with big old family Bibles etc] how important the feel of a Bible was to children we have met. So too, as we have now seen, was the sound of it. Sense is not served by disregard of the senses.”

Pridmore is yet another person questioning the current liturgical practice of the Church of England, on two fronts, first that our contemporary liturgy in attempting to use accessible language has lost its poetry and therefore lost its appeal, and second that endless variation of texts prevent them becoming familiar and inhabited – or as the collect puts it “hear them, read, mark, learn” and, perhaps most importantly, “inwardly digest them”. I have made this point before and will undoubtedly make it again. But Pridmore himself notes that his sources, those that when on to write, might be a bias source group – as group they are firstly likely to be disproportionally literate, but even among the literate they are likely to be attracted to richness of language.

Harvesting the Stars – A Pagan Temple at Lismullin, Co. Meath by Aidan O'Connell et al

Can be found on Amazon 

This archaeological monograph provides an account of the pre-historic ritual landscape discovered during the preparation for the construction of the M3 in Ireland.

There is always a challenge in the interpretation of “ritual” features when there is no written record of the belief system that created them. There must always be a certain degree of creativity in the development of the account of their meaning.

What becomes clear, at least, is the sophistication of the culture – there are a number of different phases to the landscape and a wealth of interrelated features.

Central to the account is the “temple” at Lismullin – this is the most significant feature discovered during this archaeological programme of work – but it sits within a wider landscape of other significant known features.

Of particular interest is its alignment to the Pleiades star cluster – we are familiar with pre-historic monuments being aligned to astronomical features – but mostly, like Stonehenge, these seem to be sun rises on key dates in the year. To be aligned to the stars seems to suggest that where ever happened in the enclosure must have happened at night, when the stars would be visible – but what happened and what it meant is largely closed to us.

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms by Gerard Russell

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The religious communities that Russell meets and shares through this book are mostly known to us in “the West” only through reports of their persecution – and there is a bitterness in knowing that even in the few years since Russell wrote that persecution has become more intense.

For many of these communities their sense of identity and belonging is seated in a completely different place from our own. Most of the religions do not proselytise, do not even catechize their own believers – this sets them apart from the “big” faiths (although maybe the contrast to pre-reformation Christianity would not have been so sharp?).

What we learn from Russell is that the esoteric actually enriches us all. Of them all, even though there are only 750 Samaritans (and that a rising total) makes the collective identity of the 7 billion + people alive today richer.

There would be an argument that the lives of these minorities would be “easier” if they dropped their particular identity and conformed to the majority – but life is not meant to be easy it is meant to be authentic – conformity might make me richer but it would make me less myself – as someone once said “what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?”

The Prince of this World by Adam Kotsko

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I will have to be honest and admit that most of this book when over my head...

It is a take on the “problem of evil” - finding that the problem is the creation of particular philosophical and theological ideas which have grown up, particular within the Christian tradition.

It seems that the harder Christian thinker tried to reconcile the problem of evil the more distorted the image of God became.

We are left with an essentially unsolvable problem because these distortions have become bound into the core of our world-view.

It is an interesting topic even if I struggled to engage effectively with it.

Who Killed Hammarskjöld? By Susan Williams

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That I hadn't previously heard of the assassination of Hammarskjöld feels like a personal embarrassment but is perhaps a token of the fact that we, the British, are rather good at overlooking historical events that would diminish our self image.

Susan Williams' account is tightly written, it reads with the drama of Le Carré – perhaps not a complete surprise, because it is tale from Le Carré's era of active, secret, service.

There are points where you get the feeling that there were so many people with an interest in seeing the demise of the Secretary-General that there was probably more at than one plot – that some of those trying to cover their own tracks might have inadvertently of been exposing others. There seem to be parts of the evidence that simply don't add up – they are not explained by an accident, yet neither do they fit well with any of the theories for what might have happened. Williams marshals substantial evidence – bringing it together for the first time, but there are still bits of the jigsaw missing.

The actions of the authorities after the crash seem at best negligent to the point complicity, while the investigators wilful in dismissing evidence of witnesses that didn't fit with their conclusions (the failure of even the UN investigation to get anywhere near the truth is a worry).

The treatment of the witnesses is one of the aspects that reminds us that the world has not changed that much – racial prejudice was the key drive for undermining witnesses, but it is a pattern that we see repeated, for example after Hillsborough, and why the victims of Grenfell Tower are so miss-trusting of the investigation been established there. Time and again investigations find in favour of the establishment's version of the truth.

This feels like an important story – not just to honour Hammarskjöld's memory, but as an exemplar of the ways forces of power interact and corrupt.

God's Belongers by David Walker

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Let's begin with an image that is perhaps key to what David Walker is trying to tell the church with this book, the fact that “For many of us, membership is characterised by the National Trust subscription. We join as a sign of general support for the aims of the organisation. We are happy to part with a modest financial contribution towards its work and are glad to be able to visit its properties once in a while when the urge takes us. We may even purchase modest mementoes of our visits to take home or give to our friends. But only a few of us aspire to be regular volunteers.”

The challenge is many of the findings David Walker presents run counter to the way that we would like people of behave and feel.

Most of those wrestling with the future of the church and its mission are “regular volunteers” and we want people to respond to the church in a similar way because we assume that we are “normal” but for most people that is probably not going to happen. The question is how we engage with that wider group who have faith, and even feel a connection to the church, but who don't see belonging in terms of being on the rota...

For example, in his surveys David Walker finds that a significant number feel “It wouldn't be the same to attend a service in another church.” with very strong support for statements about attachment to the building, therefore he concludes that “Place was evidently an important, if not the primary, aspect for the vast majority” of those responding. We would like people to be footloose, therefore if we close a church and consolidate resources, we see no reason for anyone to complain – we are offering the same God therefore the venue should be insignificant – but all the evidence suggests the opposite.

Walker finds that “Having the same service, at the same time and place, is of huge importance to our sense of belonging through regular activity.” This should be no surprise, because while some are clearly over protective about “their” pew, we can also see a similar sense of dislocation found in the workplace when you are forced to hot desk, it comes from a deep seated inclination – we should not blame people for being creatures of habit, but we might need to help people manage the desire for the familiar in ways that give space for welcome of the newcomer who treads on their toes.

And frustratingly as we embrace an ever increasing range of worship resources Walker also find that “People who come to church once in a while are more likely to prefer to find something that hasn't changed too radically from the last time they turned up.” The addiction to variation that Common Worship encourages flies in the face of this need, allowing us to be new every morning – perhaps Common Worship is better used to allow different churches to find their distinct voices, but having found that voice they should speak consistently with it.

Linked to this message “the survey results suggest that the church would be advised in its teaching and preaching ministry to focus on adding to the content and meaning with which individuals fill out traditional terms rather than seeking to replace them.” People find a comfort in the familiar words, but they may not have embraced the richness of meaning that can be found within them. In this respect the debate about the use of the Nicene Creed jumps to my mind, if people struggle to understand the Creed, they we should seek to share its meaning better not replace it with intelligible but essentially bland alternatives.

I think that David's research encountered those that are generally (and perhaps arrogantly) termed “dechurched”, they were making connection with their past engagement with the church. There is an increasing number of people that have no past with the church to draw on, and so some of assumptions have a limitation in that respect. However in terms of outreach, if we want to maximise our impact, the “dechurched” will be the easiest to reach, church was a habit, lost but not rejected. Let's perhaps get them more engaged before we set ourselves the harder task of getting the “unchurched”? And it could be a win-win situation, as “in preparing fresh, challenging and interactive forms of worship, the use of rather more traditional material will enhance the worship experience for both occasional and regular churchgoers.”

The recently reported rise in attendance at Choral Evensong speaks to this dynamic. As someone who returned to regular church going, as a student, via Choral Evensong, I think one of the keys to why it was a positive experience was that it allowed you to feel without demanding you to “think” (and nothing to do with the aesthetic appeal of the gentlemen of the choir). As a student, and now as a civil servant, so much of life involves having a head full of words and mental gymnastics so to say I come to church to “be” rather than to “think” is not to identify as a troglodyte. Lord save us from unthinking Christians – but worship does not need to be Bible study or theological seminar, it needs to be an encounter with our transcendent yet immanent God. So for all the richness of the hymns of John Bell, and their folksy language, they often require the intellectual side of your brain to be engaged and so pass me by – in contrast to something like Taizé where the chant becomes you, words of praise can become as instinctive as breathing.

Overall I enjoyed this book because it was basically talking about people like me, but we are all on a spectrum, if you are somewhere else on the curve it could well be a book filled with frustration – we are not right and wrong, we are just different and yet thankfully equal in the embrace of God's love.

As a ps I will mention that when he reflects on his vocation David suggests that he was called to ordination in part “because of my weakness... I wasn't sure I was up to the demands of holding a secular career and being a committed follower of Jesus Christ at the same time.” and interesting and playful idea...