What Is Worship For?

I have been thinking about the future of worship. Let me post a semester end reflection that I wrote for the seminary Foundations of Worship class in the spring.

My ideas of what worship is/should be/must be began to change when I was part of an ELCA (Lutheran) church in Pembroke Pines, Florida. Our pastor was working on a DMin degree which gave him all sorts of interesting ideas for how to make worship more interactive. But the pandemic really opened my mind to all the larger ways we could be a faith community, as we all recorded parts of worship in creative ways. In 2022, we had a native plant sale, which opened my mind again. The plant sale happened right after worship, in the parking lot of the church. We had three times as many people in the parking lot waiting for a chance to buy plants as we had in worship. There was talk of plants and care of creation and God. I remember thinking that we should serve brunch and round out the worship experience, a mimosa mass and garden day. In the intervening years, my mind has returned to that possibility that we could incorporate the places/events where people yearn to be on Sundays (brunch, outdoors, in the garden dirt) and not insist on what people don’t want as much (creeds, long sermons, hymns that are no longer relevant).

In short, I think that worship at its best is a place to meet God. Ideally, we should also hear the narratives of God and God’s people at work in the world: that might be through Scripture, through drama, through sermons, through song, and through the stories we tell in other ways. We also hear that narrative through our Eucharistic practices. All of these practices can offer spiritual formation, along with spiritual sustenance, by molding us into a faith community. When I think about the kind of faith community I want to be part of and be part of creating, I feel even more compelled to create worship that is meaningful on many levels.

Ideally, our worship gets us ready to go back out into the world. Some of us will go into the world to fight for a more just vision of society. Some of us will go into the world to care for others. Some of us will go into the world to educate or to heal in other ways. Often the work we do in the world is draining—and living in the world is draining even if we’re not interacting with it much. If a person has a drop of compassion and pays attention to current events, it’s hard not to sink into depression and despair. Meaningful worship reminds us that the forces of empire and death do not have the final say in the world. Meaningful worship not only repairs the world but repairs us too.

As I think about two thousand years (plus a few) of Christian worship, two thousand years of encountering God in times that are troubling and in times that are peaceful, it’s not surprising that we have such a variety of worship practices. I’ve enjoyed learning about them, and if I were to use any of them, I’d want to be careful to be respectful and not to appropriate/colonize. For example, singing one of the old spirituals that an enslaved person on a U.S. plantation might have sung—that seems respectful and appropriate, while including jumping the broom wedding ritual might not, especially if we’re not the descendants of enslaved people. I imagine we’ll be creating liturgies like the one described in this week’s reading by Lisa E. Dahill more frequently as we head into a future of more and more climate crisis. Times of past tragedy can inform our worship creation and remind us that humans are more resilient than we might believe, especially if we’re struggling in the midst of crisis. Hearing the resurrection story reminds us that when a time seems bleakest for a community, God breaks through in surprising and life-giving ways. Every time I create worship experiences, that’s the story I want to remember to stress. When a parishioner asks, “What is the Good News in all this hellishness?”—that’s the answer I want to be prepared to give.