ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 47.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> NICK: What are some of the dangers of the alternative worship services that we see in Lutheran churches today? You can imagine how contemporary Los Angeles sees itself to be. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: In many ways, Nick, I have addressed this question in some of the answers to the last questions that I have given, things like this idea of continuity, the sense of handing down the faith from generation to generation, the idea of the church as its own culture, adapting the culture to the liturgy, not liturgy to the culture. All of these things are part of answering some of the dangers of these alternate means of worship because they do not reflect that continuity. They do not reflect the Jesus of the scriptures. They do not necessarily allow us to see the liturgy as transforming the culture and not vice versa. Let me address this in a couple of ways that I haven't so far. I've talked a lot about content, and I think all of us could probably identify with that fairly easily, that the content has to reflect the Scriptures, has to reflect our confessional heritage, our confessional doctrines, what we believe teach and confess about Jesus in the scriptures. But the real kind of slippery slope is style. And here we get into a place where, as some of you are familiar with the grammar of Strunk and White, when you begin to talk about style, you're not only on slippery ground, but here you begin to kind of lift right off of what is solid ground. I believe there is a particular style that a liturgical church adapts because of the presence of Christ. In a way, my responses to the questions concerning reverence and faithfulness already are beginning to reflect what I would say here about style. But let me just say this in a way of getting in under this question a little bit. In my experience of teaching worship for twenty years at the seminary and being one of the kind of the people who are on the front lines of the worship wars as they began back in the mid '80s, I have had an opportunity to experience many alternative worship services, what many people would call contemporary worship or what really, today, I think more accurately is alternative worship forms. And I've not only had literally hundreds of them sent to me for analysis, but I get out in the church a lot and I preach in many congregations, and I have not only been participants as a member of the clergy in the services, but I have myself lead them as a liturgist in these services. So I'm fairly familiar with them. There are a couple of things I might say about them that I think we need to be careful about. One of them is we have to be careful not to borrow certain styles of worship or certain forms of worship that really reflect a particular church body's identity that is not ours. What really began to impress me as I looked at all these new alternative forms of worship, is that they are not that new. They're just different. They're not ours, but they belong to the Presbyterian Church, or the Methodist Church, or other church bodies. And what we have simply done is to take them into our own church and said, okay. We're going to use these as Lutherans. Now the reason why the Baptists have their kind of worship and the Methodist theirs, and the Presbyterians there's and the Roman Catholic theirs is because that worship, * Lex orande lex credende, it reflects what they believe. And they worship that way because they're forming belief by that worship. I think we need to be careful that the new, so-called, alternate forms of worship are not simply recycled from other church bodies. Now we certainly can learn things from them. In fact, I will tell you right now, one of the most wonderful hymnals in the last twenty years is the Presbyterian hymnal, and we learned a great deal in the formation of our hymnal from the experience that they had in theirs. But I think we have to be careful to borrow forms that are identified as forms associated with other church bodies. One of the reasons, perhaps, this is happening is because we have lost our identity. We no longer know who we are as Lutherans. And this is because we don't know our tradition. We don't know the treasures. We don't know our hymnody. We don't know how central the real presence is to our worship. And I think we have to be very careful about adopting those particular liturgies that do not reflect that identity. As we look at these alternate worship forms and their content, as well as their music and the style in which they�re done, we have to ask ourselves a very fundamental question. And that question is this: Do these alternate worship forms focus our eyes on Christ as being objectively present their offering his gifts, or are these worship forms set up in such a way--and I'm talking here about all aspects of it, content, music, and style�-are they set up in such a way that they are really appealing to our experience, our feelings, and our emotions? Now, I haven't talked about this yet because this is really, in some ways, something that you'll learn in your doctrinal courses. But if we believe in the bodily presence of Christ, as I did mention briefly before, there are other Christians who do not believe in that. They do not believe the finite is capable of the infinite. Some people say they believe in the real absence, which I think really, in a sense, is an unfortunate phrase. But they do not believe that Christ is present in the same way we do. So what is the means of grace for these Christians if it isn't the objective means of grace of Christ's bodily presence throughout word and sacrament? Well, the means of grace for them is their experience, is their feelings, is the emotion that they have when they come to worship. And that's why their particular forms of worship appeal to experience and emotions. Now, don't get me wrong. The Lutheran liturgy should be very emotional, and one of the places I find myself being most deeply affected in life, I mean to the point of tears sometimes, is when I go to the Lord's Supper. The Lutheran liturgy should be deeply emotional, and it should be something that we experience in a fundamental way. But that's not the basis for our understanding of how Christ comes to us. Whether or not I feel emotional or excited or high or happy, or if I'm sad or depressed, Christ is objectively there for me with his body and blood, objectively there for me in my ear where the Spirit works to transform me. And I think as we begin to look at these alternate worship forms, we have to ask ourselves a question that goes at the heart and core of them. What is it that they're trying communicate? Are they trying to appeal to us in a way in which we can see Christ as one who is present there in his very body and blood, that bodily presence we've been talking about? Or are they liturgies that appeal to our motions and, in a sense, divert us from looking straight at Christ and who he is among us? This is not an easy question to answer because these forms are really, in many ways, proliferating in our church, and I'm not one to want to be critical of them as much as to share with people the treasures and let people, in seeing those treasures, make these decisions for themselves. But I think we need to be aware of our context, the context in which we live in this culture, not only as I said the secular context, but the evangelical context in which we live, the Protestant religious culture. And there is a difference there. Don't get me wrong. They still have the gospel. They still believe in Jesus. They are still people we will be rejoicing with in heaven, but I think we need to recognize that some of those differences do make a bit of difference in what we believe, teach, and confess and how we embody that in our worship.