A Theology of Worship
Comments made by the Dean at a Parish Forum on Liturgy and Worship
My starting point for understanding worship is in the Mystery of God, that is the God who is beyond human understanding or seeking out, but yet who chooses to be made known to humanity. Worship is our human response to this self-revelation of God.
Some examples of this in the Old Testament are:
• Jacob’s wrestling with the angel at Beth-el after which Jacob builds an altar as a response to this encounter with the divine
• Covenant ceremonies as the result of the giving of the Law to the Hebrew people in the wilderness following the Exodus
• Israel’s response to the prophets as they bring the immediacy of God’s Word
The New Testament offers us Jesus the Christ as the fullest revelation of God to humanity. Christian worship is therefore about a human response to God who has been made known in Jesus Christ, and especially though the events of the death and resurrection which lie at the hart of Christian faith.
This response is one made in public and in private, both through corporate worship and private devotion.
Liturgy is the word used to describe corporate worship. The Greek words from which it is derived mean people and work and it was used to speak of any public work in general. The Church applied the word to particular services of worship and it has come to refer especially to the forms of service used for worship.
Without going into a whole history of how Christian and Anglican worship has evolved, I will just say that in recent decades the modern liturgical movement has recovered the sense of liturgy being something that the people do together. As a result there has been a shift away from clergy/lay reader led worship to worship involving and led by all the baptised.
So it is not the priest who celebrates the Eucharist, but it is the people who celebrate together with the priest presiding over the act of worship. The Eucharist has increasingly become the principal act of Sunday public worship as it celebrates the mystery of the Easter events as the key events in Christian faith. There is the architectural shift to gathering round the table rather than the sanctuary being at a distance from the people.
In each of the parishes where I have ministered as a priest, I have encountered different styles and traditions of Anglican worship. I have sought to be true to the tradition of the place and to add my own style to develop and enhance that tradition. The Cathedral choral tradition is inevitably less participatory than parish worship. One of the tensions we work within here is to be true to the choral tradition while allowing as parish expression to emerge as part of it. At heart I am a pragmatist and so seek to take the best of the tradition, to adapt it in a way that maintains its integrity, and in doing so to enable it to be useful and workable in the enhancement of our worship.
The goal is thus:
We gather in worship to give expression to the fact that we are the Body of Christ.
In liturgy we seek a sense of encounter with God to which we respond in worship
Worship is more than offering a ritual response. It is the offering of our very lives in the service of God.
Liturgy, through encounter with and response to the divine, inspires and empowers us to be of service to God and to others in our daily life. We are formed more together into the Body of Christ, and so together and individually become Christ in the world.