Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2121097
S. K. Johnson
Unpredictable. When I was invited to choose one word that describes Anabaptist worship to contribute to a video several years ago, the word that I chose was “unpredictable.” Unpredictable not only describes worship in my own Anabaptist Mennonite tradition, but in Free Church traditions broadly. The eclectic collection of Christian traditions and communities that may be considered Free Church, and the decentralized structures of these Christian communities, result in Free Church worship practices that are difficult to predict. Even within specific Free Church denominations, congregational polity leads to significant local variation. In a single congregation, there may be dramatic shifts in practice week-by-week that reflect changes in leadership or circumstance. Yet, while Free Church worship is unpredictable, it is also patterned. Congregations often rely on strong local traditions, denominations and parachurch organizations create shared resources, and larger trends and movements shape worship over time. Paying attention to the study and practice of Free Church worship is essential in the twentyfirst century as Free Church traditions continue to wield significant social and political power in the United States, and as Christianity flourishes in the Global South, with independent and Pentecostal traditions as a locus of church growth worldwide. In this brief reflection, I first outline what constitutes Free Church worship. I then explore two movements that have shaped worship in Free Church traditions in recent decades, and consider four scholarly approaches to Free Church worship.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085967
E. Andrews
As the largest evangelical Protestant group in the United States, no single depiction will do justice to a faithful description of the liturgical life currently present in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). There exists much diversity, and Southern Baptists themselves do not agree on the proper liturgical heritage of their historical predecessors. Still, as others have demonstrated, the conservative Southern Baptists leading the Convention since the early 1980s have increasingly rallied around a liturgical tradition rooted in in the confluence of liturgical historian James White’s “Frontier worship” and what Lester Ruth and Lim Swee Hong describe as the “rivers” of “Praise & Worship” and “Contemporary Worship,” the style, ethos, and practices that, for many in the U.S., have come to be identified as “the new liturgical normal.” Like many evangelicals in the U.S., today’s SBC leaders have largely settled into contemporary worship and many of its Charismatic-influenced practices as the assumed and unquestioned model. It is presumed, as SBC pastor and educator Matt Boswell puts it, that “worship leaders ought to come to lead...with a guitar in one hand...” While this has no doubt affected a number of practices and systems related to the worship ministry of SBC congregations, it has particularly influenced the avenues for training those called to lead worship in the local church. This paper traces the development of worship leadership practices in the SBC by focusing on the leader’s education for the task and the ways in which Charismatic-influenced contemporary worship music (CWM) practices have influenced the denomination’s training paths for its worship leaders. SBC congregations have a relatively long history of valuing musical education for the ministers called to lead public worship. Given the SBC’s adoption of many Charismaticinfluenced musical practices in recent decades, the nature of and pathways for this education have evolved significantly. Concluding observations describe these developments as further solidifying the future of the SBC in the liturgical life and ethos of charismatically renewed contemporary worship while maintaining connections to its own historical precedents.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2022.2085972
M. Sigler
“New Sect of Fanatics Is Breaking Loose,” read the front-page byline of the Los Angeles Daily Times on April 18, 1906, in a report on the Azusa St. Revival. Pentecostalism was indeed about to “break loose” and impact the church across the globe. Whether or not this “sect” is full of “fanatics” depends, of course, on one’s perspective. Pentecostalism emphasizes a personal encounter with the Holy Spirit often referred to as the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and evidenced by “speaking in tongues” (glossolalia), supernatural healing, and prophecy. For half a century after the Asuza St. Revival, the impact of Pentecostalism was most acutely felt outside of long-established denominations. In 1960, however, a young Episcopal priest announced to his congregation that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and had spoken in tongues. Over the next several years many in the historic churches would experience this phenomenon. Media outlets from CBS Evening News to Time Magazine would report on this growing movement. Initially, participants and observers described what was happening as “Pentecostal,” but eventually adopted the term “Charismatic”—a term first used by Lutheran minister, Harald Bredesen. Drawing form the Greek word “charismata,” meaning “gifts of grace,” those who were experiencing the “Charismatic Renewal” believed that God, by the Spirit, was renewing the spiritual gifts that were bestowed on the church at Pentecost. This issue of Liturgy explores the crosspollination between Pentecostal/Charismatic streams and what might be called “mainline” or “historic” denominations. These terms are fraught with difficulties. “Mainline” often refers to Protestant congregations in the US who have benefited from their relationship within American society. However, we do not limit our exploration to Protestant traditions in this issue and have opted for the term “historic churches.” Yet, this is equally problematic. The Church of God in Christ—the main denomination launched from the Pentecostal revival—is certainly historic in its own right. In using the term “historic churches” we are referring to those congregations who were not influenced by first-wave Pentecostalism but were later impacted by Pentecostal piety. The first essay explores what will become an important thread in this issue, the piety of Pentecostal/Charismatic worship. In her essay, Debbie Wong shows how Charismatics in mainline congregations embraced common values for encountering God in worship, while upholding a wide array of liturgical traditions. My essay unpacks this further by looking at worship in Fr. Dennis Bennet’s Episcopal congregation in Seattle, Washington, during the 1960s. Billy Kangas shows how the Charismatic Renewal took root within Roman Catholic congregations, especially through Covenant Communities. The fourth essay is an insider’s report on the Union of Charismatic Orthodox Churches (UCOC) from Bishop Emilio Alvarez. Emily Snider Andrews traces the history of mus
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085966
E. Álvarez
Every first Sunday of the month, the service at the Cathedral at the Gathering Place (CGP) a non-denominational, neo-Pentecostal church, opens with a word of prayer followed by an incense-filled procession of the church’s clergy and acolytes fully vested in their proper order, carrying the various items usually included in a Eucharistic processional (candles, cross, Gospel Book, etc.). As they process into the sanctuary, the congregation stands and many, with arms raised, begin to sing along with the worship team which has begun the contemporary worship song designated for this portion of the service. Once at the altar, the bishop censes the altar and the people; afterwards a collect is read followed by the proclamation of Psalm 51:15 (“Lord open my lips”). The praise and worship segment of the service, including a full band, is structured with the assigned lessons from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) interspersed between the praise and worship songs. After the readings, the Gospel book is processed into the middle of the sanctuary and the Gospel for that Sunday is read among the people by a deacon after it has been blessed and incensed by the bishop. Afterwards, the preaching or proclamation of the Word takes place with the kind of homiletical esthetic, zeal, and charisma found in most Pentecostal or Baptist churches. Immediately following the preached word, an altar call invites congregants who desire a word of wisdom, prophesy or prayer to come to the front of sanctuary where both clergy and laity who are trained in matters of pastoral payer welcome them with open arms. The service then comes to what the celebrant proclaims is “the center of all things,” the celebration of the Eucharist. Unlike many Pentecostal or evangelical churches that emphasize the memorial aspect of communion, the Gathering Place believes in the real presence of Christ. Given Pentecostalism’s continued growth as a global movement, it was only a matter of time before segments of Pentecostalism such as The Gathering Place encountered and developed for itself a liturgical and sacramental spirituality akin to the canonical churches (Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, etc.). In the last fifty years several evangelical and Charismatic segments have embraced a more liturgical and sacramental spirituality, leading to the development of groups identified as either “Three Stream,” “Convergence,” or “Ancient-Future.” For Pentecostals recovering orthodoxy, these expressions many times lack the essential theological, spiritual, or even cultural tensions, which recovering the Great Tradition from a solely Pentecostal framework could provide. 1 For example, the antecedent expressions, unlike Pentecostalism, historically did not include women or people of color in ministry.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085970
A. Perez, V. Larson
From the late 1980s through the 1990s, the Church Growth Movement (CGM) was a powerful force among churches, both evangelical and mainline. Within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Community Church of Joy (CCJ) in Glendale, Arizona, was a flagship institution in this regard. With its Senior Pastor Walt Kallestad and Pastor Tim Wright presiding over worship, this community grew to become a megachurch with 10,000þ members at its peak. Following many of the early principles of Church Growth as adopted by pioneers in that field such as Robert Schuller (Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, California) and Bill Hybels (Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois), the leaders of CCJ employed sociological principles to target unchurched and unaffiliated Christians in the Phoenix suburbs. Eventually, their growth and prominence precipitated a plethora of books published on topics like evangelism, growth, and church administration. CCJ offered “seeker-sensitive” and other worship opportunities tailored to the felt needs of various constituencies within the target community. By the late 1990s, Pastor Tim Wright and his wife Jan had published multiple resource books on forms of contemporary worship, most notably Contemporary Worship, offering three patterns and forms of worship along a spectrum: “spiritedtraditional” (a blend of “energy and celebration”), “contemporary praise” (contemporary music geared toward believers, but visitor friendly), and “seeker” (contemporary music focused on reaching “un-churched” visitors)—the defining style of Church Growth. Though CCJ was an ELCA congregation, its worship practices had more in common with congregations of the CGM than with historically American Lutheran practice. At the other end of ELCA worship practices, Lutheran scholars concerned with the Liturgical Renewal Movement— Gordon Lathrop and Frank Senn, among others—published monumental works on the theology and history of Christian worship in and beyond the Lutheran tradition in the mid-1990s, holding to the ecumenical four-fold shape of historic and contemporary liturgical practices. The relationship between the CGM and the Charismatic Movement may seem diametrically opposed approaches to worship. On the one hand, the “seeker services” of the CGM eschewed recognizably Christian elements from their spaces and utilized secular musics that avoided speaking about or to God. On the other hand, Charismatic worship practices are often marked by a powerful awareness of God’s presence in worship and are often (but certainly not always) accompanied by the exercise of supernatural, spiritual gifts. It is interesting, therefore, that in the sources we discuss in this essay, forms of Charismatic worship are directly implicated in critiques that
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085971
M. Sigler
Two years before the world’s fair was held in Seattle, Washington, the small Episcopal congregation of St. Luke’s prepared to welcome a new priest. The latter half of the 1950s had not been kind to the congregation as it struggled with financial viability and decline in attendance. The congregation had operated for seven decades in the thoroughly Scandinavian Lutheran neighborhood of Ballard where Episcopalians were few and far between. In its seven-decade history the church had seen services suspended on occasion and functioned as a mission outreach of other parishes in the diocese. By 1960 the congregation was desperate for any semblance of viability and the newly arrived bishop of the diocese, William Fisher Lewis, was also eager to make risky changes. He reached out to the former rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, who had recently resigned from his parish after sharing publicly about his experience of speaking in tongues. Fr. Dennis Bennett left a 2,600-member parish and took a $4,000 pay cut to come to St. Luke’s, but he did not leave behind his emphasis on the Pentecostal gift of tongues. His focus on the gifts of the Spirit was welcomed by Bishop Lewis who reportedly encouraged Fr. Bennett to “bring the fire” to this new assignment. Even though both Bishop Lewis and the congregation of St. Luke’s were somewhat aware of what they were getting with Fr. Bennett, no one could foresee the global influence that would emanate from the little church in Ballard, Washington, over the next two decades. By the time he stepped down from parish leadership in 1981, Bennett had become a leading figure within the Charismatic Renewal. The congregation would host multiple services throughout the week in which visitors from around the world filed into the parish hall to worship and learn about the Pentecostal gifts of the Holy Spirit. Reporters described services attended by nuns in habits and hippies in sandals sitting side-by-side in worship. And throughout the eclectic experience, Fr. Bennett and the people of St. Luke’s understood their worship to be both thoroughly Episcopalian and Spirit-filled. Bennett’s influence on the Charismatic Renewal has often been cited in both popular and academic work, but there remains little, if any, academic treatment of his life and ministry. Close exploration of worship practices at St. Luke’s are also wanting. In this article I will provide an overview of Fr. Bennett’s tenure at St. Luke’s (1960–1981) with particular focus on the liturgical developments that occurred during the first decade of his appointment. Special attention will be given to the ways in which St. Luke’s remained decisively Episcopalian and distinctively Charismatic. Finally, I conclude by highlighting some lessons we might consider as we think about the interplay between mainline worship practices and Pentecostal piety. While we are not
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085969
Billy Kangas
The influence of Pentecostal worship in the Roman Catholic Church has most prominently been seen through the advent of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR). This movement began in 1967 and was a driving force in bringing dimensions of Pentecostal worship into the lives of many Christian faithful, both within the Catholic church as well as in the of lives Protestant, Orthodox, Evangelical, and Messianic Jewish Christians. The Word of God Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was the most influential community in the early formation of worship in the CCR. Their community life, music, and methods of leading times of worship were the headwaters out of which the worship of the CCR has flowed ever since.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085973
D. Wong
If you visited a church affiliated with one of the historic mainline Protestant denominations and looked out into the congregation on any given Sunday morning, chances are that you would not see many hands raised during the singing of songs, hear tongues being spoken, or witness any supernatural healings or other miraculous signs—practices largely considered to be distinguishing markers of Charismatic worship. You might then conclude that the worship of this congregation has remained untouched by the Charismatic Movement. While that is certainly a possibility, the problem with this line of reasoning is that it is based on a presumption that Charismatic worship is readily identifiable by what can be observed— external, visible acts of worship, such as the lifting of hands, the practice of glossolalia, ecstatic praise, singing in the Spirit, and so on. However, those who consider themselves Charismatic do not necessarily worship with such practices, and it is equally possible that the conclusion drawn above is incorrect. Consider, for example, the case of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, once the parish of the infamous Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett whose 1960 public announcement of his baptism in the Spirit is often said to have catalyzed the Charismatic Renewal Movement. Under Bennett’s leadership, St. Luke’s conducted their Sunday services according to the same liturgy that they had used before the Charismatic Movement emerged, despite most of the congregation being Charismatic. In his book Nine O’Clock in the Morning, Bennett recounts how visitors to his parish often expressed their disappointment at how normal and non-Charismatic the service was, wondering where the tongue-speaking was to be found. Such worship escapes the attention of researchers focused chiefly on the visible practices or structures of Charismatic worship—it simply would not register as Charismatic. Yet according to the visitors to Bennett’s church, despite the lack of recognizable “Charismatic” practices at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, it was clear that something was different. Though disappointed by the lack of charismata, the visitors commented on how evident it was in the otherwise normal service that these worshipers “love God” and remarked, “I’ve never been to a mass where people were so intent on the Lord!” Similarly, John Sherrill describes a Presbyterian church in Parkesburg, Pennsylvania that was influenced by the Charismatic Renewal. Sherrill describes the worship of their Saturday night “Pray and Praise service” as follows: “There are spontaneous prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings from the congregation. Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, as well as Pentecostals come from as far away as Washington, D.C., to pack the basement auditorium in a service that lasts far into the night.” In contrast, on Sunday, Sherrill observes that the services
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Pub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054641
Stephanie Perdew
{"title":"Unmute Yourself: Liturgical Markers for Times of Transition","authors":"Stephanie Perdew","doi":"10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054641","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":"37 1","pages":"4 - 6"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49237270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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