Comments on: Post-evangelical Worship: The soli deo liturgy

By: rowie

rowie — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 08:46:54 +0000

Very nice. It’s similar to the typical Catholic liturgy.

By: Michael Spencer

Michael Spencer — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 10:37:30 +0000

Each one is a song we either know or I teach them. We’ve been working on the agnus dei from an old Lutheran hymnal. The Alleluia I picked up from a church I was visiting. Others are just well known choruses.

By: chrisstiles

chrisstiles — Thu, 14 Sep 2006 09:43:11 +0000

Where do you get the tunes/music for the responsorial sections, if I may ask?

By: Michael Spencer

Michael Spencer — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 19:36:03 +0000

This is potentially the most divisive aspect of our worship, both from the standpoint of the differing backgruds of the participants and the perception of our group by our larger OBI community.

So we stick to the words of scripture, right out of I Cor 11. I do a communion meditation- maybe 1-2 minutes- and then we hear the words from scripture, slightly expanded in the Celtic Prayer Book.

By: wnpaul

wnpaul — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 19:25:11 +0000

In the evangelical circles I have moved in, here in Austria, in the UK and in the US, generally liturgy is equated with repetitiveness and rote. I have observed that in most evangelical churches there is repetitiveness, even in the “open Brethren” or “Plymouth Brethren” meetings of my wife’s background: the same folks will say pretty much the same prayers, at the same point in the service, every Sunday.

The difference between that kind of liturgy and that which Michael presents in this post is that the former is very subjective and reflects the current spiritual and emotional state of the people praying “spontaneously” and “as the Spirit moves”, while the latter is carefully crafted with the goal of picking up and bringing along the entire congregation before the throne of God.

Over the years, even though I still call myself an Evangelical, I have come to appreciate this latter form of “repetitiveness” over the former — perhaps that is part of the reason for calling myself a “catholic Evangelical”.

Question for Michael, as a matter of interest rather than criticism: does your communion liturgy include an epiclesis or just the words of institution?

By: bookdragon

bookdragon — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 15:27:03 +0000

Sounds pretty much like what my church has been doing every Sunday for a very long time.

You don’t need to come up with terms like ‘post-evangelical’, just shed the too-tight evangelical skin constricting you and join us in the Anglican fight song (sung to the tune of God bless America):

“I am an Anglican,
old C of E.
Not a Presby
or a Luthern,
or a Baptist spitting foam!
I am an Anglican
- one step from Rome.
I am an Anglican
- one step from Rome!”

Seriously, while ‘post-evangelical’ reflects your movement beyond the evangelical outlook, what you describe is a return to a very traditional sort of Christianity.

In Judaism there is a term (baal teshuva, BT for short) for a formerly non-Orthodox Jew who has ‘returned’ by adopting Orthodox Judaism. Maybe we need to come up with something similar for disaffected evangelicals returning to traditional streams of Christianity?

By: Michael Spencer

Michael Spencer — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 10:42:38 +0000

The Lord’s Supper portion does have the words of instituion, etc, but is not responsive, so I don’t print it. It reflects our Baptist confessions on the LS.

By: coderforchrist

coderforchrist — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 04:55:17 +0000

One thing I noticed was that I didn’t see the “words of institution” or “consecration” before the Lord’s Supper. You know, the “he took the bread and brake it, saying, take, eat, this is my body which is broken for you…” part. Is that just an omission in this text, or do you not say it? I ask because, AFAIK, that’s a pretty ancient part of Christian liturgy (Paul mentions it in…1 or 2 Corinthians, I forget which, and the Didache, a document from, IIRC, around AD 100 or so, explicity mentions that part).

By: jkeay

jkeay — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 03:32:49 +0000

I really like your prayer at the beginning, with all the elements of gathering and preparation, confession and anticipation. I’m used to seeing the Creed closer to the start, but I like it at the end just the same.

Kaffinator:
As a lifer in the evangelical universe, for me, the “post-” calls to mind a certain dissatisfaction and restlessness. Business as usual doesn’t cut it anymore. For a lot of years I was told that liturgy was a dead and empty repetition, but my experience tells me that this was a willfully ignorant lie. I’m glad to leave lies of this sort behind. From this angle, the post-evangelical is in the process of unlearning deep and nasty habits of many sorts. Our progress is often measured as much by what we un-learn, as what we learn.

How does this sort of thing happen? Does everyone have a “Jerry Maguire” moment? Maybe, but in my case, quite by accident, I became a part of a small group of worshipers who discovered the joys of liturgy together. For three years we met at 8:00am, before our church’s contemporary service (with the guidance of two very experienced and gifted liturgists). When the church grew large enough for a “second service” we got squeezed out — to make room for the band to practice. I still miss that little service.

I get the feeling that people who grew up surrounded by richer deeper traditions found our post-evangelical liturgical awakenings somewhat quaint. I can’t say that I blame them, after all, we were often like honeymooners who thought they had invented sex.

By: Paul Findlay

Paul Findlay — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 02:55:38 +0000

Chronologically it is now impossible to be pre-evangelical. I think how you described what "post" indicates could be true of what I have seen Mr. Spencer articulate (see What Do I Mean by Post-Evangelical?).

I mean that the death of evangelicalism opens the door for a return to the sources and a fresh examination of the meaning of Jesus.