Rediscovering Liturgy for Church Planting
Liturgy and church planting. Perhaps these are two things you don’t expect to hear together—it has been a longstanding criticism of fresh expressions and pioneer ministry that they discard with something crucial about the worship of the Church. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard the claim that “fresh expressions are for low-church folk” or, that, “missional forms of church are run by those without a robust theology of the sacraments or a well-thought-through ecclesiology”. In dispensing with traditional forms of liturgy, the thought goes, we have thrown out the sacred bathwater in our attempt to discard its culturally irrelevant receptacle. What we’re left with is an attractive community gathering, that at best is a form of pseudo-church.
Perhaps, those of us who are passionate about church planting might dismiss this criticism as wholly missing the point. When traditional liturgical churches are seeing lives changed and people coming to faith on a regular basis, we might take the criticism more seriously. But for now, the church planter might argue, we should put aside these worries of the stubborn traditionalist and get on with doing ministry that makes a difference. Indeed, I have often heard that liturgy ought to be confined to the past, along with the trappings and distractions of a dying institutional religion. In fact, I have even been told that it is very obvious that the early church clearly didn’t monotonously recite the same lines of text week-in, week-out.
What both sides of this (admittedly caricatured) debate fail to see is that liturgy isn’t the domain only of the traditional church. In fact, on closer inspection, we can see that there isn’t a church which doesn’t have a liturgy. As hard as we try to reinvent and redesign church, we cannot get away from the fact that all churches have rituals and routines, that involve both scripted and spontaneous acts of worship.
In the church plant I was involved in leading, you would struggle to find many of the features of traditional worship (spoken liturgy, sung worship, heavily scripted prayers). But there were clearly defined liturgies to our community. For instance, we gathered every Sunday to eat breakfast together. While the contents of the meal changed, the ritual remained constant week-in, week-out. Another thing we did each week was to read a passage of Scripture. While our way of approaching the passage changed each week (sometimes we used discussion, other times video clips, interviews, or short talks), people would expect some kind of gathering around the bible in our Sunday worship.
The point is simple enough; as soon as a new community is formed it must find rituals to sustain its life and to make people feel safe and welcome. A gathering of people without a script of some sort would be complete chaos. But, as someone who has spent about a decade leading and planting fresh expressions, I know all too well that we aren’t often comfortable with the language of ritual or liturgy. Pioneer ministry can all too often confuse repetition with superstition. But when we realise that we cannot avoid ritual in our worship and that repetition can be very good for us (think of how important regular exercise is, even when we don’t feel up for it), then we can start to think more carefully about how our liturgies are shaped. There is great hope here.
The critique of the traditionalist (as I presented them) might be put like this: pioneer ministry is liturgically shapeless; it doesn’t go anywhere, and it doesn’t reflect the thoughtful and theological deep patterns of the historical church. I think there is something to this criticism. In a bid to be innovative, we can perhaps miss that the shape and structure of our worship is crucial if we are to sustain a thriving church community. There is a good reason that traditional liturgy has been shaped around gathering, confessing, hearing the word, receiving the eucharist and being sent out into the world. This pattern speaks of the good news that we find in Jesus Christ. We are loved and accepted by God, in need of his forgiveness. Through the grace and mercy shown to us in the preaching of the word and the breaking of the bread we are given new life, sent out into the world to be beacons of his light. And it’s not merely the words themselves that instil the truth of this message in us, but the forms of the liturgy themselves. The repetition of this great story of God’s grace means that our lives become caught up in the wonder of the gospel, even when we don’t feel much like joining in.
In my opinion, what’s so exciting about church planting is that we have the opportunity to learn from the deep wells of insight from the history of the church but to do so in new contexts, new cultures and with people who have no exposure to these liturgies. There is great possibility here. What would a church look like that was deeply traditional and gospel-focused in its liturgical shape and innovative and outward-looking in its form? How might fresh expressions provide a deep discipleship-forming set of rituals that are accessible to those who are alienated by rituals that often seem rigid and outdated?
Every generation reinvents the liturgies of the past to fit the culture of the present. Without such reinvention we would never have had The Book of Common Prayer. My hope is that a new generation of church planters would emerge that are deeply sensitive to the power and hope that can be found in liturgy, with eyes to see the needs of those in communities unreached by this power, so that the love of Jesus might be seen afresh in a world that so desperately needs to be shaped by his transformation.
Further Reading:
Winfield Bevins, Ever Ancient Ever New, Zondervan, 2019
Joshua Cockayne, ‘Why Bother Using Religious Rituals’, Logos Questions
Joshua Cockayne, ‘The Cultural Liturgies of Café Church’, Scottish Episcopal Journal 2020
Dru Johnson, Human Rites, William B. Eerdmans, 2019.
James K.A. Smith, You are What you Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit. Baker Academic, 2016
Joshua Cockayne
Joshua is a lecturer in theology at the University of St Andrews and a curate in the Scottish Episcopal Church. He led the G2 Central church plant in York from 2016-2017 and was on the leadership team at G2, a fresh-expressions church in York for many years prior to this.
