Brady Bowman

Brad East (once more), on how a proper grasp of the essence of Christian worship ought to serve as an antidote to the evangelical tendency toward tech-obsessed, performance-based productions:

We might instead interrogate the nature of Christian worship itself. I asked my students what they would expect, visiting a church for the first time. What should they expect?

The historic answer of the church down through the centuries is that they should expect the liturgy of Word and sacrament. They should know in advance that, with real but limited variations, they will pray, sing, confess their faith, confess their sins, hear the word of the Lord in Scripture, hear the gospel of the Lord in proclamation, and receive the visible word of the Lord’s body and blood, the bread of heaven broken for their salvation. Whatever country they are in, whatever language is spoken, whether visiting a city or a town, a congregation of 5,000 or a parish of 50—this is what should await them.

Notice what is necessary for the celebration of this liturgy: sisters and brothers gathered in the name of Jesus, a leader, the Bible, a little bread and wine. Believers, Scriptures, elements, and a place to bring them together. That’s it. In fact, on a given Sunday morning around the world, you can find them brought together in cathedrals, in houses, in apartments, in strip malls, in cafeterias, in mud huts, out in the open by rivers and under trees, hidden in basements and attics for fear of being found out.

This is the genius of Christian liturgy. Beyond the tools required to produce texts (which long predate the printing press) and food and drink (which are necessary to live), no technology is necessary for the church to worship the Lord in Spirit and in truth. Perhaps, as the case may be, new technologies have the potential to help. But they always have the potential to harm, to distort and misshape.

On one hand, worship is a form of catechesis. It molds our hearts, minds, and imaginations. Young people are right to expect, on a given Sunday, what they have seen and heard on hundreds of previous Sundays. It’s clear to me that the present catechesis has worked, but in all the wrong ways.

Too many evangelicals assume that ordinary worship is what I’ve elsewhere called the tech-church show—a performance in every sense of the word. Not the drama of the Eucharist or the reenactment of the liturgical script but a slick, high-def production. If I am right that this is what many assume is normal, based on its prevalence among larger churches, then my suggestion is that ministers need to go back to the drawing board. Back, I should say, to the time-tested wisdom of Word and sacrament. Call it the ABCs of Christian liturgy.

Brad East, on the church’s uncritical adoption of technology in worship:

Long before COVID-19 but exacerbated by lockdown, many churches have been competing in a kind of techno-liturgical arms race to draw seekers, especially young families and professionals, to the “Sunday morning experience” of high-tech public worship.

For many seasoned evangelicals among the millennial and Zoomer generations, the result—state-of-the-art, high-definition, professional video and audio and music, with smooth transitions and fancy lighting, all frictionless and ready-made for the internet—is simply becoming the norm. It’s what church, or worship, means.

At best, the gospel retains the power to cut through all the noise. At worst, believers receive neither the Lord’s Word nor his body and blood. Instead, they get a cut-rate TED Talk, spiritual but not religious, sandwiched between long sessions of a soft rock concert.

If you think East is being alarmist and blowing this whole thing out of proportion, then I don’t think I know how to help you.

James K. A. Smith:

We are bundles of potentiality, but the possibilities are not infinite. We are thrown into a time and place, thrown into a story that is our history, and these form the horizons of possibility for us…. That is not a limitation as much as a focusing, a gifted specificity. This corner of earth I’ve been given to till. These neighbors I am called to love. These talents I’m exhorted to fan into flame. This neighborhood in which to birth a future.

James K. A. Smith:

What I aspire to is a factor of what I’ve inherited. What I imagine as a possible future—even what I can hear as a “calling”—is a reflection of what my past has made imaginable. Our now is always bequeathed to us.

James K. A. Smith:

A buried past is not dormant. Ignoring the past is not a way to escape it. Indeed, the buried past probably takes more than it gives.

Cypresse (1889) by Vincent van Gogh:

Robert Bolton:

When listening does not encourage disclosures of feeling, we tend to miss the speaker’s personal reaction to the events she is describing—her joy, sorrow, frustration, anger, grief, ambivalence, and so on. Since, as William James put it, “Individuality is found in feeling,” we miss the uniqueness of the other person when we have a low level awareness of the other person’s emotions.

Robert Bolton (I almost took out the exclamation point at the end, but—alas—I’m not Bolton’s editor so I figured I should include it):

One of the primary tasks of a listener is to stay out of the other’s way so the listener can discover how the speaker views his situation. Unfortunately, the average “listener” interrupts and diverts the speaker by asking many questions or making many statements. Researchers tell us that it is not at all uncommon for “listeners” to lead and direct a conversation through the frequent use of questions. It is also common for the “listener” to talk so much that he monopolizes the conversation!