Dear Friends

Not long ago I had the pleasure of spending time with an Episcopal priest from Weare New Hampshire who introduced me to the language I was seeking about liturgy and culture. Because he spoke so clearly about an anthropology of worship, I asked John if he would contribute his thinking to our blog, and he said yes.

What follows is offered by John McCausland and from an Episcopal perspective, but I believe it translates to all denominations, all faiths. Enjoy!

For Episcopalians, and certainly for seminary-trained clergy, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer and the liturgical reforms it embodied, were a watershed. They represented the fruition of over one hundred years of scholarship and discussion among liturgists, historians and theologians, not just in the Anglican Communion but ecumenically in all the branches of Western Christianity. The thinking of the Protestant Reformers, and of the Catholic Counter Reformation, was supplemented and in important aspects revised by discoveries about worship in the early Church and new readings of the Bible. Things like the primacy of the gathered assembly, the Eucharist as the principal Sunday service, the recovery of the Triduum, and the importance of Baptism made the liturgical reforms of that generation the most important since the Reformation itself. Anyone going to seminary from the 1970s through the 1980s was exposed to and caught up in the excitement of faculty members who were part of that movement. Older clergy, as well as laity, fought the good fights that brought these reforms into standard parish practice. It was a new dawn.

But in important ways the promise of liturgical reform has not brought about the changes in congregational life and individual understanding that were hoped for. Things done carefully "by the book," even with careful catechesis, have failed for the most part to capture the hearts and minds of subsequent generations. Attendance sags, churches close, clergy wonder what they have failed to do. From the perspective of one parish priest who has "been there and done that," I think the problem is that we have failed to do our anthropology. That is, our reforms (which I think were brilliant and fully support) were inspired mainly by the past, by liturgical history, biblical scholarship and theology, while slighting the present--not giving sufficient thought to the changes and challenges of the culture in and for which liturgy must be celebrated.

We have focused on texts--but our culture has become increasingly non-textual. We have aimed at the sophisticated and intellectual, but fewer and fewer of the people we would like to reach fall into these categories. We have assumed well-formed, fully catechised congregations, but we are met with harried, time-pressed people who know almost nothing about the Bible, music or the history and doctrines of Christianity. As I say, we have failed to do our anthropology. Except where church-going is still supported by the secular culture (the South), except for those who come to us from other denominations where the situation is even worse or minorities are badly treated, and except for gray hairs and the few cognoscenti who "really get it," we are losing our place.

Some years ago I was introduced at a workshop to three terms that are important to think about here. The first is aculturation: meaning to treat something entirely without reference to the culture in which we want to plant it. Example: trying to understand Islam without reference to the history of the Middle East. The second is transculturation: meaning the attempt to move something like a religion from one culture to another by moving the whole culture with it. Example: Anglican missionaries building Anglican cathedrals in Hong Kong and Zanzibar. Both aculturation and transculturation fail to honor the truth of the Incarnation: the Gospel must always be presented, enfleshed, in the particular time and place and culture one is attempting to evangelize.

So the third term in this triad, what we as Christians need to aim for, is inculturation: presenting the Gospel in the culture we seek to reach in such a way that we are faithful to that culture as well as to the Gospel. No easy job, of course, but that is the challenge we must now address--the challenge that Christianity has always in the end met, starting from our breakout from Judaism, and a challenge that Anglicanism in particular prides itself on meeting (think "locally adapted," an Anglican by-word). Do the mega churches meet the aculturation challenge? They have the culture down pretty well: worship places that look like malls or movie theaters, spectator liturgies, soft rock music, "dumbed down" expectations, simplistic answers, emotional security. Are they compromising the Gospel? Some would say so, but those pointing the finger need to take a hard look at their own houses. How do we take the Gospel as Anglicans understand it--all that Hookerian heritage of Scripture, tradition and reason--and present it so that congregations raised on television, movies, consumerism and now video games and the Internet can appropriate and participate in it? If we cannot meet that challenge, we are in the most basic sense failing to be ministers of the Word and Sacraments. Jesus preached to the multitudes, not to liturgical perfectionists and high culture elitists. Besides, "them" is really "us"--our kids and grandkids, our spouses, partners and siblings, who are just left cold by the typical Episcopal Sunday morning, no matter how carefully and earnestly done.