In Living Theatre, we would each day approach the rehearsal putting yesterday’s discoveries to the test, ready to believe that the true play has once again escaped us. But the Deadly Theatre approaches the classics from the viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and defined how the play should be done. … But, like anything that has to be repeated especially when there is pressure to repeat it accurately and well, it suffers from the reality that from the day something is set the aliveness of it begins to die.
— Peter Brook, The Empty Space: A Book About Theatre; Deadly, Holy, Rough, Immediate
Easter has passed once again, the challenge of living through Holy Week a check mark in the calendar of a pastor’s year. It, along with Advent and Christmas are the times we are most likely to pull out all the stops for worship. We are aware of how special these moments are and want to help our congregation (and ourselves) feel the specialness of them. They happen every year and for many of us since before we can remember.
Lisa Cole Smith
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Because of this familiarity and because the events we celebrate happened two thousand years ago it is difficult to enter into them with freshness. So we exert effort to make the experience new. We try to make it real, in the here and now in a personal way. We devise services that are participatory with the whole congregation singing and reading Scripture. We add elements that dramatize Scripture and awaken all of our senses. We bring children into the service with our older members and learn from the perspective of both innocence and experience. We work hard to make our worship alive in these times because we are acutely aware of the ease with which these rituals can become mere repetition of traditions and we know that without an experience of Easter in the here and now, the Good News of Easter is lost.
But, isn’t that true of every Sunday? The practicality of developing a worship service every week of the year in the midst of other duties makes it unlikely that every Sunday will have the same attention that Easter and Christmas do, but what Peter Brooks says about theatre is true of worship. Like “Deadly Theatre,” “Deadly Worship” approaches each service from the viewpoint that somewhere, someone has found out and defined how worship should be done. Comfort comes from replicating experiences, efficiency of form and certainty of repeating what we already know. While traditions and routines are helpful and necessary, we must be critically aware that every Sunday we risk “Deadly Worship” when we don’t acknowledge the challenge that once a thing is set and repeated “something of the aliveness of it begins to die.”
All congregations struggle against this force. To combat it we have conversations about style and form. We try everyone worshipping together and splitting up by ages and preferences. We try worshipping at different times — both early and late. And still we struggle to find the magic bullet to make our worship appealing, relevant, accessible, deep, educational, excellent, experiential and, oh, yeah — worshipful. What if instead we strove for living worship where we each week approach our Sunday meeting putting our old discoveries to the test, ready to believe that true worship (knowledge of God, true awe, etc.) has once again escaped us? Thirsting for a living encounter with God and through Christ, with one another?
What if we truly believed that like Easter, each Sunday we are walking into a space that is holy, that is living, where there is something to be grasped that we know is just past our reach and yet entirely possible for us to enter into? What if we saw our routines and rituals not as what defines or drives our worship, but simply as the tools we pick up each week to help us mine the depth and mystery of the love of God with the curious minds of children hungry and thirsty for a living, breathing worship? The challenge of tending to a living worship is also the joy of it. It allows each moment to be lived more clearly and more tensely and it is each participant embracing that challenge that brings worship to life.
Lisa Cole Smith (lsmith@convergenceccf.net) is pastor of Convergence: A Creative Community of Faith, in Alexandria, Va.