By Robin G. Jordan
5. Tailor the worship of the congregation to the particular circumstances of the congregation.
This principle I originally picked up from Bishop Michael Marshall’s book, Renewal in Worship. Marshall, when visiting the London congregations under his episcopal oversight, noticed how these congregations tried to worship in a way that did not fit with the setting in which they were worshiping, for example, a mission hall, and which was far beyond their limited musical resources. His advice to congregations in similar circumstances is to adapt their worship to their circumstances. This included includes to stop using the worship of larger churches as the standard for their worship and to start using simpler, more accessible forms of music in their worship. Based upon my reading in the areas of church planting and church growth, I concluded that other factors beside the size of the congregation, the setting in which the congregation is worshiping, and what musical resources a congregation has merit consideration in applying this principle. They include the composition of the congregation, the demographics of the community in which the congregation is located, the cultures and subcultures of the community, the musical tastes and preferences of the community, and related factors.
A very important factor is the congregation’s ministry target group, the particular segment or segments of the community and surrounding area that the congregation is endeavoring to reach and engage. Keeping our ministry target group foremost in our mind in worship planning is one way of maintaining an outward-focus and of avoiding putting own preferences first. Our preferences should always take a backseat to reaching and engaging our ministry target group.
Sometimes our preferences and reaching and engaging our ministry target group may lineup. But they often do not. If we are serious about reaching and engaging our ministry target group, we will put our ministry target group first. When we put our preferences or a particular ecclesial praxis first, we are likely to create barriers between our church and the people whom we are trying to reach and engage.
A number of startups with which I am acquainted did not learn this lesson. As a consequence they did not flourish and eventually failed.
In the case of St. Michael’s, the Episcopal church with which I was involved for fifteen years—from its earliest planning stage to its launch to its attainment of self-supporting parish status and for more than a year after a devastating church split, its ministry target group was primarily the new families who were moving to the North Shore and who, if they had been previously churched, had not found a new church home. Western St. Tammany was experiencing a building boom and a population explosion in the 1980s and 1990s.
The number of new families with an Episcopal background was very small in comparison to the number of new families with a non-Episcopal or no church background. A number of these families were also mixed marriages in which one of the spouses was a Protestant and the other spouse, Catholic. We chose to cast our nets for the more abundant fish which we discovered were much easier to catch. The new families moving to the North Shore were less concerned with denominational labels than they were with whether a particular church would be a good fit for them. We also discovered that the new families with a non-Episcopal or no church background made better church pioneers.
The new families with Episcopal backgrounds generally came with a lot of baggage. They had pre-conceived notions of how church should be done. They typically wanted to recreate the worship of a previous church that they had attended. They had picked up a lot of bad practices from their previous churches.
Bad practices, like bad habits, are easily acquired but they prove even more difficult to eliminate. They become enshrined in custom. For example, one woman wanted to introduce the practice of lighting all of the candles on the Advent wreath throughout the Advent season. It had been the custom of her previous church.
Bad practices usually begin as the bright idea of someone who is not knowledgeable about liturgical practices but who wields enough influence in the church to have her own way. The individual in question may badger the pastor until he caves in.
In some cases the bright idea is the pastor’s. Pastors may exhibit poor liturgical judgement as much as anyone else. We might think that they would know better but often they do not. They are also not spared from the temptation of putting their preferences first.
My former rector and one of his seminary professors did not meet eye to eye. Due to the way that the service of Holy Communion is structured in Rite II of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the practice of singing a doxology at the offertory is generally discouraged. It overshadows the Sanctus in the Eucharistic Prayer which immediately follows the offertory. It also gives undue emphasis to the offertory which is an ancillary rite and not a major part of the service. Like the entrance rite and the concluding rite of the Holy Communion service, the offertory is prone to accumulate unnecessary clutter—offertory prayers, presentation sentences, doxologies, and the like. More recent Anglican services no longer use the term “offertory” to describe this part of the service. They may title it “the preparation of the Table” or “the presentation of the gifts” or give it no title at all. When my former rector planned his first chapel service in seminary, he included Thomas Ken’s Doxology, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” at the presentation of the gifts, modeling the service after the services of the church which he had attended before entering seminary. In his critique of the service the professor pointed to his attention the inappropriateness of the use of a doxology at that point in the service in front of the other seminarians. This did not sit well with my former rector who swore to himself that when he had a church of his own, the congregation would sing Thomas Ken’s Doxology at the presentation of the gifts. As long as I knew him, he adamantly insisted that Thomas Ken’s Doxology was a part of the liturgy.
I personally find far more profound the practice of presenting and placing the gifts of bread and wine on the Table in silence. This is the most ancient practice. We do not need to fill up every empty space in the liturgy with music. Silence is often more appropriate. In the case of the presentation of the gifts, silence enables the congregation to focus their attention upon the liturgical action
The late Lionel Dakers, the long-time director of the Royal School of Church Music, in Choosing and Using Hymns notes that the singing of Thomas Ken’s Doxology is a peculiarly American custom. It was not known in the Church of England in 1985. I have not been able to determine the origin of the practice.
Despite the archaic language and grammar Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s essay, “Of Ceremonies, Why Some Be Abolished, and Some Retained,” is a good description of how churches fall into bad practices and why congregations cling to them. The meaning and use of the liturgical practices that we adopt should be understandable to the congregation. They should also not create barriers for the ministry target group that we are trying to reach and engage. We should not adopt them on the basis that “this is the way we have always done things in the Anglican Church.” Really?!
One way of forestalling the introduction of bad practices into a new congregation’s worship services is to conduct a series of mini-classes on liturgical practices. These classes should include an explanation of how churches fall into bad practices and why congregations cling to them. They should deal with the mistaken belief that the continuance of a bad practice is justifiable on the basis that the practice has become customary. These classes should emphasize that in worshiping God we should not settle for mediocre or second-rate. What is worth doing is worth doing well. Even a small congregation meeting in one of its members’ living room can maintain a high standard of worship. It can offer God its best. This does not entail purchasing expensive communion ware and vestments or imitating the worship of a large church. What it does involve is putting our best effort into whatever we do. We pray with expectancy. We sing with enthusiasm. We read the Scriptures with clarity and feeling. We preach with boldness. We pour our hearts into everything that we do.
As I have written elsewhere, it is better to do a few things well than a lot of things poorly. Michael Forster tells the story of his father who was the choirmaster of a small village church. Rather than attempting anthems that were beyond the ability of his small choir, he would pick a new or unfamiliar hymn and teach the hymn to the choir. He then would work with the choir on singing the hymn well, not in parts but in unison. Once the choir had mastered the hymn, he would have the choir sing the hymn in a worship service as an anthem. He worked within the limitations of his small choir, enabling the choir to put its best effort into what it was asked to sing and in doing so to glorify God.
The effort we put into our worship music does not go unnoticed. In interviewing unchurched people who had begun to attend a church, Thom Rainer found that one of the main reasons that these people had started to attend a particular church was that the church put its best effort into its worship music. This conveyed to these people that the church took the worship of God seriously.
For the better part of ten years I was involved in a collaboration with St. Michael’s first music director. While my former rector hired her, I had recruited her while I was chairman of the mission’s worship committee. (When he came aboard, one of the first things he did was to disband the worship committee.) She had agreed to take the position if I helped her in planning the music of St. Michael’s worship services because she was not knowledgeable about the use of music in the liturgy and had no experience in planning music for the liturgy. St. Michael’s would benefit from our collaboration—from the combination of her musical judgement and musical skills with my liturgical judgment and my familiarity with the vast mountain of new music that was being publish at that time. I functioned as a surrogate for my former rector who had abdicated what is normally the role of the pastor in an Episcopal church and with the exception of insisting upon the use of Thomas Ken’s Doxology at the presentation of the gifts had left the selection of the music of the worship services entirely to the discretion of the music director. During our collaboration I was able to put into practice the principles that I had gleaned from the literature on worship renewal, church planting, church growth, and evangelistic outreach.
We used the Ecumenical Hymn List to identify what hymns our hymnal, its hymnal supplements, and the yet-unpublished new hymnal shared with other denominational hymnals and what hymn tunes were widely used in these hymnals. We used this information in selecting hymns and hymn tunes for worship services with a view to including in these services a number of hymns and hymn tunes that might be familiar to guests visiting St. Michael’s for the first time. We wanted them to immediately feel at home. Unfamiliar hymns and hymn tunes can be very off-putting for first time worship visitors.
We sized up the musical tastes and preference of the new families moving into the community and the surrounding area. We took their tastes and preferences into consideration in our selection of the music of our worship services. We used a larger number of the newer worship songs as well as the older hymns. We selected hymns and worship songs that were within the limitations of the congregation. We selected special music that was within the limitations of our small choir. We often used hymns and worship songs from other traditions as simple anthems. We worked these hymns and worship songs gradually into the congregation’s repertoire. We made a point of selecting hymns and worship songs with refrains and repetitions that enabled young children to participate in the congregational sing.
We placed a high value upon congregational singing. We were intentional in introducing new hymns and worship songs to the congregation and gave the congregation ample opportunity to master them. We often used the choir to introduce a new hymn or worship song as a simple anthem. We conducted pre-service congregational rehearsals and weeknight hymn sings.
We used a medley of worship songs at the beginning of worship services to draw the congregation together as a worshiping assembly and to focus the congregation’s attention upon God. We also used periods of silence, announced by the ringing of a hand bell. Except during Lent, we sung a simple alleluia before the reading of the gospel. We used the simpler service music settings, those which were easy to learn and easy to sing and which wore well. They did not grow stale with frequent repetition. On the few occasions that Morning Prayer was the principal worship service, we used metirical versions of the Venite and the Jubilate and the canticles.
All of these choices were applications of the principle of tailoring the worship of a congregation to the particular circumstances of the congregation.
Enthusiastic congregational singing and an eclectic mix of traditional and contemporary music characterized St. Michael’s worship services and was high on the list of reasons that newcomers gave for attending St. Michael’s. It was above the pastor’s sermons and beneath a warm, friendly, welcoming congregation. Relaxed but reverent worship was also on that list with an informal atmosphere and simple, uncomplicated services.
The application of the twin principles of simplicity and less is more enabled the congregation and the choir to put its best effort into what it was doing. A few things done well would more than compensate for our non-traditional worship setting and our lack of ambiance. In the kinds of settings in which new congregations worship, the ambiance that characterizes the typical Episcopal church is impossible to create and any attempts to create it look decidedly out of place. It is like putting lipstick on a pig. The lipstick does not improve the appearance of the pig. It makes a very nice looking pig look ridiculous. The pig looks a whole lot better without it.
Simplicity does not frighten off people who are unused to the elaborate ceremonial and formalism that is found in a number of Anglican and Episcopal churches. It does not look out of place in a former factory, a school commons area, or a storefront.
Along with simplicity and less is more, brevity is a third important principle for tailoring a congregation’s worship to its circumstances. When a congregation is small as is often the case in startups, tediously long services are best avoided. Adding more to a service does not enrich it or make it more worshipful. It just makes the service more wearisome. Tiring and boring guests does not encourage them to return for a second visit. Rather it is likely to cause them to warn their friends, colleagues, neighbors, and relatives against visiting the startup.
All the embellishments and enrichments beloved by liturgical commissions, liturgiologists, and other ritualists are also best-avoided. They not only lengthen worship services but they look out of place, even ludicrous, in the non-traditional settings in which startups usually worship. They do not make our services more appealing to guests contrary to what we may read in articles and books and hear at conferences. Guests often have quite different reactions to these practices than we do. In a startup it is important to be mindful of how the way we worship can create barriers between the new church and the people that it is trying to reach and engage. What turns us on may turn them off.
What we do in our worship should be harmonious with the setting in which we are worshiping. Restrained gesture and simple ceremonial works well in a wide variety of settings, including conventional settings such as cathedrals, seminary chapels, and parish churches.
When we tailor our worship to our circumstances, we transform our worship and make it more impactful. We take a step toward become a high impact church that really makes a difference in our community.
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