Reimagining Worship

Renewing worship in a changing church

Anna De Lange, Trevor Lloyd

• Publisher: Canterbury Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781848259133
• eBook ISBN: 9781848259157
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Rituals & Practice

Worship is a dynamic, living encounter that should never be static. In the Church of England, although Common Worship provides texts for every season and occasion, the church constantly needs to refresh its worship, just as it reshapes its presence in local communities. In this comprehensive volume, a wide range of experienced liturgists, musicians and pastoral practitioners consider the principles that will determine the character and quality, as well as the content, of our worship in the future. The contributors are all members of the Group for the Renewal of Worship, a broadly evangelical group within the Church of England and including senior clergy, musicians, theological college tutors in liturgy and former members of the Liturgical Commission.

1

Mission

A Quiet Revolution

During the 1990s, adult attendance in the Church of England declined by 14 per cent and child attendance by 28 per cent. Baptisms declined by 24 per cent and confirmations by 43 per cent, Christmas communicants by 24 per cent and Easter communicants by 16 per cent.1 By any standards these figures are alarming. And the problem is shared by other denominations. The rates of decline of the Roman Catholic and Methodist Churches were faster than that of the Church of England. Others declined rather more slowly although the Baptist Church grew.2

The widespread perception of a church powerless to reverse the trend of decline was exacerbated by the fact that the Church of England had agreed to designate the 1990s as the ‘Decade of Evangelism’ and the Catholics the ‘Decade of Evangelization’. And yet, far from marking a resurgence in attendance, the decade saw the century-long trend in decline apparently gathering speed. Or did it? In fact, as Bob Jackson shows, the 1990s appear to have marked a turning point. While the rate of decline accelerated during the first half of the decade, from about 1995 it began to slow. Church attendance was still in decline, but more slowly than before.3

The Decade of Evangelism did not produce a resurgent church or even a marked turn in the tide of decline. What did happen was something much more subtle but more far-reaching. During the 1990s mission began to move from the periphery of the church’s vision towards the centre. Since that time by a series of gradual steps the church has gained a new confidence in mission and a clearer understanding of what it entails. This chapter charts the quiet revolution’ in the life of the churches over the past two decades, which has led to a new emphasis on mission and acceptance of its centrality in the life of the church.

Process evangelism

In 1977 Charles Marnham, curate at Holy Trinity Brompton in West London, devised a short course that he called‘Alpha’, designed to provide a basic understanding of the faith for new Christians. The course consisted of six sessions, each of which began with a shared meal. Over the next ten years or so in the hands of subsequent curates the course was gradually adapted and became an integral part of the life of HTB. When Nicky Gumbel arrived in 1990 he quickly realized that Alpha might be just as effective with non-churchgoers as with those already part of the church and adapted the course accordingly. With the publication of Questions of Life, the text of Nicky Gumbel’s Alpha talks, in 1993, followed by videos of the talks, Alpha became a national and then international resource used by an increasing number of churches of all denominations. By 2003 7,000 Alpha courses were being run across the country each year and by 2010 42,530 courses in 163 different countries. It was estimated that up to 2.5 million people in Britain and 13 million worldwide had experienced the course.4 Alpha was not the first attempt to use a ‘nurture course’ as a means of evangelism. During the 1970s Michael Wooderson, vicar of St Thomas Aldridge in the West Midlands, devised a scheme that he called ‘Good News Down the Street’. Wooderson had realized through a chance remark after a funeral that there were far more people wishing to find out about Christian faith than willing to darken the doors of a church on Sunday, so he arranged for groups of three church members to take the faith to people in their homes in the form of a six-week course based on the Gospel of Luke. The choice of three people and six weeks was carefully considered to provide the right length of time and the appropriate number of people for a small group. In the first six years, according to Wooderson’s figures, 200 people received a team, and 136 made a commitment to Christ of whom all but ten went on to become members of the church.5

At the same time, in the Kensington area of the Diocese of London, the vicar of St Nicholas Shepperton, Peter Ball, was pioneering the ‘adult catechumenate’ or ‘Adult Way to Faith’, drawing on Roman Catholic sources, especially the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults. Ball drew his inspiration from the early centuries of the church, when baptism was preceded by long and careful preparation designed to provide converts from paganism with a solid understanding of Christian faith and practice capable of sustaining them in a hostile and non-comprehending world. A key feature of the Adult Way was the involvement of church members as companions and sponsors on a journey of faith, leading up to and then beyond baptism and confirmation. As with Alpha and Good News Down the Street, people arriving at a point of commitment had already become part of a community of faith through the friendship and encouragement of existing church members.6

The Alpha course reflected in its style and content the evangelical and charismatic strand of the Church of England, Good News Down the Street the more traditional evangelical, and the Adult Way to Faith the catholic part of the spectrum. The next major development was a collaboration between church leaders of all three strands. The Emmaus course, launched in 1996, represented a conscious embracing of what was beginning to be called process evangelism’, the use of a carefully devised nurture course to provide an ‘accompanied journey for people exploring faith in the context of Christian community7 Among other features of the Adult Way to Faith, Emmaus incorporated short liturgical ‘celebrations along the way’, services of welcome, dedication, renewal and commitment to be used at the start of a course, the lead-up to baptism and confirmation and after confirmation. Versions of these short celebrations have since been incorporated into the Church of England’s official liturgy, Common Worship, as ‘Rites Supporting Disciples on the Way of Christ’.8 The Emmaus material also includes an extensive set of follow-up courses emphasizing the point that the journey continues beyond the point of commitment.9

Thus, although with the benefit of national publicity Alpha dominates the market, it is by no means the only nurture course available. Alternatives are available from outside the evangelical strand of the church, such as ‘Doxa’ from John Thomson, Director of Ministry in the Diocese of Sheffield,10 while Robin Gamble’s Start! attempts to correct the perceived middle-class bias of other courses.11 If the rich variety on offer represents an attempt to provide for people in every church and context, the logical conclusion is the ‘home-grown’ course, devised by individual clergy or parish teams. Mark Ireland describes how he would regularly gather groups of enquirers in his home and begin by asking them two simple questions: ‘What makes you think on a good day that there might be a God?’ and ‘What makes you think on a bad day that there can’t be a God?’ Having discussed the responses, the group would decide which were the biggest issues for them and in subsequent meetings they would explore the Bible together for its responses to those issues. Through starting where people were, building relationships, and willingness to be vulnerable to questions and doubts, Ireland hoped to create a space in which God would be at work.12

Since the 1990s ‘process evangelism’ has become a recognized element in the life and mission of churches across the spectrum of theology and churchmanship. So what theology is implicit in this form of mission? First there is a recognition that people are asking searching questions - in the words of the Alpha course, questions of life’ - and that these questions are potentially a way in to Christian faith. One of the key features of contemporary culture is a loss of certainty about fundamental issues such as the meaning of life itself, along with a wide variety of choice among possible answers in our diverse and plural society. In practice, different courses take different positions on the best place to start. The first Alpha talk,‘Christianity: Boring, Untrue and Irrelevant?’ has been criticized as beginning with the question perceived as a major stumbling block to faith in the 1980s. Twenty years later it has been suggested that society has moved on; for many people the problem with the church is that it is not ‘spiritual’ enough.13 In any case, after the initial talk, Alpha quickly moves on to setting out the basic facts about Jesus’ life, death and resurrection. Emmaus attempts to begin further back with ‘God is there and he matters’ followed by‘We all need God in our lives’. Few are as open as Mark Ireland’s flexible home-grown course. Despite this variety, the implicit assumption that people are drawn to explore Christian faith through common human questions implies that what they are looking for, and what Christianity provides, is a faith for the whole of life, which makes sense of experience and ties together belief and practice.

Second is the recognition that conversion is a process. In 1992 John Finney, then the Church’s Officer for the Decade of Evangelism, published Finding Faith Today, the results of research sponsored by Churches Together in England on the way people come to faith. The research identified 500 people in a variety of denominations who had made an adult commitment to faith through baptism or confirmation and asked them for the stories of how they arrived at that point of commitment. Of those who could recall a time when they were not Christians only 38 per cent described their conversion as a sudden experience; others described a process lasting in some cases longer than ten and on average four years. Even in evangelical churches, where stories of decisive conversion experiences are a widely recognized form of testimony, no less than 50 per cent described a gradual process. ‘The fact is,’ commented Finney, ‘that most people come to God much more gradually. Methods of evangelism which fit in with this pattern are urgently needed.’14 The development of the Emmaus course, of which Finney was one of the authors, was explicitly a response to these findings. The very name ‘Emmaus’ expresses the idea of conversion as a journey like that of the two disciples accompanied by Jesus on the first Easter evening, in contrast to the ‘Damascus road’ experience of the apostle Paul, which had previously been the paradigm for many churches. Increasingly it was coming to be recognized that the ‘crusade’ evangelism of the period from the 1950s right through to the 1980s, marked by the challenge to commitment at mass rallies, relied on calling people back to a faith which they had learned and practised as children. In contrast, it was realized that most people were now ignorant of the basic facts of Christianity and needed time to absorb them before coming to a decision.

Not only may Christian conversion be a lengthy journey but it is one that involves companions and takes place in community: an accompanied journey. As Stephen Cottrell points out, this model for evangelism and nurture comes from the catechumenate, based on the practice of the early church.15 It is a long-standing aspect of catholic spirituality now gradually being rediscovered by evangelicals and others. As the Emmaus course Contact booklet points out, the idea that someone hears the gospel, believes and then goes searching for fellowship is largely a fantasy and exceptions are few. The norm is that the enquirer has contact with Christians, joins their fellowship and only then comes to belief. Increasingly belonging comes before believing rather than the other way round.16 Thus, following the practice of Adult Way to Faith, nurture courses typically involve sponsors and companions whose role is to build relationships as much as to share the discussion, since it is in relationship that people find their way to faith. Associated with the involvement of companions and building of relationships is the recognition that evangelism is the task of the whole church. No longer is evangelism to be left to a few with special gifts: everyone can be involved, even if only to prepare and serve a meal at an Alpha course. Those who complete Alpha or Emmaus as enquirers frequently take part in another course as companions as well as for a refresher. The Emmaus Contact booklet, prepared to enable churches to think through the implications of opting for this form of evangelism, forcefully points out that evangelism should not be a ‘bolt-on extra’, reliant on the enthusiasm of the minister or a group of enthusiasts. Instead, the course should be integrated into the programme of the church in such a way that other activities fit around it and the nurturing of new Christians on the journey of faith becomes central to the congregation’s life.17

Moreover the church in which these shared journeys of faith take place will be a church with ‘fuzzy edges’. If belonging comes before believing then church membership will no longer be defined by belief. The congregation will include people at all stages of the journey some of whom may be in the early stages of exploration, others, perhaps long-time members, struggling to find a faith adequate to challenging personal circumstances. Still others may be exploring faith with the help of members of the congregation but unwilling yet to identify with church. The ‘fortress church, which restricts membership to those able and willing to make a specific ...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Mission
• Kingdom
• Church
• Ministry
• Conclusion