Worship as Community Drama

Introduction to Liturgy Evaluation

Pierre Hegy

• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781532673016
  9781532673023
• eBook ISBN:
  9781532673030
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Church weddings, funerals, and most Sunday services reflect the values and dramas of their communities, even when the ministers are the main or sole actors. This point is illustrated by examples ranging from American television masses to the Zairean three-hour services in the Congo. Of greatest interest to readers might be the Sunday services at ordinary parishes, which also range from friendly but uninspiring to innovative and inviting. There are also two exceptionally vital churches analyzed here: an evangelical church in the Pentecostal tradition and a social justice parish in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. Today one can hardly buy an item in a store or on the Internet without being asked for an evaluation, yet church services are seldom evaluated. There can be no improvement without evaluation. This book proposes a method of evaluation in eight steps that must be rigorously scientific and at the same time offer a vision for spiritual growth. The prophet Elijah found God in earthquakes and fire, but most people find mystery through art, music, rhythm, chanting, expressive readings, evocative rituals, and enlightened homilies. Today people expect "mystagogy" rather than routine performances. Mystagogy can be learned and improved through evaluation, to which this book desires to make a major contribution.

1

Ritual Theory

Collins’s Model for Worship Analysis

This book hopes to create a framework of analysis easy to follow. It consists of eight variables usable in any kind of worship, whether Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim. Four of these variables involve the observation of worship services and four a reflection about these observations and interviews with the pastor and staff. In the best of circumstances this can be done in a few weekends.

The purpose of this research is to identify strategies for change by assessing the strengths and weaknesses in a given parish, after observations of worship, leadership, ecclesiology, and moral consensus. We will also raise basic sociological and theological questions, like sacramentalism and ritualism, faith and culture, spiritual growth, segmentation versus integration, and creativity versus submissive obedience. This book consists of nine chapters describing worship issues in a given church with corresponding strategies for change.

There is very little empirical research about Jewish, Christian, or Muslim worship. There are numerous articles on cults, hero and idol worships, a few ethnographic studies about local, mostly foreign, worship practices, but practically none about worship across Christian parishes or congregations. There has been, however, a long tradition of empirical research in the areas of symbolic interactionism and ritual interaction. These studies observed interactions in the secular sphere but not religion; yet their tools are ready for use in worship analysis. The original contribution of this work, therefore, consists of applying well-established sociological tools to religious services.

This chapter is divided into three parts. First it presents a brief review of the literature on ritual interaction; next I briefly introduce other fields of research applicable to worship analysis, and lastly I introduce three liturgical theologies with different emphases in the liturgy: encounter with God, symbolic exchange, and transcendent enchantment.

I. Ritual Interaction Analysis

I will not introduce Durkheim mentioned in the introduction. His conception of religion as social creation is central in sociology. He also emphasized that social phenomena must be studied as “facts,” that is, in their observable manifestations; he did not put much emphasis on interpretation, which is the main contribution of Max Weber. Let us come directly to the contemporary scene.

The study of congregations and parishes can be seen as a distant introduction to worship analysis. Since the publication of Joseph Fichter’s Southern Parish in 1951, there have been numerous studies of church participation, satisfaction, contributions, leadership, ethnicity, etc. A great source of information about congregational life is the US Congregational Life Survey in which over 2,000 congregations participated. A major study of American parish life is The Emerging Parish: The Notre Dame Study of Catholic Life Since Vatican II by Jim Castelli and Joseph Gremillion (1987); it was to answer the question, “Where have the last twenty years of Vatican II reform taken the American Catholic parish?”3 A recent replication of this extensive study has been published under the name of Catholic Parishes of the 21st Century.4 I will return to the Notre Dame study later in my analysis.

Ritual studies are closer to our topic of worship analysis. The pioneer in this field was Ronald Grimes who founded the Journal of Ritual Studies. Grimes defined basic concepts like ritualization, decorum, ceremony, liturgy, magic, and celebration,5 but these concepts do not clearly identify a field of study. Since one can see rituals in a great variety of contexts, cultures, and historical settings—rituals not being clearly defined—the field of ritual studies tends to be too broad to be of much help for worship analysis.

At this point, let me say a few words about the ancestors and direct creators of ritual analysis, namely Alfred Schutz, George H. Mead, Erving Goffman, and especially Randall Collins.

Alfred Schutz fled the Nazi invasion and came to the US in 1939. In his teaching at the New School of Social Research of New York, he promoted phenomenology in the tradition of Husserl and Max Weber, that is, an emphasis on intersubjectivity and interpretation. One of his major contributions is the notion of life-world.6 According to phenomenological theory, each individual constructs his or her own world out of experiences about events, persons, and objects in everyday life, including the interactions within one’s family, ethnic group, and social class. Schutz calls these subjective worlds the life-worlds. These constructed worlds are also psychological prisons that make social interaction difficult. Thus the clergy and the laity often live in different life-worlds and may talk past one another unless there is mutual listening. The Sunday worship is usually determined by priests, who do most of the talking and praying during the liturgy. If worship is to be an encounter or a symbolic interaction, there has to be mutual listening between the different life-worlds; without it there is segmentation.

Symbolic Interactionism is a type of social analysis that became popular in America around the middle of the twentieth century. Its main source of inspiration was George H. Mead (1863–1931), but there is great variation in the symbolic interactionist camp that he inspired. Herbert Blumer, a student of Mead, systematized the basic ideas of the movement. His two major insights are that social worlds are created by finding meaning in things, events, and processes, and that meaning is found through interaction.7 What differentiates symbolic interactionism from Schutz’s approach is the assumption that meaning is found in symbolic interpretation and social interaction rather than individual reflections. These views have become widely accepted in many fields.

A special contribution of George H. Mead for our study of ritual analysis is his notion of inner dialogue between the “I” and the “me” because this inner dialogue can be seen as a model for prayer. According to Mead, we are in a constant “conversation” with ourselves.8 The self can somewhat split itself into two, the social self or “me,” and the transcendent self or “I.”

This distinction is best understood introspectively. When we look at some past memories, these mental images constitute the “me” while the self that is looking at these mental images is the “I.” Then the self is “an object to itself,” reflecting on itself by looking at its images like in a mirror. We are our past and our social images, but we can also transcend the social persona of the “me.” This type of reflection makes possible a constant conversation between the “I” (the creative self and center of moral judgment) and the “me”(the social self).9

When a person prays, there is similarly a tension between the social and the personal dimensions. No prayer can exclusively involve the “I” with no relation to anything outside itself. Conversely, a ritual prayer that does not engage the subjective self is only a prayer of the lips, not of the heart. To the extent that liturgical prayers are performed from a script they may leave little room for the spiritual “I.” Instead of being uplifting they can be deadening by fostering mechanical performance and audience passivity. Other psychologists have further chara...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Summary Presentation of Worship Analysis
• Chapter 1: Ritual Theory
• Chapter 2: American TV Masses
• Chapter 3: Pontifical Masses at Notre Dame of Paris
• Chapter 4: Six Papal Masses
• Chapter 5: Two Ordinary Parishes
• Chapter 6: A Lay-Run Parish
• Chapter 7: Growth and Development
• Chapter 8: The Liturgical Imagination
• Chapter 9: The Zairean Rite and Usage
• Chapter 10: Method and Vision in Worship Analysis
• Bibliography