Voices In My Head Podcast Episode #280: A History of Christian Worship Part Nine - The Liturgical Mo

Have you ever thought to yourself, man, I'd like to host my own podcast? Well, guess what? You can go to podbean.com/voices and get everything you need to create, manage, and promote your podcast. I use Podbean every week for Voices in My Head. There's easy uploading and publishing tools, stunning templates, custom domains, social and promotional tools, an embeddable podcast player, monetization tools, and more. It is your all-in-one podcasting solution. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile ready right from the start. So go to podbean.com/voices, and when you sign up, use the code "voices" and you'll get a sizable discount. Podbean, for your home podcasting. Thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is your source for discussions on music, literature, movies, pop culture, theology, and more. Now sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of the Voices in My Head podcast. And don't forget to let the voices in your head be heard by following me on Twitter @RickLeeJames and sharing your thoughts about today's show. Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James. I'm really glad you could be here again for session 9 of 10 of the history of Christian worship. I've been enjoying this study. I hope you have. It's been a lot of work, but I think it's been worth it, and I hope that you've really found it beneficial. One quick announcement and then one quick question for you, the listener, that I need a response from, if possible. Possible. But here goes. The announcement that I have is, for the longest time, the podcast web address has been rickleejames.podbean.com. And the only reason it's been that is because that was the free web address that was given. Well, after nearly— I mean, we're heading up on 300 episodes here in the next 20 episodes or so. And I decided, you know what, doggone it, it's time to actually man up, put some money down, and and get an actual website that is our own. Something that we own. So as of this episode, the new web address for Voices in My Head podcast is voicesinmyheadpodcast.com. You can still get there from the old rickleejames.com or rickleejames.podbean.com. And you can still get there through my website at rickleejames.com if you click on certain links. But if you just want a direct link to the show, Voices in My Head podcast All right, and before we get into Part 9 of the History of Christian Worship, I have a question for you, and I would really appreciate your feedback. So here we go. Question of the Week. Question of the Week. Gosh, that's a segment I used to do every week, and I haven't done in a long time. But the question I have for you, maybe you could respond to me either by email The email is rick@rickleejames.com, or you could respond through Twitter @RickLeeJames and just let me know what you think of this. I am thinking of starting a podcast about Fred Rogers, dedicated to Fred Rogers, on the Mr. Rogers Say Twitter feed @MrRogersSay. That's the Twitter account. We just have been growing, we've been gaining like 1,000 followers a week. I think last week it was something like 1,000 followers, which was amazing. And we have over 8,000 followers. I think we're going to be at 9,000 probably by the end of the week. It's just been amazing how many people have been a part of that community there, and it really is a wonderful community, and there's a lot of interaction that happens. And I just quote Mr. Rogers on there, but I've read a lot about the man. I've watched so much about him in various documentaries. I've talked to people who knew him, and in fact Michael G. Long, who wrote the book Peaceful Neighbor, is going to be on the podcast here in just a few episodes, and I'm very excited about that. So I'm actually thinking about maybe a once-a-month, maybe even a conversational podcast, maybe with others who have been influenced by Fred Rogers in some way, or maybe who knew him. And I'm not sure what I would call that yet, but the question I have for you is Would you be interested in hearing a separate podcast from Voices in My Head that's dedicated to things having to do with being a good neighbor in the world, like Fred Rogers? And that would probably be what the podcast was focused on, sort of passing on the legacy that he taught and lived out. Just people who have been influenced by him and how we can go about seeing the world as our neighborhood and being good neighbors in the world. We might even call it the Good Neighbor Podcast or Welcome to the Neighborhood or who knows, I'm not sure. But if you want to respond, rick@rickleejames.com is the email you can respond to, or on Twitter @RickLeeJames. Alright, well, that's it for now. I'm gonna get right into session 9, and only took about almost 6 minutes into the podcast before we got into it. But there's only one week left after this, unless I think of something else to tack on in the history of Christian worship. This week is Session 9: The Liturgical Movement. Let's get into it. You might call the 19th century the age of revivals, both in Europe and in America. In Europe, the rationalism of the Enlightenment had given birth to an architectural awakening known as the Gothic or Neo-Gothic Revival. Although this architectural revival made its way to campuses like Oxford and Cambridge, Gothic was most commonly used in church architecture. What we often don't realize is that the architecture of the place where we worship does indeed inform how we worship. Have you ever thought about that before? Notable for worship, Gothic churches had pointed arches and/or windows. They had rich colors and decorations and a vertical emphasis pointing attention heavenward. Buildings themselves were constructed as forms of worship by virtue of the design. They were intended to inspire worship. Meanwhile, on the American frontier in the 19th century, Religious revivals were sweeping across the landscape, emboldening Protestantism with the spirit of a crusade. In Christian worship, what began as a work to revive the old turned into something very new. Revivals turned into revolutions, as we will now see in our look at the liturgical movement. So let's start with the Roman Catholic liturgical movement. Among the Romantics of the 19th century, many sought an escape into a more picturesque past. Sounds familiar, doesn't it? We always like to look to the past as if in the good old days something was so much better. Priests like Prosper— I'm gonna apologize right now, it's a hard name for me to say, and I hope I don't ruin it— but priests like Prosper Guéranger began living the monastic life among the ruins of monasteries. Géringer made his home in the damp priory of Salesmes. More than simply seeking the nostalgia of the past, Father Salesmes set out to revive— revitalize the Christian institution by centering it on worship. His hope was that the Mass itself would evangelize a secular society. It was worship as evangelism. To Father Granger, the modern age's emphasis on a spirit of independence and a spirit of individuality were its cardinal sins. Independence and individuality were cardinal sins. Corporate worship had become a minor part of life in the parish, and too often the spiritual life of the average Roman Catholic had become subjected and private, primarily focusing on personal devotions. Well, Father Granger and his fellow monks believed that liturgy could form individuals into a community, and they set out to test that belief. At the monastery in Solesmes, the Mass became the center of life. The music and the rites were so beautifully perfected that their beauty became a public witness to to the power of worship and the life of faith. Father Granger became a precursor— er, sorry, Solesmes, where he lived, became a precursor to what became known as the Liturgical Movement. And liturgists came to Solesmes to study and research the strides that they had made in their liturgy. The weakness of the Liturgical Movement at Solesmes is that Father Granger only sought a revival of the old ways, not a reformation that would cut a path forward. He restored Gregorian Chants as the model for liturgical music, which was beautiful, but because it also sought to suppress any part of the Mass that was not of the pure Roman Rite, he resisted any attempts to put the liturgy into the common language of the people. Which caused the revival to be stifled. However, what Fr. Granger and his cohorts began at Salesmes would lead to a great revival of Benedictine liturgical scholarship. The date of birth of the liturgical movement is generally marked as November 22, 1903, when Pope Pius X issued his edict, Motu Proprio. This edict officially sanctioned the movement for liturgical reform that had begun long ago. The Motu Proprio spoke of returning to the fount of the life of liturgy and restoring participation of the people. It specifically called for chant to be restored as a way of increasing lay participation in the music of worship.. It also called for more frequent communion by the faithful within the weekly Mass. The edict also suggested future revisions of liturgical books, while at the same time warning of rash local revisions. After the papal ban had been lifted in 1897, a Benedictine monk named Dom Lambert Bouadin He translated the Roman Missal into the common dialect so that it could be used for personal reading. Retreats for parish choirs began being held at Mont-César, Bodin's abbey in Belgium. The abbey also published many publications for the clergy that stressed the social character of the liturgy as a unifying factor for the church, and a way of counteracting individualism and secularism in the modern world. Dom Bodin also believed function of the liturgy was to teach, so he used it as a catechism and a corrective to the bad theology that had found its way into many of the extra-liturgical devotions. The Benedictine Revival spread now to Germany, where Dom Odo Cassel of the Benedictine Abbey of Maria Laach had developed his Mysterian theology, or in English, Mystery Theology. Cassel insisted that the core of Christian faith was its sacred mysterious worship. In Cassel's theology, liturgy makes the mystery of Christ real throughout the whole Church, in all times and places. Cassel claimed that the experience of redemption, as we have it made available to us, is found in the mystery of liturgy. Cassel's work spoke not just to laypeople but also to intellectuals. A fellow monk, Romano Guardini, inspired by the theology of Cassel, wrote a widely circulated interpretation of the liturgy for a popular audience called The Spirit of the Liturgy. In 1941, Abbé Maria Laach instituted an annual liturgical week for training laity in liturgical leadership at their local parishes. Also at Maria Laach, a massive encyclopedia on archaeology and liturgy was published by Dom Crebreul and Dom Leclercq. The Encyclopedia led to a better historical work in the liturgical movement, shifting its emphasis away from medieval worship standards to patristic ones that were more focused on the early church writers such as St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and St. Hippolytus. Benedictines were leading the way not only in Europe but in the Roman Catholic liturgical movement in the United States as well. By founding the influential magazine Orate Fratres in the late 1920s. The first Liturgical Week in the States was held in Chicago in 1940. This enabled countless priests and laypeople to take the fruits of liturgical scholarship down to grassroots on a practical and pastoral level. In America, liturgical revival went hand in hand with the recovery of the ministry of the laity. Thanks to the cautious but strong support of Pope Pius XII in the liturgical movement, Holy Week services were revised and the Easter Vigil was restored to its proper place as the center of the liturgical year. The vernacular was even experimented with as occasional services were authorized with updated language. Some restrictive fasting requirements in preparation for the Eucharist were lifted, and the celebration of major rites at evening hours were authorized, allowing the needs of modern working people to be met. At Vatican II in 1962, the first order of business was sweeping and radical reform of the liturgy. At last, the Roman Church, desperately in need of reform since before the days of the Protestant Reformation, came to its long-awaited process of renewal at Vatican II. So now let's look at the Protestant liturgical movement. Protestants in the 19th century, due to liturgical studies, began to discover that their Protestant forefathers, Luther and Calvin, were not as Protestant as they had assumed. Lutherans renewed their interest in Luther's liturgical thought as a counter to German Pietism. The Idea of the Holy by philosopher and mystic Rudolf Otto proved to be helpful in translating worship theology to the contemporary church of its day. Friedrich Heyler's High Church Lutheranism of the 1920s helped to bring about a new ecumenical spirit among Lutherans. At Valparaiso University in 1949, the Liturgical Institute fostered liturgical renewal in Lutheran congregations that spread throughout the United States. A renewed interest in the liturgical thoughts of Calvin surfaced among the Reformed churches of the mid-1800s. Like the Lutherans, many Calvinist pastors were surprised by the liturgical views of John Calvin. An interest in richer, more formal, and more traditional worship was sparked in Calvinist churches as a way of reviving the dry, verbose, didactic worship that caused many of their churches to suffer. The liturgical movement in Reformed churches is quite unique in that some of its earliest renewal came not from Europe but from the United States. Charles W. Baird's Eutaxia spread among American Calvinists like wildfire, bringing the long-suppressed liturgies of Calvin, Knox, and other Reformers to the light of day. In the 1840s and 1850s, the Mercersburg movement blossomed at the German Reformed Seminary in Pennsylvania under under the leadership of J.W. Nevin and Philip Schaff. The Mystical Presence by Nevin set forth a Eucharistic theology for Reformed churches. Nevin strongly opposed the new measures made popular by Charles Finney, accusing them of transforming American Protestant worship into blatant emotional manipulation in the way that it used worship to motivate congregations to "make a decision for Christ." Nevin believed that praise and adoration, the central historic acts of Christian worship, had been buried in pulpit-pounding rhetoric and trivial moralizing. Philip Schaff was a distinguished scholar in church history and liturgy. He accused American evangelicalism, with its exclusive focus on sin, of neglecting worship's proper focus God's grace. With the combined theology and leadership of Nevin and Schaff, the seeds planted in the Mercersburg movement would bear fruit in the reforms of the next century. In 1931, Henry Van Dyke led a revision to the liturgy of the Presbyterian Church in the USA. The revisions recovered the legacy of Calvin while incorporating works of Anglicanism and Lutheranism. Now let's take a look at European Reformed churches, the Protestant monks of Taizé. As European churches slowly entered into liturgical renewal, Taizé, France became a fascinating example of Protestant worship that was heavily influenced by Roman Catholic worship styles. By the way, as a side note, I try to once a month be a part of our Taizé services here in Springfield with several other churches, and they've been gracious enough to welcome me as their guitar player for a number of services. We have a wonderful fellowship together with Catholics and people from our local Episcopal Church and myself and anyone else who can come. But anyway, let's get into Taizé worship so you know a little bit more about what it is. Taizé worship consists of much singing. Much repeated prayer and chants during candlelit prayer services. Taizé music highlights simple phrases, usually consisting of lines from the Psalms or other pieces of scripture, repeated or sung. Let me give you an example. This is something that we sing every time we come together, something like this: Hear my prayer, O Lord. Or then there's: Bless the Lord, my soul, and bless His holy name. Bless the Lord, my soul, who gives me new life. I think I got the words a little wrong, but some simple phrases like that, we'll sing them again., and then we'll sing them again, almost like Lectio Divina, where you read a passage of Scripture and let that sink in and read it again and let it sink in and read it again. It's sort of like that through music. So, the repetition in the service is designed to help the faithful enter into meditation and prayer. Much of the return to Bible-centered prayer services at Taizé was due to the work of a Swiss Bible scholar named Oscar Kolmann. Cullman studied the biblical basis for sacramental theology and as a result was able to give many Protestants a new appreciation for the centrality of liturgy to the Bible itself, both in its creation and its message. Cullman did the service of reminding the church that the Bible itself is a text for worship. Anglicanism also had a great deal of involvement in the liturgical movement. Edward Pusey sought to reunite the Roman and English churches by emphasizing Anglicanism's roots in both theology and worship. A friend of Pusey, John Henry Newman , was a highly influential theologian, poet, and an Anglican priest. Who was so heavily involved in the reforms that he eventually became a Catholic priest and later a cardinal. Then there was John Keble, who lived 1792 to 1866. He saw the frightening process of decline in denominations in Britain that he stressed the Anglo-Catholicism as an antidote. His legacy was hymns and poems written for use during the liturgical year. Then there was Edward Caswall, 1814-1878, and John Mason Neal, 1818-1866. They worked hard to recover Greek and Latin hymns and urged that they be used in English liturgies. There were also fragments of liturgical reform found in less, shall we say, credible places. Edward Irving, 1792-1834, founded the Holy Catholic Apostles' Apostolic Church in 1832 after leaving the Scottish Presbyterians. The church combined ritualism, pieces of Greek, Anglican, and Roman liturgies, millennialism, and apocalypticism into a strange mixture of 19th-century religious obsession. As alluded to earlier in this lesson, we see the liturgical movement in the church architecture. Augustus Pugin saw Gothic style as the golden age of church architecture and led the Gothic Revival. Pugin was one of the reformers responsible for returning the table to its medieval position against the apsidal wall. The choir sat elevated between the people and the table on an elevated stage-like setting. The table eventually would become cluttered with crosses, flowers, and candles. Crucifixes, processional crosses, and public reservation of the sacrament were additions added to Anglican worship during this period. Anglican cathedrals went from being sober houses of worship to dark neo-Gothic sanctuaries accentuated with Baroque Roman liturgical color schemes. The Gothic and liturgical revivals did make worship appealing in new ways to people who had been repelled by the formal, stifling use of the Book of Common Prayer, to which Anglicans had previously withdrawn. The fruit of this movement in Anglicanism was a round of prayer book revisions in the 1920s which took place in England, Scotland, Canada, South Africa, and the United States. The rites themselves didn't change nearly as much as the liturgical piety, the ceremony, and the theology that surrounded them. The 19th-century revivals had become the institutionalized pattern for worship in Free Church-oriented American Protestant churches. Influenced by groups such as the Southern Baptists and cultivated in an environment that was suspicious of ritualism and formalism, many Free Church Protestants moved toward spontaneity and freedom in worship, seeing the liturgical movement not as a revival but as a decline. Most saw the liturgical movement as an outright denial of vibrant evangelical fervor —a view that has remained with many evangelicals to the present day. The thing that is so ironic is that both the liturgical movement and American revivalism were striving for a recovery of emotion in worship. If they disagreed on how to achieve that end, they were still going for the same end. Both movements were longing to make Moship emotional and real. Free Church Protestants in America had lost the Eucharist as the focal point for corporate worship. Unfortunately, in the American religious landscape, corporate worship was often sacrificed to the aggressive individualism found in democratic business life. American evangelicalism, with its Madison Avenue-like revivals and business-like utilitarian crusades, claimed to be not of this world, but in actuality, it began to look very much like the surrounding world and the surrounding culture. Like the Eucharist, Baptism was emptied of much of its meaning in American Protestantism, being overshadowed now by revival-esque conversion experiences. The result of revivalism was that most Protestant churches in America now elevated an individual's personal experience over corporate acts of worship or sacramental means of grace. For most American Protestants, the read, preached, taught, personally experienced, and affirmed Word was now more important than the sacraments and other corporate worship activities instituted by Jesus and the early church. As the 20th century began, More and more American Protestants in the free church tradition were growing dissatisfied with their patterns of worship. Many mainline Protestant denominations saw efforts among some of their membership to enrich worship. Too often Protestant reformers confused the psychological with the theological and simply traded the old pulpit-pounding emotional manipulation of revival services for new manipulations that used candles, crosses, and other liturgical ornamentation. Many who sought to break out of the old worship patterns in order to find a more fitting expression of worship for their beliefs became proponents of the "Social Gospel," as it's called. While this liberal approach helped many Protestants turn their worship away from subjective individualistic experiences, The Social Gospel had a tendency to reduce worship to a means for gathering Christians to social action. The weakness of this is not that it aims to help people, but that it can turn the attention of corporate worship from a focus on God to a focus on people. There were a few more specific expressions of the liturgical movement that found their way into American Protestantism. The divided chancel was introduced into Protestant architecture as a protest against the former pulpit personality-centered arrangement. Choirs began wearing vestments, and then later by clergy. Congregationalists and Methodists claimed their Anglican heritage by donning cassocks and plain stoles and surplices matched to the color of the liturgical year. Surplice, by the way, is a white ecclesiastical outer garment like a smock with wide, often flared sleeves varying in different length. The cross, which was once considered an abomination in many Protestant circles, believe it or not, was now displayed prominently atop newly installed altars, and many other new symbols were added to the sanctuary as well. In the 1920s, the Hymn Society of America, along with the School of Sacred Music at Union, helped to train Protestant musicians and worship leaders who worked to introduce traditional and new hymns in corporate worship. These new and traditional hymns emphasized the adoration and majesty of God in corporate worship over the old subjectivism of gospel and revival songs. The seasons of the church year were also recovered by many Protestant churches, as well as lectionary Bible readings as ways of bringing in a wider variety of themes for worship and preaching than just personal salvation. New service books began to be published for Protestant worship, offering rich resources and full orders of worship for congregations. Many Protestants began to discover that liturgical revival went hand in hand with a growing spirit of unity among denominations. Not all Protestants welcomed the liturgical movement, of course. Modern Pentecostalism, for example, was in part a rebellion against the liturgical movement, which it saw as a backsliding into lifeless forms of Protestantism. Since Protestants had not yet developed a sufficient theological basis for liturgical reforms as their Roman Catholic brothers and sisters, many of their innovations were simply superficial adornments without any grounding in doctrine or church history. Often Protestants would simply borrow aesthetic enrichments from other traditions without understanding their own distinct place in worship. For most Protestants outside of the liturgical reform movement, baptism and the Lord's Supper had become mere symbols of a prior individualistic experience, not nearly as important as God's Word. One person's revival seemed to be another's lifeless liturgy, and vice versa. Well, this has been Part 9, and I hope you have found it interesting. And maybe even a little convicting at points as we think through our different movements. One thing that maybe you could think about this week— I talked a little bit about it at the beginning and then later on— I'd love for us to think together about the idea that the building itself can be an act of worship, that the place where we worship can actually be a place that inspires worship, that inspires a commitment to the Lord, that inspires us to give glory to God, and inspires us to focus on His grace. Think about the building where you worship. There are certain buildings built for worship, and there are other buildings that are more utilitarian. One thing I love about a lot of our older churches that I see Many times they're big churches with stone structures. Oftentimes they're much too large at this point for the actual congregation that is housed inside of them, unfortunately. But there will be beautiful stained glass windows, and the stained glass will tell stories. And the idea behind these things was that when they were made, many people were illiterate, and so the idea was that it would be a multimedia experience. So if you walk into a Catholic church sometimes, or an Episcopal church, or Presbyterian church or a Methodist church or any church that has these beautiful stained glass windows that tell stories. Not just the ones that just have colors, but the real stained glass. You'll see in most Catholic churches when you go inside, they are telling stories throughout. They are for people who maybe can't read the text and who could come in though, and the idea was that the building itself could teach us something about who God is. And could tell us the story of the Gospel. Cathedrals are built in the shape of a cross to remind us of the One who we worship, who died on the cross and rose again. You'll notice by placement of the table how significant the idea of coming to the table is in worship. There are churches I've been to that have it right up front in a place of respect because that is the place of the climax of the service where we come as guests of God, where Jesus is the host of the meal, to receive from Him. And there are places I have been where the communion table sat in the back and was covered by bulletins, and people hardly knew it was there. That should tell us something about the priority of worship. The places we worship really do mean something. The architecture of the places really do mean something. I understand that many times today we have to build churches based on a budget. I get that. It is the reality of the world. But I think it is a little sad, and I think we have lost something when we have forgotten that even the building itself is meant to be a place that when we walk into it, we are reminded that this is a heavenly space and this is holy ground. It's not just another coffee shop. It's not just another concert venue. This is a place meant to inspire true worship with the Living God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit calling us together into the Holy of Holies. Well, hopefully that is some food for thought this week. We have one week left. I can't believe that we are going to be wrapping up. Gonna be trying to deal with the present next week. That's a big task. So I'll see you next week on Voices in My Head. Don't forget about that question about the Mr. Rogers podcast, the Good Neighbor podcast, or Won't You Be My Neighbor, the podcast. I don't know. Let me know your thoughts on that. I'd love to hear. Email me rick@rickleejames.com. Contact me on Twitter @RickLeeJames or on my Mr. Rogers Say Twitter account, which is @MrRogersSay. Alright, that's it for this week. Thank you so much for listening and thank you for all your kind feedback on this show. See you next week. Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, follow me on Twitter @RickLeeJames, like my artist page at facebook.com/rickleejames, .com/rickleejames and keep up to date on what I'm writing on my author page on Amazon. There's also the Voices in My Head Facebook community found at facebook.com/voicespodcast. And if you want to follow my alter ego on Twitter, follow my popular Mr. Rogers quote account found at @MrRogersSay. Also, make sure to follow my appearance schedule on my website, and if you would like to have me come to your town to do a concert, a speaking engagement, or a book event, you can book me through my website. At rickleejames.com/bookings. And it would mean the world to me if you would write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews we receive, the more visible this podcast is on the internet. And now the benediction: May the God of peace, who raised Christ from the dead, strengthen you in your inner being for every good work work, and may the blessing of God Almighty, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, rest upon you and dwell within you this day and forevermore. Amen.