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Q & A
Q&A: Liturgy can enhance deeper Christian walk Mary Jacobs, May 1, 2008
Christians who once dismissed traditional liturgy as outdated are now re-discovering it, says Mark Galli, senior managing editor of Christianity Today and author of a new book, Beyond Smells and Bells: The Wonder and Power of Christian Liturgy (Paraclete Press). He spoke recently with staff writer Mary Jacobs.
People who gravitate toward churches with more casual worship often tend to view formal liturgy as rote, impersonal or even irrelevant. Your response?
The fact that something is rote doesn’t make it impersonal. I use the same words to express my affection to my wife every day: “I love you.” We say the Pledge of Allegiance and we use the same words every time; we don’t make it up on the spur of the moment. Certain words or a certain order of worship can be an extremely meaningful experience in a way that spontaneous words could never do.
However, the liturgy is no magic bullet. It can be used to avoid God or to put our faith on automatic pilot so we don’t think about it anymore. But the liturgy can also help us draw nearer to God, and that’s what I argue for in the book.
You write, “Liturgy helps us enter a counter-intuitive story.” Can you explain?
We live in a highly individualistic culture, but when we enter a liturgical service, we will be grounded in a much more communitarian notion of what it means to be a Christian. We enter as individuals but we leave as a community, and in that sense it’s counterculture. It’s counterintuitive because our culture really likes informality and authenticity. But when we enter into liturgy, we find we’re addressing the Almighty Lord, the God of heaven and earth, who is in some ways a distant and overarching God. But this is also the God who comes to us in Jesus Christ in the Eucharist in a way that is more intimate than we can ever imagine, that casual language cannot even begin to address.
Without the liturgy, do you think evangelicalism has enough substance to nurture mature believers?
Evangelicalism is really good at helping people who know nothing about the faith to begin to get some hold of the faith—taking complex ideas and simmering them down to four spiritual laws, for example. On the other hand, evangelicalism is not very strong at helping people to go deeper. That’s where the liturgical church can help quite a bit. That’ll sound pejorative to evangelicals, but I do think that popular, independent, nondenominational evangelicalism will always struggle to retain people after they’ve grown in their faith for awhile. Willow Creek Community Church recently did a survey and that’s exactly what they discovered: The church was doing a great job reaching new believers or unbelievers, but the older that members got, the less meaningful they found the church. Willow Creek is hoping to turn it around by teaching some of the classical, traditional practices such as fasting. It’s an interesting model, and it’s very wise.
There’s a lot of pressure in the U.S. to keep services to an hour or under, particularly on days when there’s a major sporting event. Relevant?
I think it’s like the difference between a novel and a short story. For you to really settle into worship and begin to give yourself to God—it’s pretty hard to do that in an hour. You can do a “short story” service and there’s value in that. But anyone who’s read a novel knows it has a texture and a depth that a short story does not have.
I was a pastor of a church that shared a building with another church, and we had to do our service in less than 50 minutes. I’m now part of a church where if we get out in less than an hour and 15 minutes, it’s a short service. There’s a qualitative difference, and it’s not just the extra half hour. When you go over the magical American one-hour limit, it allows things to happen that cannot happen otherwise.
Charles Spurgeon, a tremendous 19th century orator, told his preaching students, “When it’s 12 p.m. you’ve got to quit, because Mrs. O’Leary is thinking about the pie she has in the oven and Mr. O’Leary is thinking about all the chores he has to do. They’re not thinking about your sermon anymore, no matter how good you are.” So there’s some wisdom in there as well.
Some of the ugliest battles in churches relate to liturgy: what hymns will be sung, what prayer book will be used. Is that worth fighting over?
At one level, it strikes us as “majoring in minors.” At another level, if you’ve grown up with a hymn or a liturgy that has allowed you to meet God in ways unimaginable—well, if someone comes along to change that, it’s not just changing a bunch of words. They are asking you to give up something that has helped you grow as a Christian.
It is wise to adapt our liturgy and our hymns so the next generation can have their own experience of church and of God. But I tend to be conservative. Change should be slow. Something that was handed down to us was meaningful for a reason. It’s not wise to just throw it out the door if it doesn’t seem immediately relevant.
Running parallel with an eclectic spiritual interest is a growing interest in the traditions and rituals of the Christian faith. What’s behind that?
We live in a culture that’s been trying to live without God for some time. The more we try to divorce God, the more hungry people are going to become. And that hunger takes form in spiritual dabbling. But increasingly, people will find that boring. A lot of that experimental spirituality is fairly narcissistic. It’s about finding a feeling inside myself. The liturgy allows you get in touch with something that really is beyond yourself, to enter into an experience that transcends yourself, which is what people are ultimately looking for.
You write, “Liturgy helps us enter a counter-intuitive story.” Can you explain? 
Some of the ugliest battles in churches relate to liturgy: what hymns will be sung, what prayer book will be used. Is that worth fighting over? 
