I know: I promised some more practical ideas on worship. But first, some words about worship and time. Why do we score so low in studies on Presbyterian worship? The Natural Church Development studies, for example? What kind of time do we Presbyterians spend on worship? A half an hour at presbytery meetings, half an hour at morning worship at General Assembly, half an hour at conferences such as last year’s Emmaus Project, an hour on Sunday.
Worship is about time, tempo. Even the simplest, most informal worship has tempo, a rhythm. It moves the congregational story through beats: repeated movements, peak and valley, high and low, fortissimo and pianissimo, formal and informal, from gathering through to sending out.
Worship is a temporal art. Like music, dance, drama, it moves through time. Like all these arts, worship can seem to suppress, extend, shorten or completely disregard time. Beyond the words we use, deeper than our spoken or written theology, our deepest values can be seen in the way we use the time of worship.
In some Presbyterian churches, the entry of the Bible is a key moment in the time of the service, where its forward momentum is slowed as the congregation stands and waits in silence, or sings and celebrates (yes, they do), as the Bible is placed on the lectern. Some congregations have a dancing procession as the Bible is brought in. Our devotion to the word, this piety, this attentiveness—whatever you want to call it—is expressed by more than the words we say at that time in a worship service: it is expressed by the time we give it in the rhythm of worship.
In Presbyterian tradition, the sermon has traditionally received more time and “weight” in worship; more, for example, than the homily in a Roman Catholic mass or an Anglican Eucharist. A wonderful sermon (whatever its length) can draw you in, grip you and make you lose sense of how long you’ve been listening.
The church that hurries crisply and efficiently through its communion service, and hurries to get it wrapped up before 11:00 is expressing its deeply held convictions about the Lord’s Supper through its use of time.
In a church my wife Wendy and I attended recently, the minister spent a lot of time with the children before they head out to Sunday school. This time was clearly for the children, not the adults (who didn’t mind in the least). He listened to their questions (not necessarily heard by us adults in the large sanctuary), answered them in a way that each could understand, invited them to remember their baptism by touching the water in the baptismal font), and stayed connected with them as they left the sanctuary. Time well spent.
The temporal element of worship explains why music is such an able partner in the worshiping community. Even hymns are more than what the late biblical scholar, David Allan Hubbard termed “compact theology.” Music of all kinds—songs, litanies, psalm responses, instrumental music—connect the different movements of a worship service. Each requires a different way of thinking about time as we sing them. For example, Taizé chants require a sense of time radically different from that of a hymn, with its closed line-endings and its fixed number of verses. The sung prayers of the Taizé community are like labyrinths set to music. They go round and round, and you think that they don’t go anywhere. But then they come to an end, and you realize that you have been worshipping, praying the whole time you’ve been singing. A similar time commitment is require of many songs of the world church, particularly the cyclical songs from Africa, or even African-American spirituals. We think of them as repetitive, but they offer their particular spiritual gift through repetitions and variations. They hit peaks and valleys, as the song “heats up” musically and emotionally, then relaxes. These songs demand their own kind of time, and to receive their gift, we must approach time differently.
But time is a huge problem for us North Americans. We are time misers, Ebenezer Scrooges of time, counting each minute as if it were a gold piece–which, in our culture, it is. We spend seemingly endless time on administration: presbytery meetings, business meetings, boards, committees. What kind of time do we spend on worshipping? Half an hour here, an hour there.
What time do we give to bring our visions to reality? As a denomination, what time are we spending giving congregations and our church leaders the experience of new forms of singing, or old forms in new ways? We have church choirs, leaders of our congregation’s singing voice, who have forgotten how to learn a new song. How are praise bands learning to move beyond playing worship songs the way they sound on the CD, and become leaders of congregational singing? I’ve lost count of the times a Presbyterian church leader has said to me, “What a great hymn! Is it really in the Book of Praise?”
What does vital, faithful worship cost?
Time.
