There’s a hip saying, often attributed to St. Francis, that goes something like “preach the gospel, and if necessary, use words.” This sounds really spiritual, but I’m not sure it really works. My reason for this goes back to another overused pithy saying: “words make worlds.”

Check out the whole article at The Antioch Session.

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Thick practices or (liturgies) are rituals of ultimate concern, rituals that are identity-forming and telos-laden, that embed particular visions of the good life, and do so in a way that seeks to trump other ritual formations.

So what kind of liturgies do the people in the congregation you serve in embody? How do they increase people’s honesty and love for God? How do they help shape people for God’s purposes in the world?

JR Woodward, Creating a Missional Culture: Equipping the Church for the Sake of the World

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To me, it was some Catholic holy day that I, as an evangelical Protestant, didn’t have to worry about, thanks be to God. In my view, all of “that religious stuff” detracted from what really mattered, which was having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. In my early evangelical years it never dawned on me that some of “the religious stuff” might actually enrich my faith in Christ.

It’s hard to get much more evangelical than Eugene Peterson, who explains the need for liturgy this way:

To ward off confusion let me first say what I don’t mean by liturgy. I don’t mean what goes on in the chancel of high Anglican church; I don’t mean an order of worship; I don’t mean robes and incense and genuflections before the altar…I am after something deeper and higher and wider.

What I want to do is to recontextualize our reading of Scripture…into a huge holy community of others who are also reading it…

The task of liturgy is to order the life of the holy community following the text of Holy Scripture. It consists of two movements: First it gets us into the sanctuary, the place of adoration and attention, listening and receiving and believing before God…Then it gets us out of the sanctuary into the world into places of loving and obeying, ordering our lives as living sacrifices in the world to the glory of God. There is a lot involved, all the parts of our lives out on the street participating in the work of salvation…

…There is nothing ‘churchy’ or elitist about it; it is a vast and dramatic ‘story-ing’ making sure that we are taking our place in the story and letting everyone else have their parts in the story also, making sure that we don’t leave anything or anyone out of the story. Without sufficient liturgical support and structure we are very apt to edit the story down to fit our individual tastes and predispositions.” (Eat This Book).

Liturgy is a pulley that forces us to experience the whole story of God and his people.  Center to our story, and at the heart of Ash Wednesday, is the truth that we “were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ.”

I would not suggest that you quickly start practicing the Liturgical calendar.  (Especially if you skip the important step of creating a missional calendar.) But I would suggest that you find a means to regularly remember the whole story.  This means creating opportunities to celebrate the joy of salvation, but it also means taking times to fast, repent and realize that dust we are, and to dust we will return.

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This is the high point of the Christian Calendar, celebrated by Catholics and Orthodox, the ancient Armenian and Ethopian churches, Mainline Protestant, and confused Evangelicals.  Over the past few decades, everyone from Baptists to Pentecostals have been looking for methods to help them flesh out their faith in their day to day lives.  They read something from the Book of Common Prayer and to may even give up chocolate in the spring, and secretly hope they’re not sliding down the slippery slope to Mary worship. This desire to incorporate older forms of worship was most championed by Robert Webber, who reasoned:

“The way into the future, I argue, is not an innovative new start for the church; rather, the road to the future runs through the past. These three matters—roots, connection, and authenticity in a changing world—will help us to maintain continuity with historic Christianity as the church moves forward.”

Webber had it half-right.  In his concern for creating a more visceral worship experience, he drew on two thousand years of spiritual formation to address the unique needs of post-modern thinkers.  But the other half of the equation Webber did not address was local, day to day culture.

If nothing else, being missional means being missionary.  A missionary is one who learns a culture, in order to present the gospel in words and forms that make sense to them.  While I sympathize, and happily participate, with evangelicals wishing to reclaim liturgical traditions, we need to realize that those actions alone will not help us present the gospel to the cultures we encounter.

The value of a the liturgical calendar is not in specific rites, but in the idea that how we organize our time defines our lives.

What if, as we set out on our missional endeavors, we took the concepts of time and calendar seriously.  Are there celebrations in a local culture that can be redeemed by the gospel?  Are their gross imbalances that can be reformed through organized, corporate disciplines?  Perhaps borrowing from other Christian traditions may help us address this or perhaps we will find ourselves creating something new.

In my church in Austin, Texas, we occasionally recognize traditionally Christian seasons and holidays.  We anticipate during Advent, reflect during Lent and party on Easter.  But we also host concerts during SXSW, ride our bicycles through the East Austin Studio Tour, and run around the park during the Zilker Kite Festival.  We do these things because we are Austinites.  But we do them together because we are the Church.

In the past, evangelicals have eschewed the practices of other churches.  Today, they seem to grasp at them in hopes of providing a lost sense of meaning.  What if instead, we looked at our neighborhood and asked the question “How does this people organize their lives? How can the gospel be presented within that?”

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