Untitled Sermon

Introduction

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. My friends, it has been a joy learning alongside you this past semester though I could not be with you in person. And as much as I have learned from you, I hope to share something that may be useful for you as well.

I am making this presentation as part of an honors contract project. At Dr. Stockstill’s recommendation, I decided to explore how Sunday worship plays a part in adolescent spiritual formation. This semester, we’ve looked at length at what spiritual formation is and the kinds of practices are most suitable for adolescents in this generation. Most of those practices occur outside of our traditional Christian practices, as in, they happen outside of the Sunday worship hour. It may be at summer retreats or Wednesday night youth group or other informal gatherings in homes. But if we are honest with ourselves, the most regular and extended religious activity we engage in is Sunday worship. Even during the age of the pandemic, where most other activities and gatherings have stopped, Sunday worship has been the one thing that most churches have kept alive. So there is something powerful and formative about Sunday worship that I believe we can afford to tap more into.

The Narrative Arc of Christianity

I begin with one of my favorite prayers because I think it sets the stage for what we’re about to explore. St. Augustine of Hippo prays at the beginning of his Confessions that “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in you.” This is absolutely brilliant because Augustine has summed up the major parts of the Christian story – who we are, where we came from, why there is suffering in this life, what’s the solution, and where we’re going. Particularly for adolescents, these questions are going to weigh heavily in their minds. They are searching for a way to make sense of the world and how they can live meaningful lives within the world, and only then can they find the rest that they crave for. And I’m going to propose that the way they enter into that rest, the way they find the answers to their life’s questions, is through the liturgy of the church. But more on that a bit later.

The Transitional Adolescent

I want to spend just a little time understanding the adolescents we are dealing with. We’ve already talked throughout the semester about the adolescent life stage and what changes happen, so we won’t take too long here. I just wanted to draw your attention to some of the more relevant features for this discussion.

I like Kaegler’s phrase the “cerebral upgrade.” Their intellect, emotions, social and spiritual capacities all begin to mature, and they start understanding the world in new ways. Adolescents seek to experiment with these exciting new capacities, or what I like to call “play.” It’s all new and exciting to them; it beckons them to explore. But there is also a lot of uncertainty. These changes happen so suddenly that if they don’t have help, it’s too much for adolescents to safely handle on their own. So, they are drawn towards structures, communities, and models to guide them through these changes.

And so we see a bit of a tension here. On one hand, it seems that adolescents want the freedom and empowerment to explore their emerging and maturing abilities. On the other hand, total freedom is not helpful because they are still learning how best to use their abilities and how to make sense of the world. It seems that what adolescents need is a protected environment, a safe space where they know they are safe from harm yet are also free within that space to learn and explore and play. What adolescents need is a kind of “holy playground” to be formed into the Christian story. So let’s look at what that looks like.

Defining Liturgy

James K.A. Smith wrote a fantastic book titled You Are What You Love. His big idea is that God transforms us not through big flashy events or dramatic conversion moments like Paul at Damascus. Meaning, we don’t undergo spiritual formation by thinking to ourselves after a Sunday sermon or at the end of a youth retreat, “I’m going to change my life, and this time it’s for real!” While that may work for some people, God transforms us slowly through lifestyle habits, the little, everyday actions that we do. Here is a quote from Smith:

It is crucial for us to recognize that our ultimate loves, longings, desires, and cravings are learned. And because love is a habit, our hearts are calibrated through imitating exemplars and being immersed in practices that, over time, index our hearts to a certain end. We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love.

Emphasis

Smith’s other big idea is that these practices and habits come from the practices that we pick up from Sunday worship, or what we might call the “liturgy” of the church. I believe that liturgy is an extremely useful term to move forward in our discussion, but most of us are probably unfamiliar this word.

Liturgy

The work “liturgy” derives from the Greek leitourgia, which literally means “the work of the people.” It refers to communal religious practices that contain and communicate religious meaning. For Christians, these actions include prayers, singing, Scriptural recitation, the sermon, and the Eucharist. But “liturgy” is not just the individual actions but to the “whole event of a Christian assembly’s symbolic practice.”

Other definitions

One writer describes liturgy as the “ecology of interrelated practices” and another says that it is the “practice of many practices.” So “liturgy” does not only refer to any one activity but the whole event.

What you do and why you do them

I also like the term liturgy because it’s not just about what you do. It’s also about how you do them. Liturgy is not just concerned with the fact that we have Communion; it’s also the tone of the message that Communion gives, and how Communion fits into the bigger story of the entire worships service.

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I should acknowledge that liturgy is not a common word for us. It’s used more commonly in what we call “high churches” with a very formal order of worship, where their Sunday assemblies are scripted all the way through, whether it’s the prayers or the congregational responses or standing or kneeling. That whole thing is usually called the liturgy, which runs counter to another idea that we cherish – the idea that Sunday worship should a time to freely express your joy and devotion to God, and if we have this script written out for us beforehand, that kills the chance to be authentic and genuine.

Every church has a liturgy

I want to contend that that is a misunderstanding of liturgy. The thing is that every church is liturgical; every church has a liturgy whether we call it that or not.

Order of Worship

Most of us are familiar with church of Christ worship: usually the service will start with a few songs that are upbeat and all about praise, then there will be some slower songs that prepare us for Communion. We will take Communion in a very solemn kind of way, we’ll sing another song, the preacher will come up and speak and offer an invitation, we’ll sing a song of invitation, and then there will be announcements and dismissal. And very rarely do we deviate from that order of worship. We are actually quite consistent.

Change

I don’t know if you’ve experienced a time when, for example, the Communion was moved from before the sermon to after the sermon. Or maybe when the song before Communion is fast and upbeat instead of slow and reflective.

Wait!

That tends to get some kind of response like “Wait, that’s not the way we do it!” Ah ha – that “way we do it” means that we do have some kind of set order in our minds. We follow a liturgy without really knowing it because we are creatures of habit. Or put another way, we are liturgical creatures.

Two questions

So it’s not a question of whether we have a liturgy or not. The real question is, how do the liturgies of the church contribute to the spiritual formation of those who participate? Specifically, how does the liturgy of the church impact adolescent spiritual formation?

Evangelical Approaches to Liturgy

Let’s look at some current approaches to liturgy and the kind of learning environment that they create for adolescents, and we’ll talk about their relative strengths and weaknesses. There are three broad kinds of approaches: the performance approach, the expressivist approach, and the edification approach. No church uses only one of these and not the other – they usually have some mix of all three, though they lean more to one or the other.

Performance

First, the performance approach.

Audience of One

This begins with the assumption that God is the ‘Audience of One’ and the congregation is performing for him. But God isn’t just a spectator; he is also the Judge who evaluates the quality of the performance based on whether the church accurately followed the whole script, meaning the instructions in Scripture for acceptable worship.

Five Acts

If you’re familiar with the church of Christ, you may be familiar with the Five Acts Model of worship. And for Churches of Christ, the purpose of Sunday liturgy was to perform the acts of worship according to how the New Testament told us to do them.

Obedience

Liturgy is primarily about obedience to the pattern of Scripture.

Strengths

The main strength of the performance approach is that it has an impulse to be faithful to Scripture and the traditions of the church.

Strength

The form of Christian worship matters because how we worship teaches us about who God is. The Five Acts model rightly notes that there is a sacredness to liturgical practices that we should not just lightly alter whenever we like.

Strength

And so for the adolescent who is seeking structure and models for worship, the performance approach becomes a safe space with boundaries and guiding principles.

Weaknesses

At the same time, the performance approach misses something. Sometimes we get so caught up in the external forms of worship that it devolves into legalism. We rigidly do things because “that’s how it’s always been done” and we risk neglecting the message that those forms are intended to communicate. And Jesus took issue with the Pharisees regarding the same thing.

Weakness

The performance approach does not allow for play and innovation, however faithful and reverent it may be, because it suggests deviating from the pattern of Scripture.

Weakness

The performance liturgy risks becoming rote and even empty repetition, doing things for the sake of doing them. And as young people, we all know how we react to meaningless repetition.

Expressivist

In response to the rigidity of the performance approach comes the expressivist approach. It is similar to the performance approach because it also assumes that God is the audience to whom the congregation performs. The difference is that God is not playing Judge or Critic.

Authentic

The only thing he is concerned about is whether the worshiper enthusiastically engages in the acts of worship with a sincere heart, since “God looks at the heart.”

Expressivist liturgies place emphasis on worship acts that allow worshipers to express themselves. Consider how we often equate “worship” with the singing part of the service since this is usually the only part of the assembly where worshipers can actively participate and thereby express themselves.

Strengths

Now, the strength of the expressivist approach is that it recognizes how liturgy must be more than “vain repetition.”

Strength

True worship must involve the individual’s holistic self and grow out of an authentic inner desire for God. The stereotype of youth worship services is that they are most expressivist endeavors because this approach encourages adolescents to simply “be themselves” and worship God in whatever way makes the most sense to them. Furthermore, because there is a premium placed on being authentic in worship, the expressivist approach encourages innovation that allow for fresh worship experiences – basically a holy play within the Christian tradition. And so, the adolescent community can regularly experience worship in new and exciting ways.

Weaknesses

It may seem that the expressivist approach is the perfect soil for holy play to blossom. But there’s also a problem because it tends to overemphasize “play” at the expense of “holy.”

Weakness

The expressivist approach puts so much focus on being innovative and fresh and exciting that it unnecessarily equates routineness with insincerity. If it’s not new and flashy and exciting, it’s not true worship.

Weakness

And so historic Christian liturgies, those that have endured for centuries and nurtured the faith of generations of Christians, all of them are suddenly dismissed as antiquated, irrelevant, or stifling the heartfelt expression that worship should entail. As we have also seen, if the worshiper cannot actively participate in the liturgical act, it loses its meaning. Practices like the reading of Scripture or public prayers – they become the expression of someone else. Some youth worships exclude them entirely, which is not healthy.

Edification

There is a third approach to liturgy called the edification approach. This one differs from the other approaches in that God is not the target of liturgical acts. We are not perform to him or expressing our heartfelt worship to him.

Purpose

Instead, the purpose of the weekly liturgy is not worship of God but to encourage other worshipers. Every liturgical act has a horizontal purpose – so singing, public prayers, and preaching are not about performing towards God but uplifting fellow worshipers.

Strengths

The edification approach is valuable because it emphasizes the communal dimension of the assembly, which we did not see in the first two. The edification approach rightly stresses that we “discern the body” in the assembly of saints.

Strength

This communal awareness has much to offer for adolescents because here they are aware of role models around them that they can look up to in their journey through maturity. Because there is a community that makes them feel safe and secure and accepted, that encourages the adolescent to engage in holy play. It’s almost like they are mentored by older “playmates” as they explore life and worship.

Weaknesses

However, this one also has its issues, mainly that it seems ridiculous that the liturgy of Sunday worship can be about something other than God! Also, like the expressivist approach, the edification approach neglects the “holy” part of holy play.

Weakness

It excludes any sense of the sacred presence of God from the weekly liturgy. God is not just displaced as the recipient of the liturgy, but he is almost entirely forgotten. And I would say that it’s just bad Christianity when God is not front and center.

Alternative?

So where does that leave us? All three approaches have something valuable to offer, but they are also inadequate as environments to encourage spiritual formation in adolescents.

Central weaknesses

And I think that one major reason that they are inadequate is that they put too much emphasis on the human worshiper. It’s about the worshiper who performs the liturgy, or it’s about how the worshiper is able to express his worship authentically, or it’s about worshipers connecting with other worshipers.

So I’d like to propose an alternative. What if we can have an approach that synthesizes the healthy impulses behind each of those three approaches and also reframes them in awareness that God is the primary agent in the liturgy? This is what we might call the sacramental approach.

Sacramental Liturgy

This is another of those words that evangelical Christians tend not to use, but this is a very useful shorthand to describe the kind of approach to worship we’re trying to get at. John Mark Hicks describes a sacrament as:

Not primarily modes of human obedience for testing our loyalty to God, nor are they mere human testimonies. Rather, they serve the goal of transformation into the image of Christ. They are a means to an end – means by which grace as dynamic divine presence conforms us to the image of Christ through faith.

Other definition

By itself, “sacrament” refers to an event where God uses ordinary symbols to impart grace to humans who receive them in faith. These events include baptism, Eucharist, prayer, song, preaching, and the offering. In one sense, they are perfectly normal.

Communion

There is no “magic” or God-particle in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, for example. It’s plain old bread and money. Yet in another sense, there is something otherworldly at work when worshipers participate in these rituals in faith. The sacraments are points of convergence between the earthly and heavenly realities.

Habitations

Smith calls these sacred-ordinary interactions the “habitations of the Spirit,” meaning that the Spirit does his most miraculous transformative work happens through the most ordinary of human actions.

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This is the fundamental assumption of sacramental liturgy. Remember that “liturgy” meant “the work of the people.”

Other definition

If we view liturgy through a sacramental lens, we can say that the “work of the people” only means anything because it begins as the graced work of God. God is the primary actor and initiator rather than spectator to human activity. When we realize this, Christian liturgy can truly become a holy playground instead of a sacred straitjacket. In the earlier anthropocentric models, the “rightness” of the liturgy depended on the proper conduct of the human worshiper. When a single wrong act, word, thought or feeling can make or break the liturgy, there is no space for holy play and experimentation for fear of contaminating the sacred by our irreverent conduct. But if God is the one acting in worship, then our liturgy is how we respond to his action, and there is a level of freedom to innovate and experiment and play without the fear that we could mess it up.

Formative Repetition

There are three characteristics that flow out of the sacramental approach. The first is that liturgy is formative repetition. We have discussed at length throughout the semester that spiritual formation is not an overnight process. Secular liturgies have not helped us because they habituate us into a lifestyle of instantaneous gratification.

New New New

We are indoctrinated into always consuming the newest trends. And that lifestyle ultimately fails to satisfy because what is new and trending today becomes an antiquated relic tomorrow. Adolescents get caught in this endless cycle where they lust for the next flashy thing without ever learning to abide contently in what one has. So, “old” gets equated with “bad” and “repetition” with “insincerity.”

Bible

Quite ironically, this is precisely why the regular rhythms of historic Christian liturgy can be an oasis of rest amid the desert of unsatisfied desires. Instead of bouncing around from one meaningless fad to another, the faithful repetition of the Christian story gives adolescents the space and time to immerse themselves into an unchanging, eternal story. The context of the familiar allows the adolescent to be truly free to engage in holy play, again because there is a sense of security in a familiar story.

So when we do the same thing over and over again each Sunday, it is not blind repetition. The weekly liturgy is where we participate in the faithful retelling of the biblical story, the weekly recalibration of the holistic self, and the regular engagement with the sacraments of Christian worship. Formation only happens in the process of time, and faithful repetition creates the right environment for that to happen.

Touchable Faith

The second element of sacramental liturgy is that it is tangible faith. The Christian faith is about far more than abstract concepts and theological jargon. In fact, the rituals we take part in every week are exactly how we begin to practice and live out our faith. The doctrines of justification and sanctification take the shape of bread and wine during the Eucharist. Praise, adoration, and reverence can be practiced and experienced in congregational singing. The transcendent God speaks in human language during the public reading of Scripture and the proclamation of the sermon. These are things that we can hear with our ears, taste with our mouths, sense with our bodies. And this kind of touchable faith lets adolescents handle the sacred and touch that which is radically beyond their senses. This holy engagement then fires the spiritual imagination of adolescents within the scaffolding of the biblical story.

Candle

Smith describes how his teenage son used his only two-euro coin to light a candle in the Sacre-Coeur Basilica as “a way to pray that was tangible and visceral – like the Spirit gave him a handle to grab hold of.” Through the tangibility of Christian sacraments and rituals, faith begins to make sense to the adolescent mind. Still, the mystery of its depth remains, nudging them to apply their still-developing faculties to apprehend more of this joyous, eternal pursuit.

Communal

The third element of sacramental liturgy is that it is communal. This is similar to the edification approach because a key assumption is that this whole liturgical practice happens in the context of a worshiping community. Hicks describes it this way: “The communal character [of the assembly] is the engagement of the divine community with the redeemed community – the mutual enjoyment and communing of God and his people as well as the saints with each other.” The weekly liturgy is indeed characterized by a community oriented towards the worship of God.

Circle

Liturgy facilitates this multidirectional communion by allowing worshipers to act as one body. This happens when we sing together, when we proclaim “Amen” in one voice, or when we partake the Lord’s Supper together. It is not that the individual “just so happens” to be doing these activities at the same time as others, though we often behave that way. Rather, the unity of our behavior moves us into a unity of identity.

As Smith describes, “In historic practices we learn how to be a community of faith, not just a collection of atomistic individuals who happen to love the same Savior.” As mentioned earlier, adolescents find themselves surrounded by veterans of holy play in the liturgical community. Together, they probe the depths of the faith as well as engage in self-discovery, with the older members guiding the younger members through their journey of formation. Through them, God’s loving supervision becomes incarnate, encouraging them to explore and play within the liturgy without the fear of condemnation or “getting it wrong.”

Recommendations

What does all this mean for the contemporary evangelical church? Well, it looks different depending on what church you’re talking about. But here are four principles that I will conclude with here.

First, I believe every act in the liturgy should be recognized as a sacramental convergence of the divine and earthly realms. It’s not just the “official” sacraments of Communion and Baptist. The public prayers, the reading of Scripture, the greeting of fellow worshipers, even the speaking of announcements – all these can potentially be vessels through which the presence of Spirit transforms the hearts of worshipers. Holy play and holistic engagement do not need to happen only in the singing portion.

Second, I believe that we should embrace the faithful repetition of the liturgy rather than shun repetition in favor of novelty. This does not mean “identical” repetition from week to week. I mean that the narrative arc of the liturgy always points back to the gospel message. Ironically, it is only when we have been habituated into the historic Christian tradition that we can innovate in a way that is faithful to the biblical story and relevant for our time.

Third, churches should consider introducing more tangible objects for adolescents to interact with. We give young children activity sheets to color a biblical scene or connect-the-dots to form a picture of Jesus. Why not use that concept for adolescents as well? Some churches use scented candles are to engage the sense of smell. We could Involving prayer postures or setting up interactive stations around the worship venue to engages their physical bodies and create a sense of sacred space. We can afford to move away from liturgy that is all about information and lectures to a liturgy that engages our holistic being.

Fourth, I believe that worship assemblies should be intergenerational. Now, youth worship events have their time and place, but by default, I think the church should perform the liturgy as one united body. We have said that the form of worship matters. It would be very strange for us to teach that the church is a diverse body, but then we segregate people by age into their own worship space. It would also be strange if everyone gathered in the same space but the only people who go up on stage are the same few adults. Worship must be intergenerational in that everyone is involved, not just that everyone attends.

Summary

So in summary, sacramental liturgy is a holy playground where adolescents can be formed into the Christian story. It is anchored in the assumption that God is the primary agent who gently and lovingly forms his children through the sacramental rituals of the liturgy. Within that safe refuge where they are assured of divine love, adolescents are free to engage in holy play. Through the rituals of the church, adolescents are invited to join the biblical story in wonder and worship – not just as spectators but active participants. And so begins a pivotal milestone in the adolescent’s lifelong journey of spiritual formation; it is a pilgrimage of exploration and growth until at last they return to perfect, contented rest in the God of their ultimate desires. For God has made us for himself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in him again.

Thank you for joining me on this journey, and I hope very much to see you all again in the flesh. Grace and peace to you all!