This Old Thing is a New Thing

 August 4, 2022

     Growing up contemporary protestant I was pretty judgmental of anything that felt liturgical or prescribed – I assumed that prayer should be spontaneous and from the heart, anything else was just ritualistic and inauthentic. But then in our early adulthood the Lord took Jon and I to a nondenominational church that embraced many ways of worshipping God without conforming to a specific denomination – so we sometimes sang modern worship songs with driving drums and electric guitar, but we also sometimes prayed the hours or practiced lectio divina. A Messianic Jewish priest came to lead a seder meal during Holy Week and we sometimes worshipped by creating art or taking a prayer walk in Creation. Experiencing that made me start to hold my presumptions and personal preferences loosely and I grew to love traditional liturgy. I love the beautiful, intricate language and how each word is carefully and deliberately chosen. I love the unity of an entire community posturing their hearts in the same message at the same time, and I love imagining the Christians who’ve gone before me like C.S. Lewis, Johann Sebastian Bach and William Tyndale - whom I’ll get to meet in Heaven some day! - reciting some of the very same prayers or psalms. 

     This week I took the staff through a traditional-style liturgy out of one of my favorite modern liturgical books, Every Moment Holy by Douglas Kaine McKelvey. McKelvey does a brilliant job of creating liturgical prayers for modern situations like the welcoming of a new pet, doing the laundry, or the loss of electricity. McKelvey leads me through words I wouldn’t have thought of to pray, and so much more eloquently than I could ever be. As Andrew Peterson writes in the foreword to Every Moment Holy, “For many of us, this old thing is a new thing, and that brings with it some discomfort – but also a heightened appreciation for the ancient rhythms of prayer and meditation which have been more or less absent from our experience.” 

     If I’ve learned one thing from my experience doing church work, it is that everyone has a picture in their mind of what constitutes true or real worship. We formulate how worship should be from experiences that are familiar to us (often from our upbringing), and from experiences that were powerful to us (a memory from a worship conference or a song that was meaningful to us during a formational season). But as Wendell Berry wrote “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.” 

     I like to refer to the ancient imagery of the Cross; the vertical reaches up to God, one horizontal arm reaches into the future, and one arm reaches into the past. When putting together worship opportunities for our congregation, I try to embrace both our heritage and our future. But that looks very different than seeking what is comfortable. John 12:24 says “unless a grain of wheat falls on the ground it will never be more than one grain unless it dies. But if it dies, it will produce lots of fruit.” We cannot put new wine into old wineskins. For this reason we cannot seek growth by doing things the same way we always have. Love for our congregation demands a sacrifice, a sacrifice of our comfort, of old paradigms and old systems, sacrifice of our desire to pour our new wine into an old wineskin – we are no longer in possession of that old wineskin, NOR are we still that same wine! We must carefully attend to what it might mean for us to “let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus” and be “transformed by the renewing of our minds.” It doesn’t have to be EITHER OR, it can be BOTH AND. Sometimes that means exploring the vast kaleidoscope of anointed worship music being released right now (“sing to the Lord a new song”). And sometimes that means getting reacquainted with traditions we may have abandoned or have never experienced before. I encourage you to consider that it means both.

     Much love,

     Pastor Elise

If you’re feeling brave, here’s an excerpt from Every Moment Holy for you to try this week.