Gathering Together: Baptists at Work in Worship

Contributors

C. Randall Bradley is Professor of Church Music at Baylor University in Waco, Texas

Scott Bullard is Professor of Theology at Judson College in Marion, Alabama

Amy Butler is Senior Pastor of Calvary Baptist Church in Washington, DC

Kyle Childress is Pastor of Austin Heights Baptist Church in Nacogdoches, Texas

Derek C. Hatch is Professor of Christian Studies at Howard Payne University in Brownwood, Texas

Cameron Jorgenson is Professor of Theology at Campbell University Divinity School in Buies Creek, North Carolina

Rodney W. Kennedy is Senior Pastor of First Baptist Church in Dayton, Ohio

Elizabeth Newman is Professor of Theology and Ethics at Baptist Theological Seminary of Richmond in Richmond, Virginia

Michael D. Sciretti Jr. is Minister of Spiritual Formation at Freemason Street Baptist Church in Norfolk, Virginia

Sharlande Sledge is Associate Pastor of Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, Texas

Philip E. Thompson is Professor of Theology at Sioux Falls Seminary in Sioux Falls, South Dakota

Introduction

The journey of this book arises not from an idea, but from lives immersed in the practice of worship. Both editors, in various contexts, have come to discover the rich depth within the Christian liturgical tradition and have worked in both lay and clerical capacities to bring those to life within our congregations. This has not always been easy because, along the way, we have encountered a relative dearth of resources for Baptists in the United States related to the practice of worship. In other words, with a few exceptions, we have found that Baptists have not often thought intentionally about the activities of Christian worship. This book, and all of the voices within it, humbly aims to relieve some of that deficit.

As a collaborative effort by a team of ministers and teachers, all of whom have serious commitments to the primacy of worship, the essays in this book underscore our conviction (nurtured in congregations and classrooms) that worship, the primary Christian practice, is essential to the formation of faithful disciples of Jesus Christ. To be formative, though, requires participation in the rhythm of Christian liturgy. Thus, within the parameters of the practice of worship, there are multiple activities that develop, energize, and shape the Christian believer, not only as an individual, but as a participant within the gathered community of faith, the ekklesia. We hope to examine those in order to take seriously the ways that worship molds genuine Christian faith.

As Marva Dawn has well reminded us, God is the subject and object of worship.¹ Augustine of Hippo wrote in his Confessions, [Y]ou have made us for yourself [O God] and our heart is restless until it rests in you.² Worship, with its focus on God, is the activity of our restless hearts pursuing God, though this is a communal task above all else. The Greek root of the word liturgy means work of the people. Thus, all Christians (including Baptists) do liturgy. Nonetheless, the description of what liturgy entails certainly varies from one congregation to another. Some are often described as high church and others as low church, but liturgy remains the work of worship. It is what congregations do when they gather together in the name of the Triune God to praise and give thanks. This book has been written to celebrate the powerful ways that Baptists praise and love God. As John Chrysostom says in his sermon on Ephesians 1, The Divine nature knoweth no want. And wherefore then would He have us praise and glorify Him? It is that our love towards Him may be kindled more fervently within us.³ Chrysostom is gesturing toward what it means to be human. Similarly, James K.A. Smith writes that human beings are not thinkers or believers primarily, but lovers (homo liturgicus), embodied agents of desire or love.⁴ Thus, forming our desires becomes a central part of the practices of Christian worship.

From every corner of the globe, with the embedded memory of Pentecost in our hearts, Christians gather to worship God. We gather with the words of a promise of Jesus precious to all Baptists: For where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am among them (Matt 18:20). In myriad ways, Christians gather in worship to meet God and to be met by God. Carlyle Marney said,

This is the meaning of the Sabbath, the Temple, and worship. One keeps coming by to be sure it is still there. This is the prophet’s cry. ‘Turn, turn, return!’ Keep coming by! God has been met with! And here you have an appointment – at the Tent of the Eternal – and it is a come and go affair. It is a constant reminder of what has gone by. One comes here in order to pass by again.

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Undergirding this work is a passionate devotion to Scripture as the book of the church. We affirm that the Bible is the organizing center of all worship. We are interested here in the nature and will of God. What we offer in this book is reflections on the way that the Bible informs and forms the worship practices that we find so meaningful and important. We hope that the readers will be able to sense that we are Christians at work in worship and glean what they can learn from the acts and practices of worship.

In short, this book is intended for the church and is gifted to her servants, those who have committed themselves to lives of ministry. Each of the essays found in this book emerges from the ties that bind the assembly of faith together as a gathered community, but also as part of the body of Christ across space and time. Because of this, the essays in this work all form an argument that invites you into a conversation that views worship as something like a seamless garment where music, sermon, prayer, reading, confessing, and silence interpenetrate one another and provide a multifaceted yet singular direction to worship. Like any conversation, however, debate is welcome. What is most important in this volume, then, is not the diversity of positions, but a rich and engaging conversation about what occurs in Baptist liturgy. Within these chapters, for example, there are challenges to Baptists’ ways of thinking about baptism and communion that can expand the significance of these acts for Baptist congregations. There are discussions of recovering practices that Baptists previously lost or abandoned, not for the sake of nostalgia, but because these practices offer resources for forming disciples of Jesus. There are also patterns and practices of worship that are designed to produce intentional discussion among seminarians, pastors, and worship committees about the shape of our worship.

Thus, rather than quibble about whether or not one style of worship reaches or appeals to more people or is the right way to worship, we have partnered this collection of essays with an appendix of resources that can be used in Sunday worship, perhaps in small, subtle ways. What we attempt is the elevation, celebration, and magnification of the ways, the means, and the practices of worship available to Baptists. In other words, as this book was birthed in the practices of Christian worship, it certainly must maintain its focus there as well. British Baptist theologian Christopher Ellis writes that worship is embodied theology.⁶ This, in concert with the ancient church’s emphasis on lex orandi, lex credendi (or the law of prayer/worship is the law of belief), provides the impetus for thinking deeply about the work of worship. Not surprisingly, then, while this book’s chapters have a Baptist audience in mind, they will certainly appeal to a wider group of readers, especially those with free-church affinities and background (i.e., those whom James McClendon called baptists).

In the end, as part of the Body of Christ, we enter liturgy with the great cloud of witnesses mentioned in Hebrews. Worship, then, is inextricably a corporate act that occurs in the company of the gathered assembly and in the company of the gathered saints across the generations. We must always remember that Baptists draw from and participate in the depth and breadth of the Christian tradition. Thus, we are all the children of St. Peter and the Jerusalem Church, of St. Paul and the churches of Colossae, Galatia, Ephesus, Thessalonica, and Philippi. Indeed, we are the children of Augustine, John Chrysostom, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Jakob Arminius, John Wesley, Karl Barth, Martin Luther King, Howard Thurman, and Gardner Taylor. Baptists certainly did not appear full-grown in the seventeenth century, but while our historical journeys may not have involved Anglican prayer books or liturgical rituals, this does not mean that we cannot learn from these elements and cultivate a deeper memory of the practice of the worship of Triune God. As worship is at the heart of the church, we offer these essays in order that Baptists might consider how we might worship God more fully and become the people of God more faithfully.

Overview of Chapters

The first two chapters give broader context for considering the depths of Christian worship. The first, written by Kyle Childress, addresses Sunday worship as liturgy. That is, what does it mean to think intentionally (and even theologically) about what happens in worship. If worship is essential to the formation of the Christian life, then the shape of that worship deserves attention. In the second chapter, Michael Sciretti discusses the sweep of the Christian liturgical year. For generations, Christians old and young followed a calendar of seasons that gave form and rhythm to the practices of worship. Sciretti examines these seasons and the manner in which the calendar as a whole becomes a crucial resource for thinking well about worship and the narrative that shapes all Christians.

The next seven chapters address specific practices within worship, discussing how to approach these theologically and suggesting ways to better embrace them within the warp and woof of Christian worship. Amy Butler examines many congregations’ subtle, though significant, practices of building ties of community (whether through an informal welcome or a formal litany or response). Sharlande Sledge addresses prayer in worship by discussing how it contributes to and draws from worship as a whole. Philip Thompson contends that affirmations of faith, such as the Nicene and Apostles’ Creed, could have a robust place within Baptist worship (even if they do not presently). Rodney Kennedy discusses the art of preaching and its role as a contributor to an entire worship service. Scott Bullard and Elizabeth Newman address the depths of the two commonly practiced Baptist sacraments: Communion and Baptism. Randall Bradley argues that music, while not coterminous with worship altogether, nonetheless facilitates the fullness of authentic Christian worship.

The book concludes with a chapter by Cameron Jorgenson that situates worship within a broader context—the mission of the church in the world. Thus, rather than seeing intentional consideration of liturgy as a insular activity that shields a congregation from the outside world, this book, and Jorgenson’s chapter, contend that better thinking about what Baptists do in worship will also shape better practice of the Christian life and better pursuit of God’s mission for the world.

1. Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down,

75

ff.

2. Augustine, Confessions

1

.

1

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3. John Chrysostom, Chrysostom: Homilies on Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, Thessalonians, Timothy, Titus, and Philemon (NPNF

1

13

:

52

).

4. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom,

47

.

5. Marney, A Come-and-Go Affair,

136

.

6. Ellis, Gathering,

14

.

1

Worship and Becoming the Body of Christ

Kyle Childress

There’s a saying I’ve heard around Baptist clergy circles for years that goes, There are all kinds of Baptists: everything from those who burn incense to those who bay at the moon.¹ We Baptists have a history of worshiping God in all sorts of ways. Some have followed dignified order, with classical sacred music, and sermons carefully prepared and thoughtfully expressed. Some have celebrated the Eucharist every week on Sunday morning while other Baptists observe the Lord’s Supper once a quarter on Sunday nights. Others have had nothing printed for guidance in worship and instead relied on the spontaneity of the moment, ever sensitive to the moving of the Holy Spirit and sermons preached with powerful emotion on whatever verse happened to open in the Bible. As an old-time rural preacher told me a long time ago, If you’re not hoarse and standing knee-deep in sweat when you’ve finished preaching, then you haven’t preached.

In my own context of the western edge of the American South early in the second decade of the twenty-first century, Baptists who in times past might have leaned toward the baying-at-the-moon end of the worship spectrum have in recent years joined the wide-spread evangelical movement toward an entertainment model of worship with emphasis on praise bands, contemporary choruses, short snappy sermons focused on practical advice, and, when affordable, the use of sound and lighting special effects. And while there is a church or two which still has a service with a printed Order of Worship and sings traditional hymns or gospel songs, it’s a service relegated to second-class status to the primary contemporary praise service. Even among people who are not church-goers I’ve noticed over the last twenty years a shift in their generalized cultural assumptions of what goes on inside of churches, from expectations of hard preaching on sin and hell and salvation to expectations of praise bands and sermonettes on five hints for a happy family.

²

What I’m describing can be loosely associated with what Baptist historians call the Sandy Creek Tradition of worship among Baptists in the American South. Walter Shurden gave it the short hand description ardor for its revivalistic emphasis on faith as feeling and focus upon conversion.³ And with all its variations and developments into the early twenty-first century, the central question still tends to be how might worship speak to the individual?

My own congregation, Austin Heights Baptist Church of Nacogdoches, Texas, was founded in 1968 asking different questions. While it expressed much of the turmoil of its time by questioning racism and segregation and the war in Vietnam, it tended to give different answers from the social norm of white churches in East Texas. Founded with an open membership policy on race set the church apart from the beginning and its willingness to engage in dialogue and even debate about the teachings of Christ and the war in Vietnam definitely labeled the church as liberal, which usually meant we were different. The congregation also looked for and found a pastor who preached thoughtful sermons and led the congregation to understand worship as primarily about God, moving it away from the predominant Sandy Creek model and in the direction of what Shurden calls the Charleston Tradition of Baptist worship with emphasis on dignity and order.⁴ The three subsequent pastors over the next twenty years before me continued the same tradition.

When I became pastor I knew that I wanted to work within this tradition but their version of it had become worn and they were exhausted. I knew they needed change if they were going to survive. There’s an old rule of thumb for a new pastor arriving in a congregation—a congregation will give you one big change your first year without undue debate and push-back, so choose wisely what that change will be. And there’s a second rule, which is more important than the first: work with what is good that is already going on with a congregation. Probably the best single bit of pastoral advice I ever received came from Kentucky farmer and writer Wendell Berry as he wrote about a farmer looking over and day-dreaming about a new farm:

When one buys the farm and moves there to live, something different begins. Thoughts begin to be translated into acts . . . It invariably turns out, I think, that one’s first vision of one’s place was to some extent an imposition on it. But if one’s sight is clear and one stays on and works well, one’s love gradually responds to the place as it really is, and one’s visions gradually image possibilities that are really in it.

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Berry’s wisdom about a farm goes for a church, too. A new pastor’s first vision can be an imposition on it, so one must be careful and humble about the changes one seeks to bring, instead of imposing change, seeking to learn and understand what changes God is already bringing about. The distinction between the change the pastor wants and learning to pay attention to the change God is bringing is no small thing. When pastors seek to impose change it tends to be hasty, but it takes patience to discern the work of God already present. The challenge comes when we are patiently seeking what changes God is already making while also remembering the first rule named above, that usually a congregation will grant the new pastor one big change the first year without significant disagreement. The new pastor is trying to do both within the first year.

For me, an obvious strength of the congregation was its counter-cultural identity. Though sometimes acted out as contrariness for the sake of contrariness, it could be recovered, redeemed, properly understood, and rooted in Jesus Christ and Christ’s kingdom, resulting in a way of life embodied counter to the predominant ways of this world. What was essential was helping the congregation re-root and recover its life together in the God we know in Christ.

Because the congregation was small, they might be more flexible, making consensus-building easier. It also meant that cultivating a sense of oneness and community might bear fruit much sooner than if I were working with a larger and more diverse church. And with a small church, when good things happen, there is little confusion that it comes from the grace of God instead of the congregation’s power, wealth, or size.

There were other gifts to work with as well. The so-called Charleston Tradition, like the other gifts in the church, needed a lot of pastoral work of recovery and healing, but it was definitely a gift God had given us. One other specific gift we had was that even though the 1970s bare-bones sanctuary multi-purpose space was not all that pleasant to the eye, it was beautiful to the ear—the acoustics for congregational singing were outstanding. I remembered the words of a veteran front-line pastor from the civil rights movement years before: You show me a church that sings and I’ll show you a church on the move. Austin Heights was a singing church and those good acoustics only helped make it better.

Here were places where God was already present and here was where I made my big change: worship. The church already sang well and knew that worship was about God rather than the individual. It was small and overwhelmed, fragmented and exhausted, and its only renewal possible would be found in God. But not just any God but the God we know in Christ as Triune, the God known over time in the traditions of the Church. My hope was that traditional liturgy would help transform isolated individuals into the Body of Christ, a community of faith that was larger and deeper and older than they were. As I talked to the congregation about these changes I soon learned that they were hungry and thirsty for such change. They knew they were missing something, but didn’t know what.

This God we worship is not some generalized or spiritualized Deity but the God known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This God is perfect communion, perfect relationship. The One God known as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit practices community within the Godhead. And as the church has taught for centuries we end up looking more like that which we adore. The more we worship the God we know as Trinity the more we move from discrete individuals to a community, a single Body of Christ. At the same time, as we learn to practice a shared life with each other, we also come to know this Trinitarian God in deeper and more profound ways.

⁶

Furthermore, the gospel reminds us that salvation itself is a communal affair. In Matthew 27:42, for example, Jesus is on the cross and the onlookers shout He saved others; he cannot save himself. And even though they mean it as mocking, they speak the truth. Right here in this simple assertion, these mockers encapsulate what Mark Heim calls the transitive nature of God’s redemption. The one who brings salvation cannot deliver himself. This is the way God works. Salvation, redemption is not an autonomous achievement. Always salvation is dependent on others. Heim calls this the wonderful exchange of atonement in which mutuality is the condition of salvation.

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Based then on the nature of God and what salvation is I believed then and still believe that my central pastoral task is helping form a shared life in Jesus Christ among a small band of Christians who live in an otherwise hyper-individualized society. Doing so has taken constant teaching, reinforcement, paying attention and making connections, persistence, and most importantly, Sunday morning worship focused and rooted in this Triune God.

My first Sunday we began ending worship with a benediction I first learned from the African-American church historian Vincent Harding, which begins, Let’s take each other’s hands . . . Now look who you’re holding hands with, and hold on tight! Because we’re going to need each other this week before proceeding into the traditional Aaronic blessing found in Numbers 6:24–26, The LORD bless you and keep you; the LORD make his face to shine upon you, and be gracious to you; the LORD lift up his countenance upon you, and give you peace.

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Every Sunday for twenty-two years we have held hands and had this benediction. And several times over the years I’ve had church members in unexpected crisis tell me later, When I first heard the news, I didn’t know what to do or who to call. Then it hit me, who was I holding hands with Sunday? And that’s who I called. I want my people to think in terms of God and each other, each other and God—that we can’t have one without the other until it forms as habit, practice, and instinctive way of life.

Now, there is a practical aspect to this. If our people are going to live the Christ-like life, then they had better do it as a body or else they’ll never make it. Lone individuals trying to live faithfully cannot stand against sin, death, the Powers, and the overwhelming pressure of society. Both we and our people, as individuals, are easy pickings for the Powers of Death; they’ll separate us, isolate us, dis-member us, pick us off one at a time and grind us down into the dust.

Only a community nurtured in the Triune God known in Jesus Christ, together worshiping, working, living, serving and witnessing in the same direction, seeking to cultivate the same habits in order to live for Christ can stand against the Powers. Community, the commonplace life, is the nature of the Triune God; it is the nature of salvation; it is the nature of the church and the Christian life; and it is the nature of simple survival. How we worship and whom we worship is no small thing.

After introducing the Benediction, I had a new member, who had joined the church the week after we had joined, make a large cross from local dogwood and hang it in the baptistry, providing the central focus for the sanctuary/multi-purpose room.