Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community by Simon Chan (Grand Rapids: IVP Academic, 2006 – US$22).

The church is not the only institution bothered by declining numbers. Most service clubs are in the same boat, along with many sports clubs. Some have gone out of existence. This is no consolation to the church; we are engaged in God’s mission to the world, so something must be very seriously wrong if we are in decline.

The subliminal response is that we must work harder to get people into church. There have, of course, been many programs [sic] designed to counter the downward trend. We are a mission-oriented church. The church, we are told, exists for mission as a fire exists for burning.

That is the point where too often our thinking stops. When our primary focus is on getting people into church, we can all too easily think that whatever means are used to persuade people about the gospel must be all right, that promoting the gospel is not all that different in our modern world from anything else that is advertised as good for us, and that we do not have to think too much about the church except as a place where newcomers are welcomed and are offered what we are sure they are looking for.

It takes courage to suggest in the face of an ageing and declining congregation that the first thing we need to focus on is not getting more people in, but on what we do as a community when we gather for worship.
Well, worship styles have been high on the agenda of those who want to make the church more attractive, and there is a liturgical pattern that often accompanies that. There is an emphasis on modern songs, usually accompanied by a band, and music that sits comfortably alongside what can be heard daily on most radio stations and downloaded in MP3 format.

There is polished and professional use of audio-visual material to support and enhance the sermon, which itself takes centre-stage as an act of communicating the gospel. There are, of course, prayers and a reading (often just one), and much attention is given to the warmth and fellowship of the occasion in the engaging style of the leader.

There are two fundamental assumptions in all this: one, that Christianity is primarily a message to be communicated, a sort of package of ideas and teachings that can be communicated and inculcated and promoted by the best possible modern means; and two, that church is the gathering together of Christians for the business of mutual encouragement and the worship of God to hear this message again and have our grasp of it deepened. This is a description that many evangelicals would not disavow. It has its own history, largely in the USA, but now quite widely visible in some Anglican parishes in New Zealand.

If you think that is an entirely acceptable description of the nature of Christianity and of the church, then Simon Chan’s Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community needs to go on to your ‘must read’ list. There have been plenty of critics of the modern church, but Chan has the clear advantage of being an evangelical. As professor of systematic theology at Trinity Theological College, Singapore, a highly respected evangelical foundation, he understands this approach from the inside.

Nevertheless, Chan does ask some very profound questions of any of us engaged in Christian worship, regardless of which tradition we favour most. Do we really know what we are doing? Have we really understood the nature of the community into which we are eager to invite people? Have we yet grasped what it means to be church in the first place?

Chan’s first chapter is shaped by what may seem a strange question: did creation come first or the church? Put the question another way: is the church an instrument of God’s purposes for creation, or is it itself the object of God’s purposes, the very reason for creation?

We tend to think that God’s purposes are bound up with the world and all its peoples and that the story of Israel and the church is the story of the means by which God carries out the divine purpose. If so, then the form, structure and even the worship of the church is simply a means to an end, and can therefore be varied as required to achieve that end. The line from the Eucharistic hymn, “So, Lord, at length when sacraments shall cease”, could equally apply to the church – we have served God’s purpose and now the new creation awaits.

But what if the church was what God intended all along? What if we are the very shape of the world to come? What if the purpose of creation itself was so God could create a Christ-shaped community of the world, beginning with the church?

Chan takes this idea very seriously indeed and makes clear its Biblical foundations in his first chapter. Far from being a means to an end, the church is the foretaste of the end.

The implications of this for both mission and worship are profound. “The church’s primary mission, then, is to be itself, which is to be ‘Christ’ for the world” (p40). To become that, the church needs to practise its own identity as the body of Christ, to practise being the temple of the Spirit, to practise being the people of God. And we do that primarily in our worship.

“The church’s most basic identity is to be found in its act of worship” (p42). We have to practise this because we live in the tension between the now of the world as it is and the not yet of the fulfilled reign of God. Worship is not something we invent and devise at all, but a constant re-orienting of ourselves to what God has done, is doing and will yet do. Worship is not an exercise in getting more punters in, but of nourishing those who are there in their practice of maintaining that problematic stance of being the people of God.

The way the church does that is through its liturgy. One of the unforeseen by-products of revising our prayer book was that liturgy came to be seen as something we can just make up for ourselves.

It is harder these days to see liturgy as the church’s accumulated wisdom of the pattern by which our souls are nurtured, our vision of God’s rule re-ignited and our hearts warmed to participate wherever God is beginning to exercise that rule. “To discover the shape of the liturgy, therefore, is to discover the true way of worship or the way of reorienting the church towards the Christian world-view” (p62).

In a liturgical church such as ours, we should at this point be saying, “But of course! We have always known that!” Well, we did know it. Cranmer certainly knew it. The Anglican divines of the 17th century who defended the liturgy of the prayer book from attempts to remove it knew it. So, too, did the Prayer Book Commission.

Chan outlines the shape of the liturgy as the ordo of word and sacrament that orients the church for that Christian worldview and enables any mission that is truly Christian, the extension in the world of that communion of which we have a foretaste in the church, above all in the eucharist.

The first four chapters of Chan’s book are a stunning summary of the meaning and purpose of the church and of its primary identity as worshipping community. In the second part of the book he turns to more practical matters such as Christian formation (catechumenate), the shape of the Sunday liturgy, and issues of the active participation of all those involved.

They make a useful followup to the first part, but the first part itself merits reading and re-reading and deep reflection if we want to understand our role as church in our contemporary world.

Ken Booth is Precentor of ChristChurch Cathedral, and has taught liturgy and worship for over 30 years. knblbooth@xtra.co.nz.