merefaith: two friends on pilgrimage

The prayer corner in our house contains a hodgepodge of materials. I understand that the Eastern Orthodox refer to their devotional spaces as icon corners because they are dominated by the display of these beautiful "windows of heaven." I prefer the designation "prayer corner," because, well, that's the focus of such a space anyways. Our three little icons from Egypt couldn't exercise hegemony over the corner as it is! But we do have several crosses and a couple of prayer beads. Ultimately, being Reformation-rooted Western Christians, and because we're such bibliophiles, the real center of our corner is the short shelf of devotional literature. Naturally, a couple of Bibles remain in place, as well as a few classics of evangelical piety. Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest takes its place here - as, by the way, it also does on occasion during morning prayer at the local Episcopal Church. The regulars take turns giving short homilies (since we've become regulars, Kelly has been assigned next week), and one of them insists on using Chambers during his time. Just another tidbit of grassroots ecumenism. But I digress.

We love prayer books and, as a result, they constitute the bulk of the literature in that space. And, given the history of different traditions' typical practices, the prayer books stem from the "high" churches and the magisterial Reformation - Presbyterian, Lutheran, Anglican and Catholic. The reasons that the Radical Reformation churches have generally shied from such resources are well known: intentional focus on the primary study of Scripture and suspicion of "rigid forms" over "heart worship." Among some early Baptist churches, notably the "founder" John Smyth and, later, the General Baptist Thomas Lambe at the Bell Alley Church in London, even the text of the Bible was set aside after being read at the beginning. This was done so that the "spirit" of the words could be focused upon during worship. I also suspect a third reason for the lack of prayer books: many of the Free Churches either focused their evangelism upon, or had the greatest success, with less-educated and impoverished populations. Even today, Pentecostalism, now the most successful Free Church form, spreads most readily among those who have less share in the things of this world and so long for a greater share of the Spirit.

But there is nothing inherent to the baptistic project that precludes drawing upon the resources of a prayer book, while there is much that commends such practice. I have already mentioned how the origin of the Anabaptists was a kind of generalization of monastic practice. Meanwhile, if the original communitarian vision held by Baptists is to reassert itself, the one that speaks of the Church as God's gathered assembly, then there is every justification for praying in step with others and for taking up aids to piety and worship outside of one's own thoughts or ingenuity.

I am, of course, not the first person to understand this. Not by a long shot. Gathering for Worship, the British Baptist service book that I have praised previously, is the third in a line of worship aids stretching back over several decades. This wonderful resource has now been joined by another from our theological cousins the Mennonites. Last year Herald Press, the publishing arm of Mennonite Church USA, released Take Our Moments and Our Days: An Anabaptist Prayer Book, Ordinary Time. Given that there will be latent suspicions about "forms," one may not be surprised that this book is only so ambitious. As the title suggests, the prayer cycle it creates is intended for the season between Pentecost and Advent (however, a second volume for the high seasons is apparently in the works). Being Anabaptist, it thoroughly focuses on the life and example of Jesus Christ. The four-week plan focuses on the Lord's Prayer, then the Beatitudes, then the parables, and finally the miracles. The prayers are "Scripture-saturated" (as any good prayer book should be, I think) and the pattern of themes takes on an "Anabaptist coloration." At the same time, its publication exemplifies a catholic spirit of engagement with the broader Christian tradition. It should be arriving in the mail today and I look forward to making personal remarks about its contents later.

In the meantime, here are a couple of reviews from the Herald Press web site:

"It is a blessing to have a prayer book rooted in our common Christian tradition of morning and evening prayer. It is unabashedly Anabaptist while employing the best elements of Christian prayer from other ancient and contemporary Christian sources. The layout is simple and clear and holds to a consistent pattern." - Father Andrew D. Ciferni, O.Praem., Daylesford Abbey, Paoli, Pa.

"A superb prayer book! The editors have done an outstanding job choosing texts and hymns and writing prayers and forms to establish substantial patterns of prayer. Their language is that of the universal church, so this publication knits its users to Christians throughout time and space. I pray that this volume will be used widely and well." - Marva J. Dawn, author of Reaching Out without Dumbing Down.

You can also read another Roman Catholic reader's comments here at the Bridgefolk web site.

Labels: Discipleship, Ecumenism, Liturgy

Posted by Chris Schelin at Thursday, July 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments

Pictured: Rev. Malkhaz Songulashvili, the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia, follows the cross in the Baptist-led ecumenical procession on Good Friday, 2007.

Readers of this blog remember the praise I have given to the Evangelical Baptist Church of Georgia, a tiny Baptist community that has nevertheless managed to exercise remarkable influence and moral authority in an officially Eastern Orthodox post-Soviet country. I am not the only young theology student in America who has acknowledged and sought to reflect on their experience. In fact, a Duke Divinity grad (now Catholic University of America doctoral candidate), Ben Boswell, recently wrote two articles about the EBCG for the journal Religion in Eastern Europe. For his thesis, Ben draws a parallel between the organizing efforts of the student-led democratic movement Kmara and the corporate life of the Georgian Baptists. Each group, a "radical" force in its society, played an effective role in the 2003 "Rose Revolution" precisely because each practiced its own liturgy, a "revolutionary" or looping-back movement that sustained identity and provided the impetus for engagement with society. Boswell writes:

[T]he EBCG’s ability, as a monastic movement within the Orthodox Church, to recover a democratic polity in the form of a Free Church ecclesiology, was the most significant reform that enabled their successful participation in the non-violent revolution for democracy in Georgia. In their intentional recovery of a Free Church ecclesiology the EBCG refused to abandon the Orthodox liturgical resources that had enriched their worship since the fourth century. Radical Reformed, Free Church ecclesiology, coupled with the ancient liturgical resources of the Orthodox Church, provided the EBCG with an impetus for a revolution in their social relationships and the practical and spiritual foundation to sustain them.

The Georgian Baptists' radical liturgy has taken various forms. As Boswell notes, it has included the adoption of native Orthodox practices of worship and spirituality so that their proclamation of the gospel is contextualized within the broad tradition of the church Catholic and the cultural history of Georgia as well. While the appropriation of tradition is understood as a positive good in its own right, it has helped the Baptists in Georgia because a) they disabuse themselves of the charge that they are a novel "sect" with no respect for the Church of ages past and b) they send a signal that they are committed to being a part of the Church of Georgia and for the Georgian people.

The liturgy has been radical in swinging open doors towards diversity and wide participation. Despite the typically fundamentalist climate of the Eastern European Baptist churches, the EBCG ordains women deacons and pastors. While some churches have adopted the liturgical reforms that bring their worship closer towards the Orthodox, there is no demand for uniformity and congregations are free to construct their liturgies as befit their needs under Christ's Lordship. Although Georgia is riven by ethnic tensions, the Baptist Cathedral in Tbilisi maintains four separate congregations based on language: Georgian, Russian, Armenian and Ossetian. The Baptists have taken seriously Christ's call to minister all people. When Chechen Muslims fled across the border into Georgia, Bishop Malkhaz and other members of the EBCG took a wheeled "mobile Eucharistic table" to the mountain hinterland so that they could feed the refugees and share in table fellowship:

Moved by this act of hospitality one Muslim imam remarked, “When I return to Grozny I will do two things. I will build a new mosque because ours was destroyed by the Russians, and I will build a Baptist church because the Baptists were the only people with us in our time of need.”

Finally, the Baptists have practiced a radical liturgy of ecumenical cooperation and brotherhood. For several years they have organized and led a procession of the cross on Good Friday in which all Christians are invited to participate. The procession begins at the Armenian Apostolic cathedral, moves to the Roman Catholic cathedral, the Lutheran cathedral, and then finishes at the Baptist cathedral. Bishop Malkhaz also aided Christian unity when he led the EBCG to respond to the terrorism of a rogue Orthodox priest with love. Once the priest, Basil Mkalashvili, was apprehended and tried, the bishop made the dramatic gesture of calling for his release and crossing the courtroom to shake the defrocked priest's hand in a gesture of forgiveness. While the court still sentenced the priest, he and Malkhaz continue to exchange letters regularly.

When the revolution for democracy came in 2003, Baptists were active and visible participants in the demonstrations:

During the days of the Rose Revolution, Baptists were actively protesting alongside opposition party leaders and even extended hospitality by bringing hot drinks and food to the demonstrators during the cold and rainy hours of the revolution.10 Alongside the Georgian flags (a neo-medieval flag with five blood red crosses) flown by Saakashvili and opposition leaders in Tbilisi Freedom Square flew the flag of the EBCG, which was designed with an ancient cross from monastic cave paintings found in the Georgian desert. The Baptist flags provided the only visible religious presence of any kind during the revolutionary democratic movement. When demonstrators armed with roses non-violently stormed the Presidential office building during the illegitimate Parliamentary session, a Baptist named Lela Karvelishvili, who worked forthe Liberty Institute, carried the Baptist flag into Shevardnadze’s office as a religious symbol of revolutionary power.

It is Boswell's contention that the intentional construction of a Free Church-Orthodox liturgy by the Baptists gave them the revolutionary character that has allowed them to participate in nonviolent revolution and share an active, compassionate love for the enemy and the other. As Free Church Christians they inherit and uphold a tradition of principled dissent and a commitment to what John Howard Yoder described as an ecclesiology of dialogical reciprocity, which his Anabaptist tradition had dubbed "the rule of Paul." In this church practice openness towards the gifts and voices of all is cultivated and cherished. The EBCG has externalized this process by making itself open to the gifts and insights of other Christians and of democratic movements like Kmara. The result has been a unique form of "radical catholicity" that engages the wider Church and the wider society in pursuit of fuller obedience to the gospel of JEsus Christ. Boswell writes:

To the extent that the EBCG was able to incorporate the deep liturgical resources of the Orthodox tradition within their own Free Church polity, they embodied the most radical form of the “rule of Paul,” in that they were open not only to hearing the voice of the other, of the enemy, but they were open to learning from and embodying the best of their interlocutors practices into their own liturgies as a sign of reconciliation and revolutionary dialogical reciprocity.

The result has been an inspired liturgy, a true "work of the people" that has shaped the EBCG into a vibrant expression of radical and catholic Christianity, committed both to the crucial demands of discipleship and to the beauty and unity of the faith as it has been shared across time and space. I pray that Baptists and all other Christians in America will attend to their example and consider how our liturgies - that is, our life together in proclamation and praise - will in fact shape us to be revolutionaries who continually "loop back" upon the Gospel to order ourselves afresh.

Labels: Baptists, Ecumenism, Liturgy, Theology

Posted by Chris Schelin at Saturday, May 03, 2008 | Permalink | Comments

A good Baptist church is hard to find. Well, at least it is when one's understanding of, and desire for, the Baptist tradition generates firm disagreement with both of the highly visible “poles” that characterize the North American scene. Here in the Triangle area, at least in my experience so far, the available options have tended to be either a) the Democratic Party at prayer or b) unreflective evangelicalism-fundamentalism. If a church has earnestly incorporated elements of the broad liturgical tradition then it has done so in order to provide window dressing for its revisionist liberalism. Or if a church has seriously committed itself to evangelism and missions it has underwritten them by way of a soteriology that lacks true Gospel holism.

Today four of us attended Greenwood Forest Baptist Church in Cary, which was about a twenty minute drive from my house in Durham. The ministry staff must have been tipped off that we were coming because they pulled out all the stops – the service featured the baptisms of four teenagers as well as communion. We arrived on time to the church's delicately beautiful and thoroughly packed sanctuary and took note of the simple wooden lines running throughout the apse (if you can assign that traditional name to the “stage” in this church) and the white parament adorning the communion table. We scanned the bulletin and then wondered and prayed over the corporate worship near at hand.

And from beginning to end I was most pleased with the thought and devotion that went into the service. The baptismal service was the richest and fullest of any I had seen in a Baptist church and hit all the right elements that one would expect from a robust baptismal theology liturgically applied. The congregation was called to declare in unison that baptism is the covenant signature of a community that spans the centuries. As theologians and liturgical scholars have repeatedly noted, every new baptism should be the occasion for the entire church body to redeclare and renew baptismal vows made in the past, and we did just that in the call to worship. The pastor introduced the candidates with the reverence that signifies consciousness of the Spirit's presence and the ritual that signifies somebody must have read a little Hippolytus along the way. Drawing upon the complex of symbols that have been incorporated into baptismal celebrations throughout church history, the pastor placed salt on each candidate's shoulder and gave each a baptism candle, liturgically embodying the declaration Jesus makes concerning his followers in Matthew 5. The congregation verbally affirmed each candidate when he or she arose from the waters, offering welcome and rejoicing that God's Spirit has been present and active.

After an engaging sermon (er..”communion meditation” as it was called in this service) on Psalm 119 the pastor, Randy Sherron, directed the church into a service of the table. Here my praise may be quieter because I cannot bring myself to embrace communion incarnated as crackers and shots of grape juice. But recognizing where my tradition is in its Eucharistic practice, I do embrace the adage that “beggars can't be choosers.” So while I would prefer real bread and a congregational pilgrimage to the table I can still say that this Lord's Supper was served with attentiveness and reflection.

Another highly enjoyable and striking feature of Greenwood Forest was the strong presence of female leadership. Two of the clergy on staff are women and the majority of deacons on duty today were women. Meanwhile, two women were given direct responsibility for the distribution of the elements while Randy offered spiritual exhortation.

Of course there is much that still needs to be learned about this congregation. We were greeted very warmly after the service and Kelly and I intend to visit again. But it will be most helpful to experience other aspects of the community's life together, particularly education/formation and mission/outreach. Nevertheless this was the most theologically rich and spiritually sensitive service in a Baptist church that I have seen in some time. I do hope to share in more Sundays like this in the future!

Labels: Baptists, Liturgy

Posted by Chris Schelin at Sunday, August 26, 2007 | Permalink | Comments

Last week, without much fanfare, I finally received from Kelly what was meant to be first my birthday gift, then Christmas, then anniversary, and finally it's late arrival meant it was just, well, a random gift. But a good one at that. What she has been trying to get me for some time, but which has taken its time getting here due to trouble with vendors, is the new prayer book published by the Baptist Union of Great Britain in 2005. Gathering for Worship: Patterns and Prayers for the Community of Disciples is a helpful planning resource that is directed mainly towards worship and practices in the Baptist/Free Church tradition. But it also has the promise to be an ecumenically useful worship book for Christians of all traditions, and in fact it is one of the resources placed on reserve at the Duke Divinity School library for the Introduction to Christian Worship class taught by Ed Phillips (United Methodist). I have even found a favorable review by a British Roman Catholic who believes that Gathering for Worship provides complementary forms of worship and devotional practice as well as catechetical or semi-catechetical reminders of the purpose of certain ritual acts.

Actually, the main problem that this book has will not be convincing other Christians but Baptists of its usefulness. Ours is a tradition that is traditionally suspicious of traditions, especially services that are too tightly planned and which contain written prayers that some rightly fear can become merely rote delivery. However, the unintended consequences of this laudable pursuit of spiritual worship have been a diminishing of liturgics as a necessary and vital arena of sustained theological reflection, a disconnection with some historic and meaningful prayers and worship patterns, and certainly in some cases a laziness masquerading as “following the lead of the Spirit.” Gathering for Worship reflects a small but hopefully growing liturgical renewal among Baptists in order to recover, in our own particular way, worship as a carefully thought-out corporate discipline that can be imbued with multiple layers and resonances in both what is said and done. This renewal expresses itself in various ways, from the adoption of the Church Year and lectionary (at minimum among Baptists in North America we have witnessed a large-scale appropriation of the season of Advent) to litanies and responsive prayers to fuller liturgies for the Lord's Supper. It is not surprising that British Baptists, who seem to have less qualms about so-called “Catholic” practices, are leading the way with the publication of this book.

Thus like most such books Gathering for Worship has plans for acts such as Communion and Marriage and prayers for various seasons of the Church Year and various moments of spiritual meaning. Unlike most such prayer books, of course, it has a Baptist twist: the baptism rite is only for disciples who have made a conscious, verbal affirmation, there is a rite for presenting and dedicating infants, and there are various commissionings of ministers alongside ordination. The book also presents sections of prayers for occasions not marked by the Church Year, such as The Weak of Prayer for Christian Year. Unlike the Book of Common Prayer, a prime example of books with more of a so-called “catholic” or at least mainline bent, Gathering for Worship does not contain a catechism, rites for the daily office, rites for the other five “sacraments,” or any lectionaries.

Here I may hit on what I think are some of the weaknesses or deficiencies of the book. I highlight these with a caveat. Given that Baptists have tended to stick up their noses at structured liturgies, it is an accomplishment that such a service book even exists, let alone that it contains prayers for seasons of the Church Year. So these are not strong criticisms. But I do pine for the day that a Baptist prayer book does contain a daily office plan (it's Scriptural! - Psalm 55:17, among others) so that it can be useful for families, informal gatherings of disciples, and individuals in the rhythm of worship between Sundays. Providing the lectionary would also be useful for pastors and churches seeking to follow its discipline. Perhaps also because the book's continued production is contingent on its acceptance in Baptist circles – it is, after all, not required like the BCP – it only appears in one form, which is a good-sized hardback edition. A leather-bound edition would make it more flexible and so easier to use in the midst of corporate worship and a smaller edition would make it easier for personal use. But for now this problem can be answered by using the CD that provides PDF files of the entire text of Gathering for Worship.

Ultimately, Gathering for Worship is not comprehensive in the way that the BCP strives to be, and it is not as fit for personal use, either. It may be misleading to call it a “prayer book” since its beneficial use will largely be restricted to corporate worship. It is a “service book” primarily. However, in that respect it is a sure winner, providing both traditional and contemporary forms and touching on a number of theological themes and imagery. I am most excited about exploring its seven patterns for Communion, and I will describe more about them in a future post. If nothing else, let me say this as endorsement: I used Gathering for Worship to say a prayer in worship this past Sunday, and it is only the beginning of much use that I expect to make. This is a remarkable achievement on the part of the British Baptists.

Labels: Baptists, Liturgy

Posted by Chris Schelin at Monday, February 19, 2007 | Permalink | Comments