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ELCA NEWS SERVICE

July 26, 2000

LUTHERANS REFLECT ON WORSHIP LIFE
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     CHICAGO (ELCA) -- Members of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in
America (ELCA) explored the church's worship life during "Worship 2000
Jubilee," the church's first national conference on worship held here
July 10-13.  About 1,000 clergy and lay leaders who plan worship
gathered to ponder and celebrate various liturgical traditions, ethnic
and cultural expressions, religious spaces and music styles in Christian
worship.
     Worship 2000 Jubilee was part of the ELCA's "Initiatives to
Prepare for a New Century." The 1997 ELCA Churchwide Assembly designated
significant areas of ministry for the new century, including "Deepening
Worship Life."  Leadership teams were formed in 1998 to provide overall
guidance for the work of congregations, synods and the churchwide
organization.  There are 11,000 congregations organized into 65 synods
of the ELCA in the United States and Caribbean.
     Conference participants visited Christian churches in Chicago to
experience distinctive worship styles and settings.  They were
Evangelical Lutheran Church of St. Luke, Fourth Presbyterian Church,
Rockefeller Chapel, St. Benedict the African Roman Catholic Church, St.
Clement Roman Catholic Church and St. James Episcopal Cathedral.
     "We believe that it's very important to explore the worship
traditions of churches with which we have special relationships," said
the Rev. Paul R. Nelson, ELCA director for worship.  "In Chicago those
relationships include a covenant with the Roman Catholic Archdiocese and
full communion relationships with the Presbyterian Church and The
Episcopal Church," Nelson said.
     A goal of the conference was to "broaden participants'
perspectives on worship," said the Rev. Kevin Anderson, ELCA director
for worship education.  "We hope some participants will model some of
what they've experienced here back in their own local settings to deepen
worship life," he said.
     "There are those within this church who might see worship as an
opportunity
for 'entertainment evangelism,'" said the Rev. James E. Boline,
Hollywood Lutheran Church, Hollywood, Calif.
     "But those who truly understand and experience worship as a cosmic
encounter with the Divine (those who were at Worship 2000 Jubilee) have
found a common ground within a worship pattern of simply gathering,
hearing the Word, eating the Meal, and being sent out," he said.
     "The kind of worship that follows this pattern is what is uniting
Lutherans liturgically, no matter what our musical style or aesthetic
taste may be.  That pattern itself is inclusive of all our ethnicities,
all our musical tastes, all our liturgical styles," said Boline.
     Plenary presentations focused on the elements of "Word and
sacrament" in worship.  The Rev. Gordon W. Lathrop, professor of liturgy
and chaplain for the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia,
delivered the first of four presentations at Worship 2000 Jubilee.
Using images projected on two large screens, Lathrop reflected on the
future of the "liturgical assembly" in connection with the shape and
function of the Christian community.
     "Assembly is not just a group of individuals who come together as
a passive American-targeted market to see if there are any religious
ideas the individuals might buy for their own perceived needs -- the
church-growth sales language so common in America today," Lathrop said.
     "Assembly, rather, is a common, shared active stance of openness
and need and praise before God.  Everyone is welcome because everyone is
in need.  Everyone is welcome because everyone can be introduced to the
authentic reasons for praise," Lathrop told participants.  "It is the
basic foundation of Christian worship, the beloved beginning of God's
mission in the world, the place where each specific person ought to be
honored profoundly and yet each one be welcomed in the common stance of
the whole body."
     Lathrop said God "enlivens our little meetings around Word and
sacrament.  Open the door," he said.  "Work on hospitality.  Try to see
if your own congregation can grow, even a little, in ethnic and racial
and sexual and age and generational diversity.  See yourself in all
those who come through the door.  Be a needy 'us.'  Keep reminding
yourselves that all of you are also still seekers and beggars to whom
Christ has given hospitality.  Don't segregate the seekers nor the
people by their generations.  That is such a bad idea.  All of our full
services of Word and sacrament are and ought to be seeker services."
     The Rev. Susan R. Briehl, an ELCA pastor, former co-director of
Holden Village, Chelan, Wash., led a presentation on how the "Word" is
best preached today.
     "The preacher has only one Word to speak, one story to tell, one
mystery to proclaim.  It is ... the story of God's Word made manifest
among us, the mystery of God, out of compassion for our weakness,
becoming flesh as fragile as breath, that we might not be destroyed but
forgiven and given new life.  In other words, all of God's mighty works
and wonders unfold among us.  God's infinite mercy is poured out upon
us," said Briehl.
     "But how does preaching give this gift and speak of this mystery
heard and known from our elders?  How shall the preacher tell the story
of God's boundless compassion for earth ... to those who have never
heard and to those who know it best?  Where are the words for speaking
the Word that speaks light into darkness, beauty into chaos, freedom
into fear and life into death?  What aids the preacher, week after week,
in handing over Christ Jesus and his benefits?  Or, put another way,
what hinders and what helps the evangelical preacher to offer God's
mercy in Jesus Christ to a stubborn, wavering, unfaithful people in a
way that enables faith in them to trust this gift?" Briehl asked
participants.   "Preaching is rooted in human history and time.  A
preacher is met all the time and transformed by Jesus," she said.
     The Rev. Don E. Saliers, professor of theology and worship and
director of the master of sacred music program, Candler School of
Theology, Emory University, Atlanta, explored the visual and aural arts
in worship.
     "The history of the Christian faith is also a history of the eye,
the ear, the mind imagining, and the human body at full stretch.
Wherever human beings hear and encounter God, the consequences are
poetic, visionary, metaphoric, parabolic, revealed in images, and
ordered sound -- voices, instruments and dance," Saliers said.
     "Christianity remains steadfastly a religion of the body -- Christ
incarnate, the Word's body crucified, lifted up, and the sacramental
body received by a people becoming the body of Christ for the sake of
the world.  The music of heaven became the music of earth.  This is why
the church continually searches to sound and to sing the depths of life
before God," Saliers said.
     Saliers proposed four "theses" for participants' reflection.  "The
meaning and point of language used in worship to proclaim and celebrate
Christ in our assemblies depends radically on non-verbal forms for its
meaning and point," he said.  Second, "Christian public worship is in
art, but not a work of art."  Third, Saliers said, "Christian public
worship is faithful and relevant to the extent that its art features a
series of permanent tensions: the already and the not-yet, the words and
the deeds, the hearing and coming-to-see, the declaration and the
transformation.  And finally, he said, "Christian liturgy is an
eschatological art.  Participants thus make visible, audible and
palpable the promises of God."
     The Rev. J-Glenn Murray, SJ, director of the office for pastoral
liturgy and a teacher of homiletics for the Roman Catholic Diocese of
Cleveland, examined the link between the eucharistic meal and the
assembly's sending out to lives of justice, peace and mission.
     "What would happen to our mission were we to remember that we are
one?  Our language of separation would have to end," said Murray.  "I
belong to the ELCA, I belong to the Roman Catholic Church, to the
Baptist Convention, to the Anglicans."
     "If our banqueting is true, if all are invited to the welcome
table to be transformed, if we are in communion with the Body of Christ
at the table, then we must take the first step in being truly present
wherever dislike divides.  Cynicism will not survive, sarcasm will not
survive, fretting will not survive, conspiratorial carping will not
survive, lack of access to each other's table will not survive," he
said.
     "Old and young, rich and struggling, women and men, sainted
sinners -- all gathered in the Spirit.  No less than our ancestors in
the faith do we gather in wonderful richness and baptismal unity.  Our
very act of assembling inserts us into a mission that transcends the
individualism and privatism of our very self-absorbed culture," said
Murray.
     "At our weekly feast, we put on the mind of Christ.  We hear a
Word that not only lifts us up and gets us through but sets forth a
mandate to proclaim to all the world Good News.  God creates from chaos
... has the power to step in the tangled webs of chaos that may be our
lives, our relationships, and certainly our time," he said.
     "Yes, the mission continues ... the mission will be at times a way
of weariness, of exhaustion, of giving to the uttermost -- but it is
better to burn out than to rust out, for that is the way to God.  People
are burning out every day, why not burn out for justice and
righteousness?" Murray said.
     Using song, scripture and the sharing of his faith and worship
experience, Murray invited participants to close the plenary
presentation in song.
     Forums, seminars and plenary presentations on the shape and future
of worship were also featured at Worship 2000 Jubilee.
     "Every time we sing, we use breath that is divine," said the Rev.
Victor E. Jortack, Ascension Lutheran Church, Milwaukee.  Jortack led a
seminar on five ways to implement Latino music in a multicultural
setting.
     "First, use authentic indigenous rhythms.  Various Spanish-speaking 
territories have distinctive rhythms and instruments that
illustrate various cultures," Jortack said.
     Second, "when using indigenous rhythms, present them in a way that
makes sense to the congregation.  Use rhythms familiar to the
congregation's styles and rhythms," Jortack said.
     Third, "bring music from other faith traditions to our Christian
worship," he said.
     Fourth, Jortack said, "bring popular music to worship but add a
verse or two to make that music appropriate for worship."
     Finally, he added, "transform traditional and 'praise' Christian
music into indigenous rhythms."
     Jortack said congregations are free to design music in worship in
a variety of ways, but "it is important to connect our message to music
in worship."
     Other seminar topics included bringing adults to Baptism; the use
of Chinese worship and music resources; improvisation at the organ;
hospitality in worship; self-publishing worship folders; preaching to
and for faith; choosing contemporary music for liturgy and conversations
with the plenary presenters.
     The opening worship at Worship 2000 Jubilee featured liturgy and
music from "This Far by Faith," the ELCA's African American worship
resource.  The closing worship at Rockefeller Chapel featured Lutheran
hymns that spanned more than 500 years.
     Worship 2000 Jubilee was supported by grants from Aid Association
for Lutherans, a fraternal benefits organization based in Appleton,
Wis., and Lutheran Brotherhood, a fraternal benefits organization based
in Minneapolis.

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