2011 Seminar | Worshipping God in This Place

by Dorothy Bass

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In one of Wendell Berry’s novels, a wise character comments on Sunday services in the fictional small town of Port William, Kentucky.

The preachers were always young students from the seminary.  They wore, you might say, the mantle of power but not the mantle of knowledge.  They wouldn’t stay long enough to know where they were … and they apparently were not going to school to learn where they were, either, let alone the pleasures and pains of being there, or what ought to be said there… . . No, in their brief passage through or over Port William, most of the young preachers knew this place only as it theoretically was (“lost”) and as it theoretically might be (“saved”).

Jayber Crowe, the church janitor, longs for words of worship that take heed of crops and gardens, good livestock and working animals and dogs, courting couples seated thigh to thigh, and fried chicken soon to be served for Sunday dinner.  The sermons and prayers he heard rarely placed this people in this world in the right way, he thought.  On the other hand, he liked hearing people sing together.  “I thought that some of the hymns bespoke the true religion of the place,” Jayber declares.[1]

Unlike the young preachers in the novel, the church leaders who gathered for the 2011 summer seminar had developed ministries that showed that they did know where they were serving.  None of the communities from which they came is much like Port William, of course, and further, the seven places of ministry from which they came are quite different from one other.  But in every case there is a “there” there, and seminar participants knew this “there” very well.

During the week-long seminar, we asked each team to keep its own place in mind, even as they came to know more about—and to care for—the other places represented, and even as the seminar brought all our particular places into conversation with New York and New Haven, and with theology, liturgy, history, the arts, and more.  We encouraged one another to

• Remember the hymns and songs that bespeak “the true religion” of your place.
• Visualize the portion of the earth and its beauty and distress that can be seen from your windows—and help us all to lift these up in prayer.
• Recall the smells that rise from the sidewalk in front of your house of worship, and from the latte stands, dinner tables, and soup kitchens to which worshippers disperse.
• Remember what you most love about your building and its surroundings—and also what you find difficult.
• Cherish the earthy, located particularity of your place, and ponder it in your heart.

The earthy, embodied particularity of each congregation’s place in the material world reflects the incarnational faith at the heart of the Christian gospel.  The theologian Belden Lane deplores the tendency of historic Christianity to favor disembodied inwardness more than the material world (attributing some of Americans’ ambivalence about place to this tendency).[2]  To this seminar participants replied “yes … but if we look at Christianity from a different angle, from the angle of the congregation or parish community, we would see countless actual places received with gratitude, and cherished, and served.”  Worship in such places is remarkably incarnate:  it resounds with live music made by hand and breath … with ancient words and new words, exchanged face to face … with community emerging around water and bread and wine.  Here bodies gather, with senses engaged, receiving God’s promise that together they are one body, called just here to love and serve God and neighbor, called just here to be sent from here, for the sake of all.

The committed embrace of specific locations puts Christian congregations on the front lines of one of the most urgent crises of our time—the crisis of place.  We live increasingly on a vast landscape of the temporary, peopled with globe-trotting entrepreneurs and job-hungry workers, all unable or unwilling to make lasting commitments to specific places.  Anonymous spaces designed for mobility, efficiency, and profit enable this unsustainable way of life:  airports, shopping malls, freeways, office towers.  Meanwhile, following the same economic and cultural logic that produces these anti-place spaces, the earth is stripped of water and minerals, of trees and good soil.[3]

Dislocation and rootlessness are among the characteristic features of our age.  Dislocation and rootlessness are geographic, but they can also burrow deep into the self.  Each congregation’s neighborhood contains persons who are displaced in one way or another—immigrants, exiles, refugees, or migrant workers from afar; seekers of employment, meaning, or love from the American suburbs and hinterlands; and more.  The ministries of these congregations show that they know these folks:  they are homeless, living in the park across the street; they are emerging adults, new to a city and suspicious of the church, perhaps fleeing the parochialism of other places; they are transplants from lusher landscapes to a desert region that needs their care. The ministries of place-aware congregations help dislocated people to find a place not only in congregations, but in God’s beloved world, for the sake of the world.

On this landscape of the temporary, worship, music, and the arts, led by those who know where they are, can deepen a community’s embrace of place.  But there’s a catch.  When undertaken in Christ, worship, music, and the arts also dislodge local communities from merely local assumptions; they challenge parishes not to be parochial.  (Isn’t it interesting that a word referring to the local manifestation of church also carries a negative sense of limitation and close-mindedness?)  Embracing place in Christ, worshipers are thrown into the midst of a sometimes painful but always creative tension that runs throughout biblical faith and Christian tradition.[4]  When a person is baptized into Christ, she gains brothers and sisters around the world and is joined to the suffering and hope of the whole world.  Her urgent prayers are now for those distant ones and not only for herself and those close at hand.  And sometimes, she is called to journey, quite literally, along paths as yet untrodden and through perils unknown.  She may even discover that the road is for her a place of new life, a site of transformation.  Abraham and Sarah discovered this, and so did Moses, and the people who wandered in Sinai.  So did Paul the itinerant apostle, who once had been Saul of Tarsus.

How do Christian congregations worship in and from and for and through and finally beyond the places they see as home?  During the seminar, we did not ask this question with idle curiosity or from theoretical concern.  Instead, we asked it for the sake of faithful worship and lively service.

Each congregational team brought deep experience and great practical wisdom to this shared exploration.  Three salient aspects of our theme pointed to connections among the teams and their projects:  story, boundaries, and gift.

Story.   A place (not just an anonymous utilitarian space, but a meaningful place) involves the intersection of people, stories, and the earth.  Therefore, we listened carefully for the stories each congregation tells and noticed whether and how these stories foster abundant life.  What truth do a congregations’ stories tell?  Are they full of life, or do they narrate a way of death?   This may be especially important on ground that is stained with blood—and isn’t almost all the ground on which we walk stained with blood?  (I think of two of God’s earliest questions to humankind:  “Where are you?” and “Where is your brother?”)

 

Central Presbyterian calls itself “the church that stayed.” That short phrase crystallizes a narrative that overturns Atlanta’s dominant narrative of white flight, summing up a long and complicated story of persistent love for a city and persistent longing for justice and reconciliation.  Today Central Presbyterian continues to look for fresh ways to tell this story through the arts, and to help other congregations to do so as well.

 

In 2010, Idlewild Presbyterian hosted a performance of Dave Brubeck’s Requiem.  This was a historic event:  although this work was inspired by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it had never been performed in Memphis.  In ways like this, and also in ongoing patterns of worship, Idlewild tries to help Memphis tell its story more truly.  This congregation’s project aims to help its children learn to craft a life-giving next chapter to that story by helping them find their place in Christian worship.

 

Each congregation represented here also receives the stories of scripture and makes them its own through worship, music, and the arts.  One example:  The United Church of Santa Fe has shown wonderful creativity in embracing scripture’s rich stories of the desert, integrating them with the community’s liturgical, artistic, and educational life in ways that connect people to the landscape around them and encourage them to experience God’s presence there.

 

Boundaries.  Typically, places have boundaries that mark their limits.  When places are embraced in Christ, however, boundaries shift.  “Boundaries are the places of Christian work, and their displacements are the result of this work,” writes Michel de Certeau, the late French Jesuit and social theorist.  His example is a Catholic Worker house—a specific location that offers welcome to those with no place while also becoming a place of dislocation for those who voluntarily make it their home.  Having a place, a building that provides shelter, is indispensable to this apostolic work; but this building is, remarkably, a place that overturns the boundaries that typically define place.[5]  This same dynamic appeared in several of the congregational projects.

 

St. Monica Catholic Community’s ministries of hospitality are grounded in the parish’s emphasis on “liturgical formation for transformation.”  Here, the worship of God is understood to dislodge entrenched human boundaries and to turn parishioners out toward the world.  Thus members relinquish parochialism even while they welcome strangers to their parish.  One strong example, among many in this thriving ministry, is St. Monica’s liturgy for homeless persons who died in the past year, which is celebrated annually in the public park across the street.

 

In Chicago, Holy Trinity Lutheran Church takes on another set of boundaries—the boundaries of assumption and expectation that typically separate people of various age groups in our age-segregated society.  Holy Trinity’s project also steps right over ecumenical boundaries to engage congregations from other denominations in considering how worship might reach and serve the mobile young adults in their hip urban neighborhood.

 

In fact, all seven congregations are devoted to boundary-breaking through acts of hospitality and justice-seeking.  In various ways, all are doing the Christian work of displacing boundaries of sexuality, class, and race.  And I suspect all are also eying one of the boundaries that is most perilous for liturgists and musicians today:  boundaries of worship style, whose defenders can be remarkably intense.  How might those boundaries be overcome?

 

Gift.  In our society, place involves real estate.  Questions of ownership and access—questions heavily overlaid with issues of wealth and class—are always in play.  In a now-classic biblical theology of place entitled The Land, Walter Brueggemann traced the long and continuing struggle between two quite different ways of occupying a place:  as possession, and as gift.[6]  This struggle fuels violent confrontations all over our war-torn world.  In a more modest but still important way, it also affects every congregation that owns a building.  Is this our possession?  Or is this God’s gift, not just to us but for the sake of all?

 

Luther Place, in Washington, D.C., has a plot of land that was in disrepair not so long ago.  This congregation is also part of a plot—a narrative—that challenges them to see their churchyard not as a private possession but as a gift meant for all.  And so they offer their little bit of land to neighbors as a sacred commons to be shared.

 

At St. Michael’s in Boise, guests who often go hungry are seated at lovely tables and served gourmet food.  Now music is being added to their dining experience.  This is beautiful and fitting, for music itself bespeaks God’s abundance.  As the theologian David Ford notes in a wonderful reflection on the mandate in Colossians to sing hymns and psalms and spiritual songs, a community of sound has no firm boundaries; it is open to all within earshot.[7]  At St. Michael’s, the music often begins on the street, as guests wait to enter the banquet hall.

 

I have stated these three points as affirmations, putting them in very positive terms and honoring these congregations’ faithfulness in (1) telling truthful stories; (2) dislodging boundaries; and (3) offering their places as gifts to others.  But all these dimensions of place point to tensions as well as accomplishments, don’t they?

• False stories—some of them deadly—are always on hand to shape our common life in less faithful ways.
• Boundaries are always reappearing, some new and some along divisions we thought had already been overcome.
• As for gift:  well, giving away our places, and ourselves, is sometimes incredibly difficult.

 

And so in every summer seminar we do not only talk about worship.  We also worship.  We come before God each day to confess our sin.  We confess the ways in which we hide when God calls out “where are you?” and the ways in which we have failed to be our brothers’ keepers.

And we pray, interceding with God for all the places of this world and those who inhabit them.  They, and we, are so vulnerable. A few years ago, St. Monica’s buildings were nearly destroyed by an earthquake—and this could happen again.  Recently, parts of Memphis were flooded.  Some in each of our parishes suffer from illness, loss, and economic hardship.  And so it is in distant places as well.  We pray, “Lord, have mercy.”

And we also worship God with praise and thanksgiving—for the God-given life of all creation; for the reconciling life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ; and for the new life the Spirit that continues to blow into the communities represented at the seminar and also into other communities all over this blessed, beautiful earth.