Rethinking Ritual

Beauty, Boredom, Burden and Blessing

In modern evangelical worship, ritual is the enemy.  It’s commonly accepted wisdom in the evangelical world that you can worship a certain way for a while, but then that way gets “stale.”  You can only sing Shout to the Lord so many times in 1996, or Oceans so many times in 2015, or The Blessing in 2021, before you stop thinking about the words, and you don’t really feel them the same way you do before.  I mean, maybe the especially pious do, or maybe old people do when they stubbornly want to hang on to the songs they like to sing, which is generally understood as very selfish.  But for most people, when it turns stale, it’s turned into a “ritual,” and that’s the death sentence: turning into a ritual means that you’ve sung it so often that you can sing it without feeling it, or considering it.  So it’s time to stop singing it, and go find a new song which says things in a new way, and you can feel it again.

I don’t think we’ve ever stopped and realized what this is doing to us:

• It splits us apart by age demographics.  It’s one thing for me to disagree with my neighbors about the golden era of pop music.  It’s another for me to say that I objectively experience God’s Spirit more with one type of music than another.  It makes worship services into a fight for slices of a very limited pie.

• Because it treats worship music like a consumer product, that shapes the way we think about those who make and choose the music.  There is tremendous pressure not to bore people.  In the end, we value leaders who can hold people’s attention through doing something unique.  That’s not a bad gift—and leaders ought to have it in some way.  But we’ve got to develop the body of Christ’s attention span if we’re ever really going to grow up.

• Did you ever notice how this feeling is very…American?  We love novelty; we love to buy new things. We love the feeling of new love, and fear when the roaring flame burns down to embers.  And we trust our feelings—our internal sense of what works for us, and doesn’t.  You can’t pull our feelings about worship songs apart from this quest for novelty and a trust in ourselves.

Most importantly, though, discarding rituals keeps us from the gift of worship that Jesus knew.  Because Jesus ritually read and sang from the Old Testament every day of his life, there were words and phrases written on his heart that rolled around in his mind and informed his daily life.  How did Jesus know, for instance, that Isaiah 61 (“The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is upon me, for the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor”) was about him?  How did he discern that there was this unique connection between this text and his life and calling?  Perhaps the Holy Spirit revealed it to Him in a supernatural way.  But it is also true that He had been reading that text his whole life.  He likely strained to understand it as a young boy, yawned his way through it as a teenager, read it ritually every day in his twenties while life went by, and then eventually—it clicked!  But we never get to that place where it clicks if we don’t rehearse the words so much that they sink into our heart and bones. 

In my classes, we sometimes talk about the way young evangelicals can be drawn to more liturgical worship.  Generally, people’s experience with liturgical worship goes through four stages:

• This is beautiful.  Drawn in by the contemplative silence, the candles, the colors, the rituals of liturgical worship can be beautiful.

• This is boring.  Eventually, though, the repetition of liturgical worship gets to be a strain for young people raised in novelty-based worship.

• This is a burden.  If you keep at it while it’s boring, it can begin to seem a burden.  Why get up for morning prayer, just to say the things you always say?

• This is built in.  If you persist through boredom and burden, though, the strangest thing can happen—the words sink in deeply and find a home in your emotional life.  You find the words flashing through your mind when you sit at a stoplight.  You start remembering the Magnificat when the odds are long.  You find it easier to choke out, “I’m sorry” because you’ve got some muscle memory related to repentance.  You find it is possible to forgive because you have internalized that God really has forgiven you.

But if you want to get to that place, you have to persist.  Right now, we encourage Christians to drop out when things get boring, and certainly by the time it feels burdensome.  We encourage Christian leaders to go to great lengths to keep people from ever feeling bored or burdened.  But the gift can only come when we press through those things; it can only come when we rethink ritual.