PLAGIARISM FREE "A" WORK 18 HOURS or LESS

CHAPTER 14

Worship, Evangelism, Ethics: On Eliminating the “And”

Stanley Hauerwas

The Background of the “And”

Tents — I think the problem began with tents. At least I know that tents created the problem for me. When I was a kid growing up in Texas, it never occurred to me that a revival could be had in the church building. You could only have a revival in a tent. You “went to church” in the church. You “got saved” in the tent. Worship was what you did in the church. Evangelism was what you did in the tent. Thus was created “the problem” of how to understand the relationship between worship, evangelism, and ethics.

I do not know if Don Saliers was a product of, or even participated in, tent evangelism, but I do know that, like me, he has benefited from but also suffered at the hands of an American form of Christianity that tents produced. That form of American Christianity is called Methodism. Moreover, like me, he has become “Catholic” — or at least our fellow Methodists often think the importance that Saliers and I attribute to “liturgy” has made us Catholic.1 Saliers was trained to be a philosophical theologian, and I am supposed to be an ethicist. How and why did we ever become so fascinated with liturgy, not only as something the church does but as crucial for helping us better understand how theology should be done?

It would be presumptuous for me to speak for Saliers, but I suspect that he is as concerned about liturgy, and for the same reason, as I am — he is a Methodist. This may seem a strange confession, given the separation between worship and theology so often legitimated by current Methodist practice. Yet Saliers represents personally and intellectually the Methodist refusal to separate theology and piety. Indeed, Saliers’s focus on worship becomes a way to explore how the and might be eliminated between theology and evangelism or theology and ethics. Our difficulty, of course, is that we are members of a church whose history, particularly in America, was shaped by the tentsanctuary divide. Currently some Methodists are even suggesting, in the interest of church growth (which has become synonymous in some circles with evangelism), that worship must be made more “user- friendly.” They thus assume a tension exists between worship and evangelism.

I am not suggesting that the tensions some currently feel between worship and evangelism are due to “the tents,” but I think there are analogies between then and now. Certain pictures of worship and/or evangelism hold some Christians captive, leading them to think that there must be a deep difference between the church at worship and the church in its evangelistic mode. At least some seem to think that the only kind of worship consistent with effective evangelism cannot be identified, let alone associated, with what the church

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understands as “traditional” Sunday morning worship.2

I would venture that those who have never experienced a tent revival, which includes many Methodists as well as Protestant evangelicals, associate evangelism with a Billy Graham crusade. Of course, Billy Graham just moved the venue to football stadiums, combined that move with media savvy and organizational sophistication, and got the same tent-revival results albeit on a larger scale. What some Methodists now want and have tried to do is to move the football stadium back into the church in an effort to attract the “unchurched.” The tents have become the church, which makes some worry that “traditional” Methodist worship is being watered down.

That is the context within which Saliers has tried to help us recover liturgy as the locus of the theologian’s work. Of course, for him the very as sumption that there may be a tension between worship and evangelism (or ethics) is indicative that something has gone terribly wrong. He rightly assumes that Christian worship has always been the way the church has both evangelized and gone about its moral formation. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations” is a command of Jesus, not a suggestion about which we might make up our minds. Making disciples is the legitimating activity that makes the church the church. As Julian Hartt, another good Methodist, noted in his Toward a Theology of Evangelism, “Whenever the church is authentically Christian the conviction yet lives that its sole reason for existence is the preach the gospel of the kingdom in Christ.”3 There can be no such preaching without the church at worship. The way the church “wins converts,” therefore, is by making us faithful worshipers of the God who alone is worthy of worship.

Truthful Worship

Saliers has tried to help Methodists recover the way worship is evangelism and ethics by reminding us how worship is about the shaping of the affections. In what I hope has been a supportive move, I have tried to help Methodists recover the social and political significance of worship by claiming that the first task of the church is not to make the world more just but to make the world the world. Such a claim is not, as is often alleged, designed to legitimate a withdrawal of the church from the world, but just the opposite. If the church’s first task is to be the church, it is so because without the church the world would have no way to understand what justice entails. For as Augustine observed, “justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient City according to his grace, forbidding sacrifice to any being save himself alone.”4 That the “cities” in which we now exist do not worship the one true God only indicates how important it is that the church be truthful in its worship.

The church’s worship, therefore, is evangelism. That we Methodists thought we had to erect tents to evangelize should have suggested to us that something had gone wrong with our worship. The tents, to be sure, assumed a generalized Christian culture in which everyone, at least everyone in the South, assumed that sometime in their life they ought to be “saved.”5 This resulted in the further problem that many who “got saved” in the tent did not show up

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on Sunday morning with a regularity that might testify to the lasting effects of their being saved. Nonetheless, the same people got to claim the name Christian, since they had been saved. That the saved did not act like those who had been saved, moreover, was one of the reasons “ethics” became such a concern. Some hoped that if we just thought harder about something called ethics we might find a way to make people live better lives. This was a deep mistake, as it turned out.

These problems are simply reproduced by those who are currently trying to make the church the tent in order that they might reach the “seekers.” They assume that what is important is that new people should come to church. As a result, they fail to see that the more important question should be, does the church to which they are coming worship God truthfully? As Saliers has insisted, in worship “form matters” for the truthful shaping of our emotions. The words we use matter.6 That the Word should be followed by table matters if we are to be rightly formed as Christians. It matters what kind of music shapes our response to the Psalms, since what the psalm declares is not separable from how we as the church sing that declaration.7

In this respect there is an interesting parallel between liturgy and ethics as disciplines. To think liturgically and ethically is to try and help the church discover connections by developing historical analogies, exploring philosophical and theological implications, and in the process make normative recommendations. That is why, hopefully, it is hard to distinguish the work done in liturgy from that done in ethics.8 After all, when all is said and done liturgy and ethics are just ways to do theology, and theology, so understood, might again be construed as worship.

The liturgist’s concern to have the different parts of the liturgy “make sense” is quite similar to the ethicist’s concern to help the church understand the relation between certain kinds of behavior and moral judgment. Adultery means having sex with someone who is not your spouse, not matter how “loving” the extramarital encounter is or may have been. “I come to the garden alone” are not appropriate words to be sung in corporate worship, no matter how meaningful some people may find the hymn.9 Part of the difficulty is that Protestant Christians, evangelical and mainstream alike, have lost their ability to make such judgments. They have done so, moreover, because they have debased their worship in the name of evangelism and moral uplift.

As Marva Dawn reminds us in her Reaching Out without Dumbing Down, worship is “for” God, which is not the same as “meaningful for us.”10 Worship that is for God is, she argues, character forming. That truthful worship of God requires that we proceed in “good order” is a reminder of the very God who alone is deserving of worship. For, as the quote from Augustine reminds us, it is not any God that Christians worship, but the God whose justice is be found in Jesus’ cross and resurrection. To learn to worship that God truthfully requires that our bodies be formed by truthful habits of speech and gesture. To be so habituated is to acquire a character befitting lives capable of worshiping God.

One of the ironies of our time is that many “conservative” Christians fail to understand

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the relation between truthful worship and truthful living. For example, many “conservatives” became upset at women and men allegedly worshiping Sophia in the name of making liturgy “meaningful for women.” Yet too often the same people who criticize the worship of God as Sophia are more than ready to distort the proper order of Christian worship in the name of evangelism. They, of course, say they use the name of Jesus, but they fail to see that how Jesus’ name is used makes all the difference. Without the Eucharist, for example, we lack the means to know the kind of presence made possible by Jesus’ resurrection.

The Eucharist is usually not considered an essential aspect of Christian worship by those concerned with church growth. Evangelism means getting people to church, because unless we go to church, it is assumed, our lives are without moral compass. Thus the assumption that lack of attendance at church and our society’s “moral decay” go hand and hand. What such people fail to see is that such decay begins with the assumption that worship is about “my” finding meaning for my life rather than glorification of God. Such evangelism is but another name for narcissism. Christian worship requires that our bodies submit to a training otherwise unavailable so that we can become capable of discerning those who use the name of Jesus to tempt us to worship foreign gods. Without the Eucharist we lose the resource to discover how these gods rule our lives.

It is important to note the problem is not whether our worship is “contemporary” or “traditional.” Too often such an alternative is an attempt to make us choose hymns that were contemporary in the seventeenth century but sound “traditional” today because we no longer remember what seventeenth-century music sounded like. Nor is it a question of whether worship can be changed. Worship is always being “changed.” To remain “the same” while everything around you is changing, whether you like it or not, is to be changed. That is why those who sometimes insist on the actual use of tents may think they are doing the same thing that was done in the past, but in fact the very consciousness required to use tents when tents are no longer necessary makes the use of these tents different.

The question, then, is not choosing between “contemporary” or “traditional,” to change or not to change, but rather the faithful character of our worship, insofar as such worship shapes the truthful witness of the church to the world. The problem with churches that make “evangelism” (that is, the continuous acquisition of new members) the purpose of their worship is not whether the worship is contemporary. The question is whether they are worshiping the God of Jesus Christ. Moreover, it is not just the “church growth” churches, the Willow Creeks, that have that problem, but “normal” mainstream churches.11

Consider, for example, this statement on the back of the bulletin of a very “successful” Methodist church (name changed to protect the guilty): “You are welcome, just as you are, at ‘Pleasant City’! Everyone is welcome here. We particularly welcome those who have been away from church for a while, and those who are not members of any church. Whether you’re married, single, divorced, or in transition, you truly matter to us because you matter to God. We would be honored to have you become a member of Pleasant City Church. Check the box on the friendship pad if you wish to discuss church membership.”12

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Is that evangelism? What would worship in such a church look like? How would anyone in that church know which god it is that seems allegedly so concerned about them? It is easy to criticize Willow Creeks, but Willow Creeks merely exemplify the loss of the Christian worship of God in the name of “more members.” The difficulty with worship intentionally shaped to entertain those who are “new” is not that it is entertaining but that the god that is entertained in such worship cannot be the Trinity. For example, to worship the Trinity requires at the very least that we learn to say together the Apostles’ Creed. That such a discipline has, in the name of evangelism, become odd, even for Methodists, is but an indication of how distorted our worship has become.

The heart of Saliers’s work has been to try to remind his church, the Methodist Church, that faithful and truthful worship of the crucified God is evangelism. That he has done so has not won him universal acclaim among Methodists. That he insists that worship be done “right” is rightly seen by some as a threat to church growth. I suspect that Saliers does not make that erroneous assumption. The fact that large numbers of people are attracted to a church is not in itself a sign of false worship, but like me he probably thinks that if such is the case it is an indication that a close example of how that church worships is a good idea.13 That we, moreover, feel the need for such an examination is because we are Methodists who believe that the shaping of our lives in worship is inseparable from the moral shaping of our lives — a shaping that cannot help make us appear quite odd given the assumptions about what it means to be “morally normal” in American society.

Holiness

The name we Methodists have used to indicate the inseparability of worship, evangelism, and ethics is holiness. We believe that God’s salvation is nothing less than participation in God’s very life through word and sacrament. Worship is what we do for God, but in that doing we believe our lives are made part of God’s care of creation. To be made holy is to have our lives rendered unintelligible if the God who has claimed us in Jesus Christ is not the true God. To be holy is have our lives “exposed” to one another in the hope that we will become what we have been made.

From Wesley’s perspective, Christian worship is evangelism because worship is converting work.14 Though this may sound Pelagian, the work that worship does is not something we do apart from God. Worship requires that our sins be named, confessed, forgiven.15 In worship, we discover that sin is not something we do, but rather it is a power that holds us captive.16 The good news of the gospel, the message proclaimed to the nations, is that we are freed from sin by the God who would be honored, who would be worshiped, before all else.

From a Wesleyan perspective, to be made holy, to be made capable of accepting forgiveness for our sins so that we might worthily worship God, does not involve just “personal holiness.” As Augustine suggested above, nothing is more important for a society

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than to worship God justly. Without such worship terrible sacrifices will be made to false gods. Contrary to the modern presumption that as enlightened people we are beyond sacrifice, few societies are more intent on sacrifice than those we call modern.17 Societies that think they have left sacrifice behind end up basing their existence on the sacrifice of the poor in the name of human progress. Christians believe that we are the alternative to such sacrificial systems because we have been given the gift of offering our “sacrifice of thanksgiving” to the One who alone is worthy of such praise. That is what makes us a holy people, a people set apart, so that the world might know there is an alternative to murder.

That I teach “ethics” through the liturgy and Saliers refuses to do theology as if prayer does not matter is, I hope, testimony to the fact that we are Methodist “perfectionists.”18 We have staked our work and our lives on the assumption that if in some small way we can help our church recover liturgical integrity, we will not have to deal with a question about the relationship between worship, evangelism, and ethics. Of course it may still be useful to distinguish between worship, evangelism, and ethics as subjects of study, but hopefully such distinctions will be seen as part of the church’s ministry reflected in a diversity of gifts. Such gifts, however, cannot become separate disciplines or realms if they are to be of service.

Yet neither of us can deny that if we do in fact worship God truthfully, we may well find the church again worshiping in tents. For such worship creates a people who by necessity are on the move, forced to wander among the nations, home nowhere yet everywhere. Such a people are bound to attract followers, because the God who has called them from the nations is so beautifully compelling. That is, after all, why we believe that there is nothing more important in a world that does not believe it has the time to worship God than to take time to worship God in truth.19

1. The quotation marks around liturgy suggest the unfortunate and still all too common Protestant assumption that “liturgical” churches are Catholic. Often the worship shaped by the experience of Protestant revivalism is not thought to be liturgical.

2. Of course one of the ironies of this view is that the “Sunday morning worship service” thought too “formal” for the effective evangelism is the result of past evangelistic form. For example, it is not uncommon in Methodist services that the offering is taken up before the sermon. This order is the result of revivals in which it was assumed that following the sermon some would respond and be “saved.” You would not want an offering intruding between the sermon and the response of those needing to be saved. Such an intrusion would mean you might miss the emotional moment, thus letting the sinner escape. Edward Phillips notes that the revival had three distinct liturgical movements: (1) preliminaries, involving hymn singing, special music, testimonies, love offerings; (2) the message; and (3) the altar call. This pattern, he observes, “became embedded in the Protestant mind as the pattern of church meeting. The problem is that it became the pattern, not just for revivals, but for Sunday worship. Sunday worship was turned into an evangelistic service.” See his “Creative Worship: Rules, Patterns, and Guidelines,” Quarterly Review 10, no. 2 (1990): 14.

3. Julian Hartt, Toward a Theology of Evangelism (New York: Abingdon, 1955), p. 9. Hartt’s book remains one of the finest accounts of evangelism we have. Hartt’s influence at Yale Divinity was everywhere during the years Saliers and I studied there.

4. Augustine, The City of God, trans. David Knowles (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1972), p. 890 (19.23). 5. The reason I am a theologian is that I never was able to get “saved.” I understood I was a member of the church, but I

also knew that I was supposed to be saved at a Sunday night service — Sunday night services were what we did between summer tent events. I wanted to be saved, but it just never happened. I finally decided somewhere around fourteen that if

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God was not going to save me I would “dedicate my life to Christian service” by becoming a minister. So during the sixteenth singing of “I Surrender All” — a relatively short altar call, as altar calls went on Sunday nights — I dedicated my life to God by declaring I would become a minister. That never happened, but it did result in my majoring in philosophy in college, going to seminary, doing a Ph.D. in theology, and, as they say, the rest is history.

6. The effect of the loss of eloquence in worship is a moral loss. Our lives morally depend on our being able to describe that which we do and do not do truthfully. When the language used in worship is degraded, so are our lives. For example, consider the word just. Often those who pray extemporaneously say, “Lord, we would ask you just to do X or Y.” Not only is the use of just in that context ugly, but theologically it suggests, “Lord, we are really not asking for all that much given your power.” I realize that often the use of just is meant to suggest humility, but such humility cannot help but sound like a pose. Eloquence, of course, is not achieved by using “archaic” language but by the constant attention necessary to put basic matters simply.

7. I mention the Psalms in particular because of Saliers’s work to ensure their inclusion in the 1989 edition of the United Methodist Hymnal. It is my belief that this hymnal is the most important development in Methodism in the last fifty years. Theologians often think that what is important is what other theologians think, but much more important is what the church does. It is to Saliers’s great credit that he has understood this. The time he has dedicated to help the church sing is not wise if you want a successful academic career, but he has rightly understood that such a career is a very small thing indeed compared to the glory of praising God.

8. This is particularly the case if you are, like me, a convinced Aristotelian. For Aristotle, what and how we “feel” when we do the virtuous thing is as important as our doing it. Aristotle says moral virtue “is concerned with emotions and actions, and it is in emotions and actions that excess, deficiency, and the median are found. Thus we can experience fear, confidence, desire, anger, pity, and generally any kind of pleasure and pain either too much or too little, and in either case not properly. But to experience all this at the right time, toward the right objects, toward the right people, for the right reason, and in the right manner — that is the median and the best course, the course that is a mark of virtue.” Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Ostwald (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962), 1106b.15-24. I take it that those concerned with helping us worship God rightly do so as Aristotelians — which is to say, it is not enough that we do what we do but that we do what we do rightly. It is, of course, crucial to remember that we do not worship alone, which means that sometimes I must rely on my fellow worshipers to feel rightly for me.

9. Ed Phillips had to tell me that “In the Garden” was written not by Fanny Crosby but by Austin Miles. The problem with this beloved hymn is not, as is often suggested, the hymn’s barely repressed sexual longing. There is nothing wrong with desire even if it is confused. Rather the problem with hymns like “In the Garden” is that their lyrics and music are shallow. A steady diet of worship formed by such hymns and prayers not only reflects a shallow church but also produces a shallow people. I know this seems like a harsh judgment that can also betray a “high culture” arrogance that disdains “popular religion.” I have nothing but profound respect for the “country churches” that thought “In the Garden” the best hymn they sang. The problem, however, is that hymn and the worship that was shaped by it proved incapable of preparing those who sang it to recognize, much less resist, the world that increasingly made their Christian commitments unintelligible. I am well aware that many churches whose hymns and prayers are richer are often equally unprepared to challenge the world. Yet hymns like “A Mighty Fortress” have the potential to help mount a resistance that “In the Garden” can never muster.

In a letter to me about this hymn Ed Phillips — a church historian and liturgist who teaches at Garrett Theological Seminary — notes that “the last stanza subverts the entire text and makes it, actually, more interesting than you might at first notice: ‘I’d stay in the garden with him though the night around me be falling, but he bids me go; through the voice of woe his voice to me is calling.’ In other words, we might want to remain ‘in the garden’ all day long, but Jesus says, ‘get out there where the suffering is!’”

10. Marva Dawn, Reaching Out without Dumbing Down (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), pp. 75-104. 11. I may have been among the last in this society to learn that Willow Creek is the paradigm of churches that use

modern marketing methods to sustain church growth. The best way to think about such “churches” is to compare them to a shopping mall where periodically the customers are gathered for a common event. Such churches seek to be full-service institutions providing athletic activities, clubs, and childcare. If such churches were more centered around determinative liturgies that were recognizably Christian they might be usefully compared to medieval cathedrals. The latter were often centers for carnival, trade, and politics, and I see no reason to be critical. The problem with churches like Willow Creek is not that they are the center of so many activities but that those activities do not require for their intelligibility the Mass. I realize such a comment will invite the charge I am romanticizing the medieval life, but I am more than willing to take that risk. For an arresting account of the vitality of religious life in late medieval culture, see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), as well as David Aers’s criticism of Duffy for failing to provide an adequate account of the complex social, political, and military factors shaping

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“religion”: David Aers, “Altars of Power: Reflections on Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars,” Literature and History 3, no. 2 (Autumn 1994): 90-105.

12. That this invitation is particularly directed at a person’s marital status is but an indication of the privatization of Christianity in liberal cultures. The church gets to claim its own peculiar jurisdiction, in this case something to do with the family, because the family is “private.” Such an invitation would have been interesting if it had said, “Whether you are rich or poor, in debt or not, just out of prison or on the street, you are welcome.” Such an invitation would have indicated some recognition of how class divides our churches, but to acknowledge class is even more threatening for most churches than the acknowledgment of homosexuality or racial divides. I have noticed the “higher” a church’s liturgy, the more likely some recognition of class is possible. I have no strong evidence to support this generalization, nor am I sure, if it is true, why it is so. Of course, this is true mainly of Roman Catholic churches. That farm workers, for example, appear at Catholic Masses predominantly populated by middle-class people is open to many explanations. But such explanations surely must involve an account of how the liturgy offers some challenge to the power that class has over our lives.

13. To attract large numbers of people presupposes that they are coming to worship without requiring fundamental change in their own lives. There is nothing wrong in itself with worship being entertaining, but the difficulty is the kind of entertainment necessary to attract large numbers. If worship must, as is often alleged, compete with TV, the TV will always win. Our only hope is that some will find the demanding character of the worship of God so enthralling they will be drawn to it time and time again.

14. For an account of Wesley’s views on these matters, see Ole Borgen, John Wesley on the Sacraments (Grand Rapids: Francis Asbury/Zondervan, 1986).

15. The worship service at Pleasant City had no confession of sin. Since the service from which I extracted the bulletin quote was a Fourth of July service, there were pledges made to the United States flag, the Christian flag, and the Bible. Sin was mentioned in the last pledge: “I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God’s Holy Word, and will make it a lamp unto my feet, a light unto my path, and hide its words in my heart that I may not sin against God.”

16. Of course, that sin names the powers does not mean that we do not sin. We confess our sins as those who have willingly sinned, but our willingness names complicity. I often think the closest paradigm we have to what it means to confess our sin is the alcoholic’s confession at AA: “My name is X and I am an alcoholic.” It may be that alcoholism is a power that possesses someone in such a manner that they can never remember “choosing” to be an alcoholic. Only as I confess that alcoholism is “me” is there any hope of recovery. Sin may not always be something I have “done,” but it is nonetheless mine.

17. For an extraordinary account of our current sacrificial system we call America, see Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads (New York: Crossroads, 1995). Bailie’s analysis draws on the remarkable work of René Girard.

18. For an account of the way I teach Christian ethics at Duke Divinity School, see my In Good Company: The Church As Polis (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), pp. 153-68. I confess I have no idea how much I have stolen over the years from Donald Saliers, The Soul in Paraphrase: Prayer and Religious Affections (New York: Seabury, 1980), but I know it is more than I have acknowledged. For example, everything I have said in this essay could be and, hopefully, will be read as a commentary on his claim that “prayer is a logically required context for the utterance of theological truths” (p. 82).

19. I am indebted to Kelly Johnson and Jim Fodor for their criticism of an earlier draft of this essay.

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