Rick Warren Meets Gregory Dix: the Liturgical Movement Comes Knocking at the Megachurch Door

ATR/92:3 Rick Warren Meets Gregory Dix: The Liturgical Movement Comes Knocking at the Megachurch Door Patrick Malloy* The movement commonly called “the emerging church” arose out of the evangelical megachurches, where members—especially younger members—increasingly sought an affective, symbolic, and non-dogmatic style of worship. The emerging church arises out of postmodernism’s suspicion of truth claims and its trust in experience. This has led to a liturgical style that embraces experience but, as some within the movement acknowledge, lacks theological grounding. As they have turned to the early church for models of authentic common prayer, emergent Christians are building a liturgical style that is often described as “ancient- modern.” Episcopalians, like emergent Christians, value enacted over confessional theology yet claim a theological tradition that situates the liturgy within what Phyllis Tickle calls “a grand fram- ing story.” An “ecumenical” conversation with emergence holds great promise, will happen primarily at the parochial level, and will require Episcopalians, especially clergy, to be not only rooted in the great sweep of the Christian Tradition but also open to the insights of postmodernism. America’s Critique of Liturgical Renewal By the mid-1980s, liturgists had begun to question and even to doubt the ability of modern Americans to celebrate the liturgy. For more than a century, an international, interdenominational coalition had clung to a hope not just that the liturgy would be reinvigorated, but that a reinvigorated liturgy would inevitably reinvigorate the church. It seemed by the 1980s that both assumptions had been naive. In every * Patrick Malloy is Associate Professor in the H. Boone Porter Chair of Liturgics at the General Theological Seminary, New York. He also serves as rector of Grace Church, Allentown, Pennsylvania. This paper was delivered at the General Seminary in February 2009. 439 440 Anglican Theological Review denomination, some members, if not many, were resisting the new liturgical forms, and liturgists were not entirely unsympathetic. The twentieth-century liturgists were the children of nineteenth- century Liturgical Movement pioneers. They envisioned a future that reappropriated the best of the past, especially of a time well before Anglicans, Roman Catholics, and Protestants made liturgy a field of battle, and even before it had been clericalized and complicated dur- ing the Middle Ages. They looked mostly to the patristic era, where they found a liturgy that was a crucial force in forming a vigorous young church. The work of the Anglican Dom Gregory Dix, especially his The Shape of the Liturgy, and the scholarship of others of his time shaped generations of liturgists who in turn shaped the new rites.1 Because of these scholars and pastors, the general contours of the early liturgies, especially the third- and fourth-century liturgies, are unmistakable in all of the rites that were crafted and promulgated in the mid- and late twentieth century. The 1979 Book of Common Prayer is no exception. By the mid-1980s, however, the hope that a renewed liturgy would renew the church had turned for many to skepticism and even fear that the new rites were weakening the churches and driving worship- ers away. The Liturgists’ Critique of American Culture Perhaps in self-defense, liturgists sought explanations for the fail- ure of the new liturgies beyond the liturgies themselves. Robert Bel- lah’s wildly popular Habits of the Heart came at the right time for liturgists. It exposed the pervasive individualism of modern American culture and its destructive impact on every aspect of public life. In the chapter on religion, Bellah used a woman named Sheila Larson as the exemplar of what American culture had done to religion. “Sheila Larson is a young nurse who has received a good deal of therapy and who describes her faith as ‘Sheilaism.’ ‘I believe in God. I’m not a religious fanatic. I can’t remember the last time I went to church. My faith has carried me a long way. It’s Sheilaism. Just my own little voice.’”2 Sheilaism, Bellah and his colleagues argued, was a symptom of the slow collapse of the hierarchical structure of American society, the 1 Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy (London: Black, 1945). 2 Robert N. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualisim and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 220–221. Rick Warren Meets Gregory Dix 441 de facto disestablishment of religion (so that one’s religion was no longer a consequence of anything but one’s choice), and the frequent use of religious language without reference to any religious institu- tion. (Today, this might be called using “spiritual” language while ac- tively rejecting “religious” commitments.) Liturgists began to contend that this absence of societal common life, not the new liturgical books, was preventing liturgical and ecclesial renewal in modern America. In 1985, the same year that Bellah published Habits of the Heart, Neil Postman gave liturgists another way to counter critics who blamed them for the decline in mainline denominations. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman built on Marshall McLuhan’s thesis that the medium is the message. Postman argued that television aims ulti- mately to entertain, no matter what its content.3 Because Americans spend a great deal of time experiencing reality filtered through the television, they have been conditioned to evaluate all experiences in terms of how entertaining they are. Liturgists argued that, in a culture that increasingly seeks to be entertained rather than engaged, liturgy seems dull and foreign. This, they claimed, far more than the new liturgical books, was the reason mainline Christian worship was failing to create a resurgence of faith and zeal. The Complicity of the Churches in Liturgical Dysfunction A number of liturgists lamented that because the churches did not see these cultural opponents for what they were, they were surrender- ing to them without a fight. Francis Mannion’s analysis of the impact of American culture on the Roman liturgy was highly influential across denominational lines. “I think that the fundamental reason why liturgy has lost a considerable part of its cultural and social power is related to the absorption into post-conciliar American Catholicism of profoundly negative dynamics operative in modern secular culture.”4 The Ameri- can Roman Church in its practice, though not in its books, Mannion claimed, had adopted a liturgical style that was “therapeutic” (focusing on the individual’s feelings, not the community’s identity); informal (highlighting intimacy and emotionality over social patterns); and 3 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985). 4 Francis Mannion, “Liturgy and the Present Crisis of Culture,” Worship 62 (1988): 102. 442 Anglican Theological Review issue-driven (imposing a political or ecclesial agenda rather than en- countering a Mystery on its own terms). Roman Catholics were not the only ones to embody these cultural values. Two years before Mannion, Episcopal liturgical musician Carol Doran and her colleague, poet Thomas Troeger, then a Presby- terian, had reported that they were seeing this trend in “a variety of Christian communions including Baptist, Episcopal, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, United Church of Christ, Methodist and Mennonite Brethren churches. Our general observation is that worship has become problematic for the churches with whom we have worked because the values of popular culture, particularly the high worth placed on the idiosyncratic self, have so pervaded these communities that the historical roots, theological rationale and corporate character of worship have greatly diminished in the consciousness of church members.”5 Church Growth, the Emulation of Culture, and the Rejection of Liturgy While Mannion, Doran, Troeger, and many other mainline liturgists were fighting back the encroaching American culture, other church leaders were intentionally clearing the way. This was when the church-growth movement was born and megachurches first began to take shape. “The contemporary church growth movement traces it origins to the 1980s and the theories and strategies of Donald A. Mc- Gavran, sometimes referred to as the ‘father of Church Growth.’”6 “Church growth” is essentially pragmatic. Because overt religion is off-putting for many Americans, the megachurch / church-growth strategy remakes Christianity, especially Christian worship, in the image of the culture, stripping away every religious image or symbol that might frighten or offend. As Ruth Tucker cleverly put it, “The end- times justifies the means.”7 By the early 1990s, this approach had borne fruit, and the modern megachurch phenomenon was born. Almost twenty years later, it is clear that it has been an astonishing success. “The raw number of 5 Carol Doran and Thomas H. Troeger, “Reclaiming the Corporate Self: The Meaning and Ministry of Worship in a Privatistic Culture,” Worship 60 (1986): 200. 6 Ruth A. Tucker, Left Behind in a Megachurch World: How God Works Through Ordinary Churches (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2006), 98. 7 Tucker, Left Behind, 101. Rick Warren Meets Gregory Dix 443 megachurches [Protestant and Episcopal8 churches with an average Sunday attendance of more than 2,000] has grown tremendously over the past few decades. Some reports have the number growing from the low teens in the early 1960s to around 310 in 1990 to nearly 1,250 in 2007.”9 The multiplication of megachurches is outpacing the growth of the U.S. population. In 1990, there were 1.2 megachurches for each million American citizens. In 2005, there were four.10 Megachurches are growing not only in number but also in size. On average, megachurch attendance increased over the past five years by 50 percent.11 Many congregations have far more than the 2,000 weekly attendees that would qualify them as megachurches.

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