If you’ve been around here awhile or if you’re new to this blog, you will see that this blog is about worship. You will notice that most weeks, I will have commented on the readings from the Revised Common Lectionary. As a pastor and a worship leader, I have more than a passing interest in what some would call “high church” worship. You might ask me, how does one who grew up in a “low church” free-worship church like The Wesleyan Church, develop an interest in “high church” worship. The short answer is, it’s been a work in progress.
For many years most Wesleyans, Pilgrim Holiness, or Wesleyan Methodists would have only known about Christmas and Easter in the church calendar. About 25 to 30 years ago, many Wesleyan were introduced to Advent. Just about every church that I have been in since, at least references Advent as a season in the church year. Most even have an Advent wreath with candles, but other than that most Wesleyan wouldn’t know the other seasons, like Dr. Keith Drury has said, we typically celebrate Mother’s Day over Pentecost, which is strange when you think about it because Pentecost is about the birth of the church and the coming of the Holy Spirit to the church. Wesleyans have typically had a strong emphasis on the Holy Spirit.
My first introduction to the church year came at Indiana Wesleyan University during a class on church music. One of our semester long projects was to put together 52 weeks of orders of worship based on the church year/lectionary. It seemed strange and then there were all those colors and they didn’t make sense to me at all. I remember looking through the themes of Advent for that project. I was ready to do Christmas carols, but they didn’t fit the theme. This still affects my thinking during Advent. Advent is a season of preparation for the coming of the Lord; it is not the celebration of the coming of the Lord. My prof was impressed because I probably took about 16 to 20 hours to put this project together. Even though we attended in a college town, most of the Wesleyan churches worship times were more based on the revival model — Song service, preaching service, altar service.
After graduating college, I took my first worship leader position. What is really ironic now is that they were pushing me to add the Lord’s Prayer, Apostle’s Creed, and Doxology to the worship service (and being young, I was a bit stubborn.) Now I would gladly welcome those suggestions. (Isn’t it amazing how we mature.) I’ve documented how God moved us from Flint to Fort Miller. One of the churches that I interviewed at in the process was Houghton Wesleyan Church. They sent me several bulletins and orders of worship. On the top of the order of worship was Second Sunday of Easter or something like that. This got me thinking, would it be possible to combine our low church tradition with a bit of high church?
It didn’t take too many weeks at Fort Miller to incorporate the day of the church year into the bulletin. The church was used to having colored cloths on the cross, so that was easy to incorporate as well. They were also using the Doxology. While I was there we did some more formal services — not everyone liked them, but some did. One time after coming home from FLAME, we did a Covenant Renewal Service and we did a few formal Maundy Thursday services. Two years before we left Pam and I became acquainted with the community clergy association, most of those churches followed the church year, so we became more acquainted with it and were involved in the community lenten services.
While I doubt I will ever be fully high church — I enjoy the spontaneousness of the free worship. There are times that we used a more formal style of worship. At my current church, we mark time in the bulleting two ways; the regular calendar and the church calendar.
Maybe I’ll share a little more next week about this.
