Future Renewals: Looking Toward the Next Fifty Years of Worship Scholarship and Practice

Abstract

When the Liturgical Conference board realized that the North American Academy of Liturgy (NAAL) was approaching a celebration of its first fifty years, the board decided to mark the event by looking at where liturgical scholarship and practice had come in that time and what might be the direction of future work. Accordingly, the board set out to publish two issues of Liturgy focused first on the past and secondly on the future. The first issue was a retrospective on the unfolding—the changing worlds—of liturgical scholarship and practice over the past 50 years. This is the second issue: a prospective reflection on the future possibilities and trajectories of worship scholarship and practice over the next 50 years. At each annual meeting of the NAAL in recent memory, five banners have stood behind the podium at which we conduct most of our communal work and fellowship. These banners portray the rising sun—an homage to the logo of the NAAL—behind two trees that, appropriate to our winter meetings, are devoid of leaves. The cover image of this issue pays tribute to this familiar visual, yet we selected it, as well, because it visualizes trees that rather than being in hibernation—or dead—are bursting with the lush and long-awaited greenery of spring. This visual provides an apt metaphor for much of what we encountered in this issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of NAAL. When these two issues were originally planned, we had a very clear sense of one issue (vol. 37, no. 4) being historical in focus and the second issue (vol. 38, no. 1) being future-facing. In this issue, we encounter the complex interweaving of the past, present, and future. In the first issue, authors engaged the past but often with a vivid awareness of and concern for the present and future, and in the second issue, authors who were tasked with imagining the future were still very concerned about the past and present. As the image on the cover is intended to remind us, even as we look forward with hope and expectation for the ongoing renewal of liturgical scholarship and practice, it is certain that the past has brought us to where we are today and set us on still unfolding trajectories. The concept for this issue was first tested in a focus group held in May 2021 that was funded by a grant from the Styberg Preaching Institute. The editors drew together a small but diverse array of liturgical scholars and practitioners—many of whom subsequently agreed also to write for this issue. This focus group was a generative time of sharing why liturgy matters within our individual contexts, reflecting on the strengths and weaknesses of current liturgical scholarship and practice, identifying needed shifts in the study and practice of liturgy, and identifying obstacles to change within the field. This conversation provided us with rich content from which emerged some of the essays comprising this issue and through which we were able to provide initial generative questions for additional authors.