{"title":"Between the Ordo and the Frontier: The Struggle to Define an American Lutheran Worship Identity for the Twenty-First Century","authors":"A. Perez, V. Larson","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085970","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"From the late 1980s through the 1990s, the Church Growth Movement (CGM) was a powerful force among churches, both evangelical and mainline. Within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Community Church of Joy (CCJ) in Glendale, Arizona, was a flagship institution in this regard. With its Senior Pastor Walt Kallestad and Pastor Tim Wright presiding over worship, this community grew to become a megachurch with 10,000þ members at its peak. Following many of the early principles of Church Growth as adopted by pioneers in that field such as Robert Schuller (Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, California) and Bill Hybels (Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois), the leaders of CCJ employed sociological principles to target unchurched and unaffiliated Christians in the Phoenix suburbs. Eventually, their growth and prominence precipitated a plethora of books published on topics like evangelism, growth, and church administration. CCJ offered “seeker-sensitive” and other worship opportunities tailored to the felt needs of various constituencies within the target community. By the late 1990s, Pastor Tim Wright and his wife Jan had published multiple resource books on forms of contemporary worship, most notably Contemporary Worship, offering three patterns and forms of worship along a spectrum: “spiritedtraditional” (a blend of “energy and celebration”), “contemporary praise” (contemporary music geared toward believers, but visitor friendly), and “seeker” (contemporary music focused on reaching “un-churched” visitors)—the defining style of Church Growth. Though CCJ was an ELCA congregation, its worship practices had more in common with congregations of the CGM than with historically American Lutheran practice. At the other end of ELCA worship practices, Lutheran scholars concerned with the Liturgical Renewal Movement— Gordon Lathrop and Frank Senn, among others—published monumental works on the theology and history of Christian worship in and beyond the Lutheran tradition in the mid-1990s, holding to the ecumenical four-fold shape of historic and contemporary liturgical practices. The relationship between the CGM and the Charismatic Movement may seem diametrically opposed approaches to worship. On the one hand, the “seeker services” of the CGM eschewed recognizably Christian elements from their spaces and utilized secular musics that avoided speaking about or to God. On the other hand, Charismatic worship practices are often marked by a powerful awareness of God’s presence in worship and are often (but certainly not always) accompanied by the exercise of supernatural, spiritual gifts. It is interesting, therefore, that in the sources we discuss in this essay, forms of Charismatic worship are directly implicated in critiques that","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Liturgy","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085970","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"RELIGION","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
From the late 1980s through the 1990s, the Church Growth Movement (CGM) was a powerful force among churches, both evangelical and mainline. Within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), Community Church of Joy (CCJ) in Glendale, Arizona, was a flagship institution in this regard. With its Senior Pastor Walt Kallestad and Pastor Tim Wright presiding over worship, this community grew to become a megachurch with 10,000þ members at its peak. Following many of the early principles of Church Growth as adopted by pioneers in that field such as Robert Schuller (Crystal Cathedral, Garden Grove, California) and Bill Hybels (Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Illinois), the leaders of CCJ employed sociological principles to target unchurched and unaffiliated Christians in the Phoenix suburbs. Eventually, their growth and prominence precipitated a plethora of books published on topics like evangelism, growth, and church administration. CCJ offered “seeker-sensitive” and other worship opportunities tailored to the felt needs of various constituencies within the target community. By the late 1990s, Pastor Tim Wright and his wife Jan had published multiple resource books on forms of contemporary worship, most notably Contemporary Worship, offering three patterns and forms of worship along a spectrum: “spiritedtraditional” (a blend of “energy and celebration”), “contemporary praise” (contemporary music geared toward believers, but visitor friendly), and “seeker” (contemporary music focused on reaching “un-churched” visitors)—the defining style of Church Growth. Though CCJ was an ELCA congregation, its worship practices had more in common with congregations of the CGM than with historically American Lutheran practice. At the other end of ELCA worship practices, Lutheran scholars concerned with the Liturgical Renewal Movement— Gordon Lathrop and Frank Senn, among others—published monumental works on the theology and history of Christian worship in and beyond the Lutheran tradition in the mid-1990s, holding to the ecumenical four-fold shape of historic and contemporary liturgical practices. The relationship between the CGM and the Charismatic Movement may seem diametrically opposed approaches to worship. On the one hand, the “seeker services” of the CGM eschewed recognizably Christian elements from their spaces and utilized secular musics that avoided speaking about or to God. On the other hand, Charismatic worship practices are often marked by a powerful awareness of God’s presence in worship and are often (but certainly not always) accompanied by the exercise of supernatural, spiritual gifts. It is interesting, therefore, that in the sources we discuss in this essay, forms of Charismatic worship are directly implicated in critiques that