LiturgyPub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2022.2085972
M. Sigler
{"title":"Introduction: Pentecostalism and Historic Churches","authors":"M. Sigler","doi":"10.1080/0458063x.2022.2085972","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063x.2022.2085972","url":null,"abstract":"“New Sect of Fanatics Is Breaking Loose,” read the front-page byline of the Los Angeles Daily Times on April 18, 1906, in a report on the Azusa St. Revival. Pentecostalism was indeed about to “break loose” and impact the church across the globe. Whether or not this “sect” is full of “fanatics” depends, of course, on one’s perspective. Pentecostalism emphasizes a personal encounter with the Holy Spirit often referred to as the “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and evidenced by “speaking in tongues” (glossolalia), supernatural healing, and prophecy. For half a century after the Asuza St. Revival, the impact of Pentecostalism was most acutely felt outside of long-established denominations. In 1960, however, a young Episcopal priest announced to his congregation that he had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and had spoken in tongues. Over the next several years many in the historic churches would experience this phenomenon. Media outlets from CBS Evening News to Time Magazine would report on this growing movement. Initially, participants and observers described what was happening as “Pentecostal,” but eventually adopted the term “Charismatic”—a term first used by Lutheran minister, Harald Bredesen. Drawing form the Greek word “charismata,” meaning “gifts of grace,” those who were experiencing the “Charismatic Renewal” believed that God, by the Spirit, was renewing the spiritual gifts that were bestowed on the church at Pentecost. This issue of Liturgy explores the crosspollination between Pentecostal/Charismatic streams and what might be called “mainline” or “historic” denominations. These terms are fraught with difficulties. “Mainline” often refers to Protestant congregations in the US who have benefited from their relationship within American society. However, we do not limit our exploration to Protestant traditions in this issue and have opted for the term “historic churches.” Yet, this is equally problematic. The Church of God in Christ—the main denomination launched from the Pentecostal revival—is certainly historic in its own right. In using the term “historic churches” we are referring to those congregations who were not influenced by first-wave Pentecostalism but were later impacted by Pentecostal piety. The first essay explores what will become an important thread in this issue, the piety of Pentecostal/Charismatic worship. In her essay, Debbie Wong shows how Charismatics in mainline congregations embraced common values for encountering God in worship, while upholding a wide array of liturgical traditions. My essay unpacks this further by looking at worship in Fr. Dennis Bennet’s Episcopal congregation in Seattle, Washington, during the 1960s. Billy Kangas shows how the Charismatic Renewal took root within Roman Catholic congregations, especially through Covenant Communities. The fourth essay is an insider’s report on the Union of Charismatic Orthodox Churches (UCOC) from Bishop Emilio Alvarez. Emily Snider Andrews traces the history of mus","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43835805","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085966
E. Álvarez
{"title":"The Union of Charismatic Orthodox Churches","authors":"E. Álvarez","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085966","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085966","url":null,"abstract":"Every first Sunday of the month, the service at the Cathedral at the Gathering Place (CGP) a non-denominational, neo-Pentecostal church, opens with a word of prayer followed by an incense-filled procession of the church’s clergy and acolytes fully vested in their proper order, carrying the various items usually included in a Eucharistic processional (candles, cross, Gospel Book, etc.). As they process into the sanctuary, the congregation stands and many, with arms raised, begin to sing along with the worship team which has begun the contemporary worship song designated for this portion of the service. Once at the altar, the bishop censes the altar and the people; afterwards a collect is read followed by the proclamation of Psalm 51:15 (“Lord open my lips”). The praise and worship segment of the service, including a full band, is structured with the assigned lessons from the 1979 Book of Common Prayer (BCP) interspersed between the praise and worship songs. After the readings, the Gospel book is processed into the middle of the sanctuary and the Gospel for that Sunday is read among the people by a deacon after it has been blessed and incensed by the bishop. Afterwards, the preaching or proclamation of the Word takes place with the kind of homiletical esthetic, zeal, and charisma found in most Pentecostal or Baptist churches. Immediately following the preached word, an altar call invites congregants who desire a word of wisdom, prophesy or prayer to come to the front of sanctuary where both clergy and laity who are trained in matters of pastoral payer welcome them with open arms. The service then comes to what the celebrant proclaims is “the center of all things,” the celebration of the Eucharist. Unlike many Pentecostal or evangelical churches that emphasize the memorial aspect of communion, the Gathering Place believes in the real presence of Christ. Given Pentecostalism’s continued growth as a global movement, it was only a matter of time before segments of Pentecostalism such as The Gathering Place encountered and developed for itself a liturgical and sacramental spirituality akin to the canonical churches (Anglican, Catholic, Orthodox, etc.). In the last fifty years several evangelical and Charismatic segments have embraced a more liturgical and sacramental spirituality, leading to the development of groups identified as either “Three Stream,” “Convergence,” or “Ancient-Future.” For Pentecostals recovering orthodoxy, these expressions many times lack the essential theological, spiritual, or even cultural tensions, which recovering the Great Tradition from a solely Pentecostal framework could provide. 1 For example, the antecedent expressions, unlike Pentecostalism, historically did not include women or people of color in ministry.","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44393040","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085970
A. Perez, V. Larson
{"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":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085970","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":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46178629","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085971
M. Sigler
{"title":"Fr. Dennis Bennett and the Charismatic Renewal at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church","authors":"M. Sigler","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085971","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085971","url":null,"abstract":"Two years before the world’s fair was held in Seattle, Washington, the small Episcopal congregation of St. Luke’s prepared to welcome a new priest. The latter half of the 1950s had not been kind to the congregation as it struggled with financial viability and decline in attendance. The congregation had operated for seven decades in the thoroughly Scandinavian Lutheran neighborhood of Ballard where Episcopalians were few and far between. In its seven-decade history the church had seen services suspended on occasion and functioned as a mission outreach of other parishes in the diocese. By 1960 the congregation was desperate for any semblance of viability and the newly arrived bishop of the diocese, William Fisher Lewis, was also eager to make risky changes. He reached out to the former rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Van Nuys, California, who had recently resigned from his parish after sharing publicly about his experience of speaking in tongues. Fr. Dennis Bennett left a 2,600-member parish and took a $4,000 pay cut to come to St. Luke’s, but he did not leave behind his emphasis on the Pentecostal gift of tongues. His focus on the gifts of the Spirit was welcomed by Bishop Lewis who reportedly encouraged Fr. Bennett to “bring the fire” to this new assignment. Even though both Bishop Lewis and the congregation of St. Luke’s were somewhat aware of what they were getting with Fr. Bennett, no one could foresee the global influence that would emanate from the little church in Ballard, Washington, over the next two decades. By the time he stepped down from parish leadership in 1981, Bennett had become a leading figure within the Charismatic Renewal. The congregation would host multiple services throughout the week in which visitors from around the world filed into the parish hall to worship and learn about the Pentecostal gifts of the Holy Spirit. Reporters described services attended by nuns in habits and hippies in sandals sitting side-by-side in worship. And throughout the eclectic experience, Fr. Bennett and the people of St. Luke’s understood their worship to be both thoroughly Episcopalian and Spirit-filled. Bennett’s influence on the Charismatic Renewal has often been cited in both popular and academic work, but there remains little, if any, academic treatment of his life and ministry. Close exploration of worship practices at St. Luke’s are also wanting. In this article I will provide an overview of Fr. Bennett’s tenure at St. Luke’s (1960–1981) with particular focus on the liturgical developments that occurred during the first decade of his appointment. Special attention will be given to the ways in which St. Luke’s remained decisively Episcopalian and distinctively Charismatic. Finally, I conclude by highlighting some lessons we might consider as we think about the interplay between mainline worship practices and Pentecostal piety. While we are not","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45442410","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085973
D. Wong
{"title":"Charismatic Piety: Uncovering the Hidden Impact of the Charismatic Movement","authors":"D. Wong","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085973","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085973","url":null,"abstract":"If you visited a church affiliated with one of the historic mainline Protestant denominations and looked out into the congregation on any given Sunday morning, chances are that you would not see many hands raised during the singing of songs, hear tongues being spoken, or witness any supernatural healings or other miraculous signs—practices largely considered to be distinguishing markers of Charismatic worship. You might then conclude that the worship of this congregation has remained untouched by the Charismatic Movement. While that is certainly a possibility, the problem with this line of reasoning is that it is based on a presumption that Charismatic worship is readily identifiable by what can be observed— external, visible acts of worship, such as the lifting of hands, the practice of glossolalia, ecstatic praise, singing in the Spirit, and so on. However, those who consider themselves Charismatic do not necessarily worship with such practices, and it is equally possible that the conclusion drawn above is incorrect. Consider, for example, the case of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, once the parish of the infamous Episcopal priest Dennis Bennett whose 1960 public announcement of his baptism in the Spirit is often said to have catalyzed the Charismatic Renewal Movement. Under Bennett’s leadership, St. Luke’s conducted their Sunday services according to the same liturgy that they had used before the Charismatic Movement emerged, despite most of the congregation being Charismatic. In his book Nine O’Clock in the Morning, Bennett recounts how visitors to his parish often expressed their disappointment at how normal and non-Charismatic the service was, wondering where the tongue-speaking was to be found. Such worship escapes the attention of researchers focused chiefly on the visible practices or structures of Charismatic worship—it simply would not register as Charismatic. Yet according to the visitors to Bennett’s church, despite the lack of recognizable “Charismatic” practices at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, it was clear that something was different. Though disappointed by the lack of charismata, the visitors commented on how evident it was in the otherwise normal service that these worshipers “love God” and remarked, “I’ve never been to a mass where people were so intent on the Lord!” Similarly, John Sherrill describes a Presbyterian church in Parkesburg, Pennsylvania that was influenced by the Charismatic Renewal. Sherrill describes the worship of their Saturday night “Pray and Praise service” as follows: “There are spontaneous prayers, intercessions and thanksgivings from the congregation. Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians, as well as Pentecostals come from as far away as Washington, D.C., to pack the basement auditorium in a service that lasts far into the night.” In contrast, on Sunday, Sherrill observes that the services","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43113003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085969
Billy Kangas
{"title":"Charismatic Ambassadors: How the Charismatic Renewal Fueled the Rise of Covenant Communities","authors":"Billy Kangas","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085969","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2085969","url":null,"abstract":"The influence of Pentecostal worship in the Roman Catholic Church has most prominently been seen through the advent of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR). This movement began in 1967 and was a driving force in bringing dimensions of Pentecostal worship into the lives of many Christian faithful, both within the Catholic church as well as in the of lives Protestant, Orthodox, Evangelical, and Messianic Jewish Christians. The Word of God Community in Ann Arbor, Michigan, was the most influential community in the early formation of worship in the CCR. Their community life, music, and methods of leading times of worship were the headwaters out of which the worship of the CCR has flowed ever since.","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"59497932","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054641
Stephanie Perdew
{"title":"Unmute Yourself: Liturgical Markers for Times of Transition","authors":"Stephanie Perdew","doi":"10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054641","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054641","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49237270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2054646
Bryan Cones
{"title":"The Assembly Beyond “the Brink of Chaos”: Signs of Hope among those Re-gathered in Christ’s Name","authors":"Bryan Cones","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2054646","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2054646","url":null,"abstract":"As Christian assemblies—along with everyone else—now embark on a third year of praying together through a pandemic, the prophet Jeremiah’s promise to the exiled Israelites remains today, as then, a distant hope. Latter-day prophet and Episcopal priest Pauli Murray’s description of hope as a “song in a weary throat” is both literally and liturgically more accurate. Zoom fatigue, absent families, and disagreements within assemblies about how to pray have sapped some of the original energy that accompanied attempts to maintain common prayer online. And the shape of prayer after the pandemic remains unclear, from whether digitally mediated prayer will remain a permanent feature of church life to ihow and whether assemblies may resume sharing from a common loaf of actual bread and a common cup. Yet, weary throats continue to sing—a sign of hope’s endurance reflected both in the resilience of assemblies’ commitment to gathering (as they have been able, given pandemic restrictions) and flexibility in adapting received forms of prayer to online environments. Resilience signals the enduring faith that has sustained communities through disasters greater even than Covid; flexibility is the hallmark of ongoing “traditioning” that adapts what has been handed on to the demands of God’s mission in the present time. Both evoke Aidan Kavanagh’s famous definition of the church’s “primary theology” as the “adjustment to deep change caused in the assembly by its being brought regularly to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living God.” Although both chaos and change have been hallmarks of the pandemic, the adjustments they will yield are not yet fully apparent. For that reason, it seems wise to begin with a note of caution. While I celebrate with many the resilience and flexibility that has emerged in this unusual time, I concur with Gordon Lathrop and others that there is no equivalence between the assembly convened at the same time and place, and the variety of mediated gatherings made possible by interactive digital technology. While these latter have value, and even make possible new forms of gathering, they cannot replace the signification possible only when the assembly is physically and publicly present with one another. Digitally mediated gatherings are always in danger of “context collapse,” identified by Ryan Panzer as “a process of reduction, in which digital environments ‘flatten’ multiple distinct identities into an oversimplified form.” Such collapse, in my view, profoundly undermines liturgy’s fundamentally symbolic mode of communication, with the primary symbol being the assembly itself engaging its liturgical work. As Hannah Lyn Venable writes, “There are certain practices of liturgy that either cannot be reproduced virtually, such as","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48734963","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054655
Brother Dennis Gibbs
{"title":"Holy Ground","authors":"Brother Dennis Gibbs","doi":"10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054655","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063x.2022.2054655","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48395973","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
LiturgyPub Date : 2022-04-03DOI: 10.1080/0458063X.2022.2054647
Michelle K. Baker-Wright
{"title":"Liturgical Hope as Public Work","authors":"Michelle K. Baker-Wright","doi":"10.1080/0458063X.2022.2054647","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/0458063X.2022.2054647","url":null,"abstract":"My neighbor died recently. His body was discovered in the midst of the severest lock-downs of the pandemic. He died alone, despite the efforts of neighbors to reach out to him, and because of the necessity for social distancing, rumors and misinformation flew up and down our small street. The house sat empty for months and began to take on the reputation of a “haunted house” to the neighborhood’s youth, while adults walked by whispering. In an already fearful climate, the stories that swirled around the house fueled even greater anxiety, uncertainty, and grief. Over texts and phone calls, some of us wrestled with how to support each other in this situation. A simple ritual evolved. One neighbor offered to bring a table to put out on the sidewalk in front of the house. Another offered to bring votive candles. Yet another brought flowers. After getting to know my neighbors better, I wrote a simple, interfaith friendly prayer remembering Eric’s life (not his real name). As people walked by, some of us sat apart on the front lawn, passed out votive candles, and invited people to take them to their own homes, light them at seven o’clock in the evening, and offer a prayer if they wished to do so. We deployed a common time as a unifier for ritual action and remembrance in the hopes that this would help create a sense of shared experience, even as households were separate. We anticipated and hoped that a collective, even if disparate, remembrance would be a comfort to our community. What I didn’t anticipate was the extent to which gathering itself was powerful, even if its focus point was simply that some of us would be present at a flimsy picnic table to dispel misinformation and fear as people walked by. People in the community felt able to ask questions about what had occurred, and we realized how distorted the facts had become, filled in by assumptions and hearsay. We could offer factual information. We could be honest about what we didn’t know. We could create different associations with the space than that of fear. By facilitating a diffuse gathering with a simple liturgy, a deeper public work had begun— one that offered hope in the sense of community and clarity that ameliorated isolation, fear, and half-truths. Leitourgia is often referred to as “the work of the people,” and yet as a number of liturgical scholars have clarified, a more accurate meaning is that of “public work.” Edward Foley offers this observation:","PeriodicalId":53923,"journal":{"name":"Liturgy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2022-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41320956","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}