Liturgical Renewal 1966–2020—A Mainline Protestant Perspective

I have been invited to offer a mainline Protestant perspective on liturgical renewal and liturgical scholarship over the past fifty years. It is important to note that this is only one perspective, and that of a now late-middle-aged white male. While I have lived with and experienced the liturgical reforms and changing modes of studying liturgy as a church musician, pastor, and theological educator primarily in the context of The United Methodist Church, my own liturgical formation and scholarship has been shaped ecumenically by the liturgical and sacramental theology of Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, the publication of which coincided with my entry into seminary at Yale. It was there that I first encountered the historical and pastoral study of liturgy through Jeffrey Rowthorn’s curricular sequence on the roots, reforms, and renewal of liturgy, and the theological study of liturgy through Aidan Kavanagh’s defining work in liturgical theology and explorations in ritual anthropology. Forty years after that initiation into the study of liturgy and liturgical theology, I identify several threads shaping the work of liturgical reform and of liturgical theologians: ecumenical roots, tensions in and challenges to those ecumenical roots, and emerging methodologies. While these threads are loosely tied to Gordon Lathrop’s piece elsewhere in this issue, they are also spun from Thomas Schattauer’s 2007 reflections on the teaching of liturgical studies. There Schattauer rightly describes liturgical studies “as a field of multiple disciplines and perspectives” that make use of a variety of perspectives. He then traces the ways in which the study of Christian and Jewish worship have developed from a primary emphasis on the comparative “historical study of liturgical texts and other textual witness to liturgical practice” to a broader focus on the “material evidence of worshiping communities (architecture, visual art, furnishings, vessels, etc.),” to more anthropological and sociocultural attention to liturgical practices in their cultural contexts and to liturgy “as a ritual and symbolic event” and as a communicative practice. Such study of liturgy, Schattauer argues, is shaped “by an ecumenical spirit of inquiry into a common inheritance” and by a concern for how worship is itself a theological event, intending to say “something authentic and reliable about God.”