Common Worship: Tradition, Formation, Mission

Common worship? Yes, because a broken church cannot repair a broken world. Common worship is evidence of our engagement with Christ’s prayer that we may be one.

Dare we think about common worship in a social context that more readily identifies polarization rather than commonality–traditional or contemporary, liturgical or non-liturgical, high church or low church, evangelical or sacramental, protestant or catholic, unity or diversity?

This book will help the church learn, through reflection on its liturgical practices, how to be a both/and community in a time when current discussion focuses on either/or: traditional or contemporary, liturgical or non-liturgical, evangelical or sacramental; and in which the diversity of the church receives more attention than its unity.

How and to what end might we speak of common worship, of shared liturgical patterns and practices that express something of the unity of the church?

Common worship: idealistic? Certainly, but only if we believe that we are responsible for creating that unity rather than for receiving it as gift already given. But, to get to this requires that we learn to think and act differently as the church. We need to learn how to think and speak conjunctively rather than oppositionally, to speak and think of traditional and contemporary, evangelical and sacramental, protestant and catholic. In doing so, we will learn to live out of what Paul Ricouer calls a second naivete or what James Fowler calls a conjunctive or paradoxical faith.