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Presiding genius?
Exciting the imagination
The priest as leader of worship
The title of the chapter is of course ironic. Not every priest is
a genius at leading worship, but they are all expected to be just
that. This is naturally something of a strain. Here in church
on a Sunday morning is a middle-aged woman looking for
worship which is both structured and beautiful to help her cope
with a life that is anything but. Here is an engaged couple who
have never been to church before and haven’t a clue what to
do. Here is an English teacher who loves the cadences and
poetry of the Book of Common Prayer. At the back is a family
struggling with lively children, drawn to church through the
school, but not sure what they’re looking for. Near the front
there’s a couple in their fifties who have just been to a New
Wine Christian festival and want the enthusiasm quotient
moved up several gears. There’s also an elderly woman who’s
been bereaved recently, and a man who’s registered blind
with his guide dog (whose worshipping needs are unclear).
This is the glorious, motley people of God, but how on earth
does the priest meet their needs in worship without turning
worship into either entertainment or therapy?
Worship looks first and last to God
It’s important for the priest to remember that worship is a
profoundly simple movement of the heart offered in highly
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complex situations. It’s therefore even more necessary to be clear
that worship is directed, first and foremost, towards God. We’ll
come back to other reference points later but fundamentally
worship is for God, to God and of God. Worship is offering all
of ourselves to all God has revealed himself to be, but it’s about
the Lord of heaven and earth before it’s about us.
The priest understands that worship is the supreme expres-
sion of our humanity because it reminds us who we are in
relation to who God is. The Westminster Confession said that
‘the purpose of man [sic] is to worship God and to enjoy him
for ever’. Worship is therefore a defining human activity. It’s
as basic to our being as thinking and working, reading and
singing, laughing and playing. I worship, therefore I am. It’s also
very important for our emotional health. Worship is the
means by which we interrupt our preoccupation with ourselves
and attend to God. We’re endlessly absorbed and fascinated
with ourselves, our image and appeal. Worship is the great cor-
rective to all this. It puts us back into a healthy relationship
with ourselves, and with life, the universe and everything.
As the priest comes to prepare worship for next Sunday,
therefore, he or she will need to be very clear that we are not
dealing with a pitiful form of Christian entertainment. God
is central. Worship is the lightning conductor through which
God’s life strikes the earth. It’s exciting and dangerous to be
mixing these divine and human chemicals together without being
able to predict the outcome. Priests are meant to be able to han-
dle this divine alchemy without blowing anyone up. It’s not easy.
Nor is public applause a significant measure of effectiveness.
In particular, worship exposes us to exhilarating encounters
with both scripture and sacrament. Worship is a showcase
for scripture and hearing the great story of God. It’s also the
occasion when earth and heaven come excitingly close in the
sacramental meal of the eucharist. Here we sit at God’s table,
both re-entering the Upper Room and anticipating the final meal
at the end of time. This meal is for many people the closest
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they come in this life to the halls of heaven, and it’s the huge
privilege of the priest to preside at this awesome occasion.
The high-octane potential of worship is linked to the level
of our expectancy. It’s interesting that we don’t seem to pray
‘maranatha’ (Lord Jesus, come) in our services very much
these days, unlike the early Christians who were very keen in
their longing for Christ to return. Is it because we think we’ve
got life sorted, bar a few wrinkles? Leave it to us, Lord; we know
what we’re doing? Perhaps we need a much greater sense of
expectancy in our worship. Sir Alec Guinness returned from
church one day and met a lapsed Catholic friend who asked
him: ‘Had a nice Mass?’ Sir Alec wanted to reply: ‘Oh you know,
the same old thing. The Real Presence at the altar, body, blood,
soul, divinity of Christ, the usual.’ God is both beautiful and
terrifying, almighty love and a consuming fire. Our worship
should be about nothing less.
Worship relates to the gathered people of God
If worship is first and foremost directed towards God, it relates,
second, to the gathered people of God. The priest has the
prime responsibility of presiding at an event that should
help regular worshippers experience the healing re-alignment of
self that good worship provides. Worship is the moment when
we’re both broken open and repaired at the same time. We’re
broken open to the majesty and love of God, to the beauty
and angst of the world, and to the joyful detail of each other’s
lives. We’re broken out of our self-enclosed, private worlds and
placed on a bigger map and in a larger family. We can’t truly
encounter the living God and then go back to peeling the
potatoes and cutting the lawn as if nothing had happened.
At the same time, like a well-used piece of furniture, we’re repaired
by worship because the nails of our life and faith will often have
worked loose during the week, and the glue will have come
unstuck in places. What worship does is fit us together again,
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strengthening our joints and making us more ‘serviceable’ in
God’s work. This breaking open and repairing of our lives should
be a normal consequence of worship, although people will articu-
late that process in many different ways.
A crucial, and worrying, question to ask of our worship, how-
ever, is whether people are indeed being led to an encounter
with the profound and transforming reality of God. One city-
wide study revealed that although there were many reasons why
worshippers attended church, only 5 per cent of them believed
they’d experienced anything they might call ‘divine presence’ on
the particular Sunday they were interviewed. Moreover, 25 per
cent of a sample of people who had stopped attending church
gave as one of the main reasons the fact that they simply
didn’t feel they met God in the acts of worship in which they
participated. When routine overtakes reality, and repetition
replaces imagination, then worship is dying. A key question
for worship leaders, therefore, is how, without manipulation,
people are to be offered a context in which God may touch them
and give them life. (Another question, of course, is whether
people not only meet God, but also whether they meet each
other in worship. Although much is made of the communal
dimension of worship, there remains the suspicion that for many
people worship is a solitary experience and community is what
happens afterwards, over coffee, and not always even then.)
Worship is shaped by the community in which it is offered
and priests are those who have the responsibility of helping the
worship to represent and express the life of the congregation.
There’s a strange synergy at work here and priests are in the
middle of it.
The priest’s competence in ordering worship is a crucial
gift both to and from the people of God. The priest is dealing
with their deepest needs and aspirations and helping them to
offer the giftedness and complexity of their lives to God. The
quality of our worship and the care and imagination we bring
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After hours of rehearsal, the choir was ready to perform Messiah
to the task is therefore of the utmost significance. Anglicans are
both helped and hindered by their service books. Common
Worship seems in one sense to do it all for you. The liturgy,
the different Eucharistic Prayers, the seasonal variations – it’s
all there in clarity and abundance. How then shall these bones
live? That’s where the skill and imagination of the priest is
essential. How can the worship be both familiar and fresh each
week? How can people be both reassured by the constancy of
God and also stretched and surprised by God’s originality?
How can the worship represent the life of the community
before God and allow God to re-present his grace to us?
Wise priests remember that they are the presidents, or pre-
siders, at worship and not the celebrants. All the people
of God celebrate the goodness and the mighty acts of God;
the priest has the privilege of presiding at that community
celebration. The priest will therefore, hopefully, recognize the
huge resource of the congregation in planning worship. Others
will bring not only their complementary views on what helps
an act of worship to take wings and fly, but also particular gifts
of music and drama, the ability to lead prayer imaginatively
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or to communicate with children, and so on. You may even
turn up a lighting and soft-furnishings expert. Atmosphere is
crucial, and can be helped by the arrangement of space,
changes in lighting at different points of the service, the im-
aginative use of symbols, or the rare gift of silence. The ideas
begin to flow when a group works together regularly on the
whole experience of worship. The priest just needs to be un-
threatened and to keep the group on course, shaping the
ideas into living worship.
There is of course nothing so divisive as change in worship.
I had the misfortune of becoming a footnote in ecclesias-
tical history when I supposedly dismissed the choir of the
church I served. The details are unnecessary and would only
tempt me to further self-justification. Suffice it to say that
when the media smelled blood, the prey realized he’d under-
estimated the powerful forces that operate around music and
choirs. National ignominy followed. However, the lesson I
learned was that when conflict arises over such an important
thing as worship ‘jaw, jaw’ is always better than ‘war, war’ and
that the most useful strategy a priest can employ is to widen
the discussion to encompass the various protagonists on some
common ground. In my case we should have been discussing
the nature of worship, its purpose, who it’s for, complement-
ary services and so on. The question then becomes: ‘What can
we unite on?’ rather than ‘What is it that divides us?’
Yet it is undeniable that the priest has to be at least com-
petent and at best brilliant in the ordering of worship. Worship
is the litmus test of our life as a church. It shows whether we
are acidic or alkaline, alive or dead, whether we care deeply and
passionately about God and each other or whether we are
going through the motions and putting on what Peter Brook
called ‘deadly theatre’. It’s the central responsibility of the
priest. It may be the first question God asks us on the Last
Day: ‘Did you truly help to inspire my people to worship and
to love?’
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