Unfamiliar practices may bring unexpected benefits to churches

Introducing unfamiliar practices to church members can be challenging, but congregations often are far less resistant than expected, according to some pastors who have tried it.

“I think people are hungry for ritual, especially those who don’t come from a Christian tradition which has them,” said Sterling Severns, pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Richmond, Va. “Communion is the closest many Baptists come to ritual. But there’s something that is inside Scripture, a way that God uses ritual and rhythm to help people understand something about God’s nature.

“I think that instinct is also inside us, and we don’t know it,” said Severns, who introduced his congregation to Lent soon after he was called to the Richmond church. “And sometimes when we start sharing these rituals with individuals unfamiliar with them, it taps into something they didn’t even know they were hungry for. When we bring ritual to the rhythm of worship, it’s one of the things that bring us together.”

Wide acceptance of untried spiritual disciplines can succeed if a few factors are present, pastors and other church leaders noted.

Start with the familiar. Author and pastor Rick Warren popularized the significance of a 40-day period of spiritual development with his “40 Days of Purpose” campaign and through several books, said Chuck Warnock, pastor of Chatham (Va.) Baptist Church. And it’s biblical, he added, noting that spans of 40 days played important roles in the lives of Noah, Moses, Elijah, Jonah and Jesus.

“I think a church that doesn’t want to observe Lent, per se, could easily plan 40 days of anticipation leading to the Easter Sunday celebration,” Warnock said.

It’s not a package deal. Adopting spiritual disciplines long associated with the liturgical tradition doesn’t require reorienting a church’s entire worship patterns, many pastors said. Choose those practices that work and avoid rigidity, they urged.

“We’re not a liturgical church, and I don’t think our members associate Lenten practices with Catholic or Episcopal liturgical forms of worship,” said Lynn Turner, senior associate pastor at First Baptist Church in Richmond, Va., who coordinates many of the churches services during Lent. “The practices we’ve adopted simply connect them with God. People say, ‘I need this in my life.’”

At Richmond’s Tabernacle Baptist Church, worship services during Lent and at Easter often involve a procession of ministers and choir. “We process carrying the Christ candle, but we don’t robe up,” Severns said. “Some of our folks are in jeans and flip-flops. I wear a suit and bow tie. And we sing traditional Baptist hymns.”

At Mosaic, a congregation in Austin with Baptist links and roots in the city’s lively artistic community, worship is an unexpected combination of informal dress, alternative—and original—folk music and liturgical practices. The service, held each Sunday at 5 p.m., is called simply “liturgy.” Pastor Don Vanderslice begins each sermon with the ancient greeting, “The Lord be with you.” His diverse congregation responds, “And also with you,” and following the public reading of Scripture, worshippers respond, “Thanks be to God.”

“Our liturgy is designed to … (bring) together the ancient signs and symbols of our tradition along with the visual arts, Scripture reading, storytelling and a music created out of our own community,” the church writes in a defining web statement. “We at Mosaic follow this rich tradition of diversity and orthodoxy, combining elements of the ancient church while interpreting the liturgical expression for our own local context.”

Start them young. Seminary and divinity school students are well placed to ex-plore unfamiliar spiritual practices and develop ways to integrate them in the chur-ches they serve in contextually appropriate ways.

Many students at Hardin-Simmons University’s Logsdon Seminary in Abilene will serve West Texas churches that might view observance of Lent—and the liturgical Christian calendar in general—as too high church and Catholic-influenced for their tastes, noted Bill Tillman, who holds the T.B. Maston Chair of Christian Ethics there and teaches spiritual formation.

Even so, those students can help their churches incorporate into worship the spir-itual disciplines associated with Lent, he noted.

Early Christians “saw the value of introspection and confession,” Tillman said. “They practiced fasting—self-denial of things that get in the way of one’s relation-ship with God. They saw these as ways to get into a better frame of mind to celebrate the resurrection.”

–Managing Editor Ken Camp contributed to this story.