Tradition or Nostalgia?

Are we embracing tradition? Or just being nostalgic for a tradition that was never ours to begin with? 

When I was growing up my family attended WASPish UM churches that were pre-liturgical renewal. Talk about social distancing! We all sat a respectable distance from one another. We stood sometimes, and sat sometimes. We never kneeled. The pastor consecrated the elements at an altar against the wall of the chancel, flanked by the choir. Communion was little crackers and little cups of grace juice to which we helped ourselves on command from the pastor. We sang the Agnus Dei. We didn’t touch, either each other or the pastor. That was our Methodist tradition, as it had been for a very long time. Was that community invalid? The sacraments substandard? True, we could see each other mediated only by clear air. But only if we looked around and weren’t blind. Do the blind have no true communion because they cannot see other faces? 

Before we make demands on the worshipping community of the future we need to ask about the worshipping community of the past. 

In truth, contemporary UM worship isn’t traditional in any long sense. It is a product of liturgical renewal and in its aftermath the rise of charismatic and contemporary worship: processes I first experienced as a youth and more seriously in theological school. 

By the 70’s we were all clutching our copies of James White, thumbing through Dom Gregory Dix, and of all things we had the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer as a textbook in classes on worship. Oh yes, we started wearing dog collars (unheard of among Methodists), smoking pipes, sneering at the use of preaching robes, belittling those grand trays of little communion cups, buying hand-thrown pottery pattens and chalices, outfitting ourselves in albs and elaborate rope belts, and generally getting on our inner Ox/Bridge. Not because we were embracing our tradition, but because we were trading in our tradition for nostalgia – a fantasy projected backward to create a past that never was. 

Okay, I’m being a little harsh. The liturgical renewal was also a reaction against the thinness of traditional worship based on the “hand” model: five hymns with something stuck between each. Liturgical renewal was an effort to make worship a more complete engagement with the gospel, to make it more of a spiritual journey. And one might add, more physically engaging. Kneeling became a thing. Congregational processions. Foot washing. Liturgical dance. We were going to discover we had bodies whether we wanted them or not!

And it was happening under the influence of the ecumenical movement and a desire to find ways that we could share common liturgical experiences and understand one another as part of a common project. These aren’t bad things. 

The new liturgies, new clothes, new forms forced us into a spiritual journey, begged us to acknowledge our bodies, and bound us to an older and wider Christian community. They also separated us away from our ancestors in the faith who had spread Methodism across the frontier. 

It was about that time I found a book, The Pastor Preacher  by Quayle from my grandfather’s library. My grandfather had been a circuit rider trained in the Course of Study. (Eventually he was a college president and received an honorary doctorate, but he never had a BDiv much less an Mdiv.) One sentence I remember went something like this. “The Methodist Elder shall kneel at the altar on one knee. Only women and priests kneel on two.” Manly Christianity – that was our tradition, the one we wanted to forget. 

Quayle believed a real Methodist Preacher should die or be invalidated out from his years on horseback if he was the real deal. In any case my grandfather was aghast at wearing robes and gowns for worship, seeing them as another sign of degenerative yankee liberalism. (We have his letters) Was he an exception? He was the president of a Methodist College, so I don’t think so.

Small wonder in 1968 that many newly United Methodists rejected the new liturgies, preferring to stay in communion with their grandparents rather than the Catholics and Episcopalians who didn’t want them anyway.  I note that in the 7 years I was a pastor in Europe (1997 – 2004) many German speaking UM churches didn’t touch the renewed liturgy – it wasn’t their  tradition. My congregation, strongly African in origin, also wasn’t much for the new liturgies – it wasn’t their tradition either.

And what about pastors? Well in seminary we could play “dress like a don,” but it didn’t work in a lot of traditional churches. A lot of what we learned about worship didn’t work in traditional churches either; a bitter lesson as more and more of my classmates dropped out of ministry in frustration as the decades passed. Instead, in many United Methodist Churches new forms of alt-liturgical worship emerged, most notably “contemporary” worship – a kind of nouveau revivalism built on the old “hand” model but with fewer fingers. More a Micky Mouse hand. Pretty physical as well, since in its most robust form it has the congregation acting like a giant punk mosh pit bouncing up and down for Jesus.

Which takes us back to the question: what part of the tradition requires that worshippers be embodied and present to each other in flesh and blood? “Nothing like blood on blood, me and Johnny dancing with Maria while the band played night of the Jonestown flood.” Or “I need a little of that human touch.” Springsteen was right, but realistically you could attend months or years of UM worship and never get that human touch – unless you count having a piece of bread mashed into your hand (no longer allowed since Covid) as a human touch. 

I am not suggesting that there are no answers to these questions. Only that a reference to tradition or long-standing practice is no longer definitive. It may just be nostalgia. 

To start with we tend to downplay the much more physically intimate forms of community that take place in alt-liturgical settings like house churches and coffee-house Bible studies. Yet if I’m looking for a place where flesh and blood make a difference it’s more likely where a dozen people are crowded around a table holding hands, praying, and sharing a meal than modestly avoiding a stranger’s touch in a formal sanctuary. You can’t claim physicality is important when you haven’t delivered it on Sunday morning.
And as we move into an age of re-embodied humans then we have to ask the purpose of flesh and blood as a central medium for being present in community. 

And that means that like Peter and Paul we need to visit some places we’ve never been and may consider unclean: the virtual communities already well established online for years. As I write there are tens of millions of individuals present as avatars in virtual worlds ranging from full virtual presence conference rooms to virtual team games. Meta’s Metaverse, but also Alt-Space VR and other virtual worlds are already hosting churches. As I write a planned conference for church planters working in the Meta Virtual world is being planned for, of course, a meeting in that same virtual world. Already there are people who find these virtual worlds more habitable than a physical world; not least those with physical disabilities that make navigating the physical world a huge challenge. 

Can such worlds engage the whole of our humanity? That depends on where you “humanity” resides. Unless you want to deny the disabled possess full humanity then that is a question to be asked, not an assumption to be made. And in any case already the embodied senses of seeing and hearing are fully supported in virtual worlds. Touch (tactile feedback) is already here as well. Smell and taste will be further behind, but are conceptually possible and being tested. 

If we’re looking for where all that spilt wine from our burst wineskins is to be found, we might try looking at virtual worlds. And when we’re there, we might notice that along with humans in virtual garb, there are new creatures present – virtual creatures in human garb. AI is here, and that is the next in this series of blogs.