Liturgy: The World Being Done

Jennifer L. Lord

Spectator or Participant?

Are those of us “in the pews” on a Sunday morning spectators at an event? Are we recipients of and responders to what happens “up front”? Or are we actual participants in the action; does our individual and congregational agency in a Sunday morning worship service matter? These are questions provoked by Søren Kierkegaard in an essay where he challenges norms about worship and labels the spaces of a church sanctuary according to a common theatre architecture. And he rearranges the places for audience and performers!¹ His essay contests any approach to public worship that presumes the congregation as mere recipients of the things done “up front.” 

I was serving as a pastor when I first encountered this work by Kierkegaard. It was included in a denominational confirmation curriculum publication, and its images have stayed with me. Kierkegaard acknowledges that most worship spaces (of his nineteenth-century time and Northern European location) place the congregation in the seating area, in pews, as an audience; the ministers and music leaders up front, onstage as performers; and God somehow present above it all. Instead, Kierkegaard invites readers to imagine the minsters, music directors, and other worship leaders as if they are standing off to the sides of the stage, hidden from sight, in the wings. And he invites us to imagine that the congregation is not seated as an audience but is onstage, up front, centered under the spotlights. God, he says, is in the audience. This is quite the flip. Can this be?

Years later I would apply a bit more theological scrutiny to this re-mapping and take his rearrangement one step farther: yes, ministers, music leaders, and other worship leaders act “as if in the wings” and yes, the congregation is centered and acts “as if in the spotlight,” but God cannot be only in the audience, as if merely a distant observer or one who is far off and needs to be appeased. God, the Holy Trinity in the perichoretic sense of an eternal dance around Glory, is onstage with us all, in us, among us, through us, leading us, enticing us, summoning us; the centripetally and centrifugally acting Holy One is with us.

Some years later I would meet, through his written works, that irascible Aidan Kavanagh. He too had something to say about whether or not the congregation is spectator or participant: “Pews, which entered liturgical place only recently [thirteenth century], nail the assembly down, proclaiming that the liturgy is not a common action but a preachment perpetuated upon the seated, an ecclesiastical opera done by virtuosi for a paying audience. Pews distance the congregation, disenfranchise the faithful, and rend the assembly.”² He critiques the actual seating arrangement because it impairs the participation of the people.

On the Court (As in Basketball)

But Kavanagh does not stop with a critique. He provides an image that reframes what is meant to happen in the pews. He gives this Hoosier a basketball image as an image for liturgical celebration: “Filling a church with immovable pews is similar to placing bleachers directly on the basketball court: it not only interferes with movement but changes the event into something entirely different.”³

I was still worshiping most frequently in church buildings with pews when I first read his sharp-tongued commentary, but because of his basketball court prompt I started to focus on my actions during Sunday worship. And so it began: even in places with pews, could I see with the eyes of my heart what he was revealing about Sunday liturgy? I started to ask more of myself: What was I contributing to that local convening of the body of Christ? How was I not simply a recipient of “a preachment”? How could I sense and see that to which Kavanagh gestured, that event before it was “changed into something entirely different”? How could I participate as if that event was happening? 

Here is what changed:

• I sang more robustly, despite being a total amateur singer; I sang with a renewed sense that my voice in the mix mattered, that my vocalizing manifested myself as co-member with the other members of Christ present and accounted for⁴; 
• I tried to truly “say what I mean and mean what I say” while praying the prayers, be they opening words, short prayers, prayers of the people interceding for others. I meant for my entreaties to rise like incense, conjoining and curling with all the other offered prayers;
• I prepared to pray the prayers of the people (what my tradition calls longer prayers of intercession), mindful ahead of time of that ancient grouping of beseeching categories that bid us pray for all manner of people and needs, the earth, and for peace; I would have specific people and places and situations in mind, even though I might only say those silently;
• My speech became performative (as the word indicates), my form coming through.⁵ I would say things audibly and with purpose. I would speak as if the words manifested the reality, as if the words changed things, as if the words mattered. Akin to the words that change reality in the marriage ceremony—the constant “I do” of that ceremony now played out in ten thousand different ways on Sundays, words bringing about a shift in reality: “I confess,” “Hear our prayer!” “I believe in one God . . .”;
• I listened to the Word read and proclaimed, expecting God speaking to the me and to the us there in that shared space and time;
• I prepared for the prayer of confession of sin, whether a reiteration of an old known prayer, or one with sentences far too long to easily say in unison, or too lightweight or too thematic as to miss my sinnings of the week: I would have my true confessings ready and would attach them to that unison prayer;
• I gathered with others, strangers and friends, knowing we were becoming something more, something other, by our gathering in God’s name, dwelling contemporaneously for that time, dwelling deeply in the Name; 
• My bulletin became a prompt—that I would attend to the action at hand rather than bury my face in a piece of paper or the pages of a book or have eyes locked on a screen. 

To Dance with God

Because of this growing attention to my part in things, I also felt that I wanted to know some of the worship matters by heart. I had discovered that if I knew words by heart or if I knew what was coming next by heart, I could, as C. S. Lewis is purported to have said, dance because I no longer needed to count the steps. I could enter into words and song and actions more fully. I consulted the worship bulletin less; I could set it down on the pew. I wondered about worshiping communities whose liturgies change all the time and what is happening if the people in the pews are always surprised or always needing to be directed at every turn. I wondered about the ways that some liturgies keep the people in the pews bound to a screen or a page or a book or to someone directing us. When I began knowing things by heart, I started to have ownership and experience deepened meanings of the things said and done; I re-encountered words and song and gestures and actions in ways that increased the layers of meaning manifested by those symbols, those images, those verbal icons. What happens if we have not been granted the chance to know things by heart, in our hips and in our hearts? 

In all of this I am telling my story. I am someone with disabilities and abilities; my brain functions in specific ways, and as far as I know (and for now) many of those ways are labeled typical (according to?).⁶ And of course I am also, as I describe my relationship to liturgies, relaying information about my gender and race and privilege and class and nationality as well as the types of worship to which I have grown accustomed (ones with confessions of sin and prayers of the people!). These declarations about myself are acknowledgments that who and how I am absolutely influence which liturgies I want to learn by heart. My ways of being in the world absolutely influence the how of my participation in worship. And these admissions are to also acknowledge that some do not want or cannot have that type of know-by-heart/not-count-the-steps dance relationship with worship.

But let me take a step back. So far in this essay, I’ve used the words worship and liturgy in an interchangeable fashion. But in the next two sections I press questions that are core to this journal issue: How does our participation in worship relate to what label is used? Am I describing liturgy? Or am I describing worship? Does it matter which word I use to label and describe Sunday morning?

Worship or Liturgy?

When I talk about liturgy and worship with congregations, in classrooms, and among colleagues and friends, I sometimes notice that people who are used to the word worship seem hesitant when saying the word liturgy. They seem to have discomfort around the word liturgy. Their voice relays a questioning tone as if they aren’t quite sure they are using the word liturgy correctly. Perhaps the hesitation is because they sense a distinction between the terms worship and liturgy, and maybe they are not quite sure which side of the equation they prefer. Occasionally I experience someone’s outright defensiveness regarding the word liturgy. When they talk about it, they describe liturgy as a form of worship that is imposed, that it is a form of worship that is absolutist and rigid, as in the liturgy. Liturgy, to them, designates those prayers and rites that have been prepared and passed along and upheld by those in power. The word liturgy seems, to them, synonymous with a formalized and repeated ceremony that is rote, representative of preserving the past rather than responsive to the present, does not leave space for the surprising movement of the Holy Spirit, and may perpetuate a misuse or even abuse of power.

Worship, in my circles of conversations, is the go-to word instead of liturgy. But even that word raises questions. Some persons understand worship as what happens first in the Sunday service, before the sermon. Songs and praise time is their worship time or even a particular genre of music.⁷ Some use the word worship to describe everything that happens in the Sunday service, from gathering together to separating and going their own way at the end, and including everything in between. Some persons use worship to mean listening to a favorite song, reading a morning devotion, walking in the woods, or other personal acts that connect one to God for a worship time. And all of this could be in person or virtual/online.

All of this is further complicated by thinking about the power of liturgies in print. Liturgical books contain liturgies. Someone wrote those liturgies. Someone decided that they ought to be published and someone was authorized to publish them. Some ecclesial traditions’ liturgical books are required for all liturgical services in that tradition. Some ecclesial traditions’ liturgical books are published by a denominational publishing house and are made available but are not required. But what is published may flesh out that traditions’ theology and polity of worship, and so even that optional book is recommended. Some church traditions do not have a judicatory or publishing house precisely because they value independence from such matters. The term liturgy is often associated with these books even though some of the books, like that of my own denomination, use worship in the title. Print and publication wields much power and further complexifies how we think about worship and liturgy.⁸

A potential summary could be: the usage of worship feels more descriptive of what pours forth from humans toward God, and the usage of liturgy feels more descriptive of what some humans have codified and authorized and put in print for other humans to do. Add to this: what the Bible says and what we do with that.

Scripture

I am not a Bible scholar, and I know that Bible scholars disagree with one another over translations and interpretations of words and just how much power that one word ought to yield for our interpretations and applications. Here is my attempt to touch on the highlights regarding the etymological origins for the words worship and liturgy. It starts with this significant tidbit: the translators who gave us the King James Version of the Bible (KJV) chose to use the English word worship when they translated Hebrew and Greek words that conveyed “obedience, service, and bodily performances related to them; God or gods are the sole referent.”⁹ Worship in the KJV was not meant to express one’s inner life or to offer praise but rather it meant one’s ethics, one’s disposition for and total commitment to a way of life/the personage representing that way of life. So, to worship God was an act of total commitment, an all-in declaration. Again, to highlight differences between then and now, many of the biblical terms translated as worship are related to bowing and prostration. Worship carries the sense of an enacted fidelity, a relational obedience, an ongoing, life-adjusting, re-orienting, turning-to-God again and again commitment. “The molding of the body . . . primarily acts to restructure bodies in the very doing of the acts themselves. Hence, required kneeling does not merely communicate a subordination to the kneeler. For all intents and purposes, kneeling produces a subordinate kneeler in and through the act itself.”¹⁰

And so personal prayer and communal ritual acts express (and create) that broader reality of service and obedience. It was all about one’s whole orientation in life, ethics, and even politics, not the inner “spiritual” life or worship style, or specific actions that we moderns might list as part of our worship. Of course there are other permutations of meaning; if you trace the word worship through the centuries, there are additional nuances. But I linger over this translation choice because, for many of us, a word that meant indivisibility of bodily actions from service and obedience to God can now, at least for some worshiping traditions, seem void of such body-centeredness. So says this author, formed by a style of worship that was so very much about education, information, knowing according to the mind.

Scripture uses other words pertinent to this conversation, but importantly it gives us the word liturgy. We find it derived from two Greek words, laos and ergon, literally people and work—leitourgia, the compound version of it reads. And, so, it is often thought to plainly mean “the work of the people.” 

It’s become increasingly popular in Protestant circles for people to be excited about the word liturgy defined as “the work of the people” (full stop). Maybe this is because the phrase sounds like a corrective to the time when liturgies were in Latin or some other language unknown by the people actually gathered in that location. Or the excitement is because the phrase sounds like a corrective to the time when parts of liturgies were silent or spoken so softly and done behind a rood screen and the people, the populus, could not hear what was being said nor see what was being done. Or the shorthand phrase is underscored because it is a corrective to experiences of worship where the people “up front” deal out wisdom, or holy things, or are meant to be the only important ones in the room. Or the excitement is because this phrasing finally sounds permissive against a backdrop of codified books and academic busybodies, as in we can create our own liturgies, and worship is about what we do.

However, leitourgia, in its context, really had nothing to do with the human-divine relationship or, at first, any act of worship. It referred to a public service or act of the state that was for the benefit of the people and, indirectly, to the work of a public servant in a state office. It meant a service act done by one or a few for the good of the many. “Too often one hears or reads a superficial etymology of the word ‘liturgy’ as ‘the work of the people.’ But . . . in its origins it referred not to work done by the people but rather a public work in the sense that we would speak of the ‘Department of Public Works’—in other words, a benefaction or work done for the people.” ¹¹ 

And to further complicate matters, some people want to emphasize that the real translation is not “the work of the people” but “a work done on behalf of the people,”¹² raising questions about who does what on behalf of whom. Does that phrasing mean work done by the ordained persons on behalf of the laity? And if that is what is meant, can it be a right use of power? Those who answer yes often speak from Roman Catholic contexts.¹³ These meanings are interpretive moves. We moderns did not discover an absolute and singular meaning for worship and liturgy. To be clear, these claims about leitourgia are theological moves. But I know which meaning convicts me.

Full Stretch

A large, black-and-white photograph hangs over a desk in my office. Fans of Alvin Ailey know this is an old photograph, taken when he was still dancing. Even if you do not know Alvin Ailey’s work, you see a near impossible thing: this man extending his arms like wings but bending back, so far back, and on the tips of his toes. It looks like he will form the letter o. I gaze at his arc and remember the phrase humanity at full stretch before God.¹⁴ I see this in Alvin Ailey. He is fully present in that dance, giving all, outstretched, honoring Something beyond himself, a witness such that movement erupts from this still photo. I want to live that way too: that centeredness, that doxology, that impossible balance that must give way to the next move.

God made us to live that way, that doxology, that full-stretched-ness, however that takes form for our particular physicalities. God made the cosmos to be that way. The biblical image of all living things at full stretch is, of course, Eden. God made all for Paradise. The earth and the fullness thereof (Ps. 24:1), all created things, humans too. All made for shalom, all with inherent dignity of particularity, all in community, all in doxological communion with God. This is Eden restored; by God’s mercy this is the télos for all creation.¹⁵

I need to be clear that with this focus on liturgy it could sound like worship or liturgy is the object of our attention. No. The object of liturgy is God’s relationship to us, ours to God, ours with one another and with God’s world, and liturgy as the vehicle for all of that. “Liturgy is an ensemble of divine action and our response.”¹⁶ Liturgy is our being together in the presence of the Holy Trinity: call and response repeated ad infinitum. Liturgy is our participation in that eternal dance around glory that bids us be poured out for one another and the world and be assured all things are caught up in Christ’s new creation, the eighth day.¹⁷ Liturgy is our love language; it is our being languaged for life as Christ’s own for God’s beloved world. Liturgy is life in ritual form. Liturgy is our joining in something that is already in progress (in both an earthly and Communion of Saints’ manner). Liturgy re-orients us in the paschal mystery: Christ’s death that defeated the powers of death and sin and Christ’s resurrection and life now. We stretch together. Some say that we humans, in this ecology, are cosmic priests.¹⁸ We recognize all comes from God, we open our hands and receive, we bless and name again that all was created holy and good. Kavanagh calls this liturgy: doing the world the way the world was meant to be done.¹⁹

To say liturgy is “the work of the people” (full stop) is insufficient. What is beautiful about this word liturgy is the claim that our Sunday morning actions are for public good; we use that word to describe what the church is actually doing by its prayers, teaching, fellowship, and the breaking of bread (Acts 2:2). To use the word liturgy declares that the church’s liturgy is for the life of God’s beloved cosmos. It is the work of the people for the life of the world. Yes. For us to use the word liturgy also underscores that what we do matters. Remember: “For all intents and purposes, kneeling produces a subordinate kneeler in and through the act itself.”²⁰ The what of worship, of liturgy, is transforming us through the acts themselves: gathering, praying, lamenting and thanking singing, confessing and forgiving, listening and hearing, uplifting, water-washing and sharing in eating and drinking, blessing, sending. And our doing it matters. Liturgical participation forms us to live as repairers of the breach (Isa. 58:12), living as ones seeing, with the eyes of our hearts, a restored Eden even when all evidence seems to the contrary. I continue to use worship and liturgy interchangeably. But these things are what I mean. And if our liturgies are not reclaiming us wayward ones weekly for the fullness of life in God and for the world’s restored fullness in God, then we should ask: what are we doing?

What is most important about public worship is that we gather the sisters and brothers together for a festival, a special occasion, a celebration of the reign of God (not yet terribly evident in daily life nor in the institutions of society), that helps all of us feel so good about ourselves, so important, so dignified, so precious, so free, so much at one . . . not as escape, not merely in distinction to daily routine, but in judgment, in the Lord’s judgment on those ways and institutions. A celebration of the reign of God that goes way beyond the tight, drab, rationalistic, verbose, pedagogical exercises we sometimes try to make of it—all those dreadful “themes” we love—into a large, broad fully human landscape, where Jesus is truly the firstborn of a new humanity, and where our other liturgical tools (festival excess and colors and tastes and textures and odors and forms and touches) penetrate the Babel of our words and points and arguments to heal the human spirit and to raise it up in the covenant community’s vision of new possibilities. Good liturgical celebration, like a parable, takes us by the hairs of our head, lifts us momentarily out of the cesspool of injustice we call home, puts us in the promised and challenging reign of God, where we are treated like we have never been treated anywhere else . . . where we are bowed to and sprinkled and censed and kissed and touched and where we share equally among all a holy food and drink.²¹

What does full stretch before God look like for you? What ought full stretch look like for those for whom life is nothing but violence and wickedness (Ps. 55)? For those for whom access and opportunity are constantly denied? What does the created earth look like at full stretch? God’s cosmos, the universes, all things interdependent? May our worship, our liturgies be such that our response to these questions is to fling wide the doors of our church sanctuaries and say: Come and see. 

Notes

1. Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, tr. Douglas Steere (New York: Harper and Row, 1938), 180–81 (SV XI114–15); reprinted in Parables of Kierkegaard, ed. Thomas C. Oden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 89–90.
2. Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite: A Handbook of Liturgical Style (New York: Pueblo Publishing Co., 1982), 21–22.
3. Kavanagh, Elements of Rite, 21–22.
4. See Kathleen Harmon, “The Ritual Nature of Music for Worship,” in Lifting Up Jesus Christ Yesterday, Today, and Forever: Proceedings of the Worship 2000 Jubilee (Minneapolis, MN: Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, 2001), 48–56. Harmon writes: “Our singing makes us present to the liturgical action . . . our singing makes us present to one another . . . our singing unleashes our power as the Body of Christ,” p. 53.
5. Jana Childers, Performing the Word: Preaching as Theatre (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 1997).
6. See Rebecca Spurrier, The Disabled Church: Human Difference and the Art of Worship (New York: Fordham University Press, 2019). See also The UDL Approach, accessed May 15, 2025, https://theudlapproach.com/theudlgears-graphic/.
7. See Lester Ruth, Flow: The Ancient Way to Do Contemporary Worship (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2020).
8. See Cláudio Carvalhaes, Liturgies from Below: Praying with People at the End of the World (Nashville, TN: Abingdon Press, 2020).
9. Andrew B. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship: Early Church Practices in Social, Historical, and Theological Perspective (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2014), 3. Here bodily performances include the literal practices of bowing down or prostration. See Gen. 24; Matt. 4:9; 8:2; 28:9. See too his discussion of words translated as worship in the New Testament: “Like their equivalents in the Hebrew Bible, these terms are concerned either with reverence or obedience or with bodily performances that enacted them,” p. 6.
10. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, 3.
11. John F. Baldovin, Reforming the Liturgy: A Response to the Critics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2009), 67–68.
12. Lizette Larson, “The Languages of the Word ‘Liturgy,’” Pray Tell: Worship, Wit & Wisdom (blog), September 22, 2022, https://praytellblog.com/index.php/2022/09/22/the-languages-of-the-word-liturgy/.
13. Anscar J. Chupungco, What, Then, Is Liturgy? Musings and Memoir (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2010), 58.
14. See E. Byron Anderson, Liturgy and the Moral Self: Humanity at Full Stretch Before God (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998).
15. Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope, trans. James Leitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). “From the first to the last, and not merely in the epilogue, Christianity is eschatology, is hope, forward looking and forward moving, and therefore also revolutionizing and transforming the present. The eschatological is not one element of Christianity but it is the medium as such, the key in which everything is set, the glow that suffuses everything here in the dawn of an expected new day,” p. 16.
16. David W. Fagerberg, Consecrating the World: On Mundane Liturgical Theology (Kettering, OH: Angelico Press, 2016), 68.
17. See Jennifer L. Lord, The Sunday Meeting: Worship, Its Elements, and Conversion (Eugene, OR: Cascade Press), forthcoming.
18. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973); Gordon W. Lathrop, Christian Assembly: Marks of the Church in a Pluralistic Age (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2004); Fagerberg, Consecrating the World.
19. Aidan Kavanagh, Elements of Rite, 45–46. “What one witnesses in the liturgy is the world being done as the world’s Creator and Redeemer will the world to be done.”
20. McGowan, Ancient Christian Worship, 3.
21. Robert Hovda, “The Vesting of Liturgical Ministers,” in Robert Hovda, The Amen Corner (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994), 220. Used with permission.