Theologia Prima: A Conversation with Jonathan Hehn
Jonathan Hehn interviewed by Sally Ann McKinsey
SAM: How would you describe your sense of the relationship between Christian education and worship? How can the enactment of liturgy become pedagogy, and what can we keep in mind when making these connections?
JH: Thanks for that question. The core question, “What is the relationship between Christian education and worship?” is one that I’ve been thinking keenly about over the last few years. I think I’ll answer it first through storytelling.
Growing up in a PC(USA) congregation in South Georgia, I went with my family to church pretty much every Sunday and on Wednesdays for a few hours. Sunday school was part of the deal, youth group on Wednesday night, and choir practice every week, that kind of thing. I know that this was a formative community because of the people in my youth group at that time, half a dozen of us ended up going into some form of professional ministry. It was just a ripe time for that. In sixth grade, we went through the Westminster Larger Catechism question by question for a year, then had an additional one-year process of confirmation. It was a very, very pedagogically rich congregation. Aside from that, worship was very rich liturgically. We used the liturgy from the Book of Common Worship, 1946, at that time, and sang a mix of classical and global hymnody; there was this confluence of things between worship, Sunday school, choir, and youth group that resulted in a really thorough kind of formation, or Christian education, or edification. I use those three terms interchangeably.
The relationship between Christian education and worship is an issue that has been important for me, for one, because I now teach and mentor graduate sacred music students who go through the program here at Notre Dame, and also because my own children are now thirteen, ten, and seven. Growing up, you tend to think everything that happens to you is normative, but I now see my upbringing in that fairly large, vibrant Presbyterian congregation was an extremely unusual circumstance.
If I assumed when I was younger that this level of formation was normative for other congregations, I have realized since then that it was not. And now as a parent and a teacher, I am reflecting so much on the realities of the church—how much different it is now, both with respect to the way Christianity seeps into our broader culture and also the ways in which congregations have had to shift with declining membership numbers and declining resources. I don’t think that any of the shifts in our society with regard to the relationship between church and culture are necessarily bad. I don’t necessarily think we should be posting the Ten Commandments on the front lawn of the courthouse, as people have often argued about, right? But it does make me think about how we are forming disciples from childhood through adulthood. That’s the question I’ve needed to wrestle with.
While I have this dual life of music and liturgy, my academic interest is in the land of liturgical history, especially Presbyterian and Reformed liturgical history. I was invited to be a clinician at the Calvin Symposium in 2020, and in addition to being the organ clinician that year, I was invited to give a talk1 about this issue of liturgy and pedagogy and to sit on a panel2 on “The Bible in Public Worship and Daily Life in an Age of Declining Biblical Literacy.”
We know that most people who consider themselves active church members show up roughly once a month. Because of my unusual circumstances working at the campus chapel, even I only show up, at best, every other week with my children to the congregation where I take them. So even though I’m in church multiple times per week, my kids don’t get that, and that’s just a fact. The fact is that active church members don’t go to church every Sunday. Then there’s also the reality that among those active church members, even fewer show up to Sunday school or to a midweek activity. That’s also true for my family, despite my strong commitment to the church. This puts a lot of the onus on worship to be a formative experience for folks. The nineteenth-century Sunday school model that we have tried to carry into the twenty-first century is quite broken. There’s a lot of research that shows the realities of church and Sunday school attendance precipitously dropping over the last decades.
But the solace for Presbyterians and for Reformed folk in general is that we have this great heritage where worship is understood to be an edifying activity. Calvin talks about this at length, and other Reformed theologians who have talked about worship, like John Lee, for instance, agree. Worship should be about, is about edification and formation, not just doxology.
We have done a lot of good creative work in Reformed worship these days. We have built on the ecumenical consensus and figured out how to give the consensus liturgies that came out in the seventies and eighties a home in Presbyterian and Reformed contexts. But what we haven’t done—this is where the enactment of liturgy has not become good pedagogy—is given adequate thought to how practices of worship actually reflect the theologies of worship that we’re so good at articulating. If you read the Directory for Worship in the PC(USA)’s current Book of Order, for instance, there are three primary aspects of Reformed worship that are also part of the ecumenical consensus: Baptism, the Eucharist, and the Word of God, broadly speaking. But if you walk into any given Reformed or Presbyterian church today, it’s pretty unlikely that those will actually be the three primary elements you encounter.
As it happens, I bring my children to an ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church in America) church. I bring them there partly because it has a convenient service time, but also because I appreciate that the liturgy there actually reflects the three primary elements that the PC(USA)’s Directory for Worship lifts up. We start and end the liturgy each Sunday at the font. We have Eucharist every Sunday, and four passages of Scripture are read or sung every Sunday, alongside solid preaching. So, they (this ELCA congregation) are getting this idea that the basics of Christian worship should be centered around font, pulpit, and table.
SAM: How could we transform our worship in the PC(USA) so that it is pedagogically rich in the way you describe? What are the practical changes that pastors and church leaders can consider in weekly worship?
JH: I’ll lean on other people’s ideas rather than my own here, because other people have already said all these things better than I ever could. In fact, there are many Presbyterian congregations doing this well. I could name several off the top of my head, and one in particular, where I used to worship when I lived in Tallahassee, which is First Presbyterian Church of Tallahassee. Other leaders within the PC(USA) have already been talking about this for decades. I remember clearly being so encouraged when Invitation to Christ was released in 2006. Invitation to Christ is an absolutely fantastic document published by the Office of Theology and Worship which calls the PC(USA) in particular to practices of richer sacramental life. While I embrace the ecumenical consensus around liturgy, I’m also very much in the same camp as Horace D. Allen, the Presbyterian liturgist who considered what he called “denominational distinctives” incredibly important. Most Protestants in the United States have been in different denominations throughout their life, and when they land in a PC(USA) church, they land there for a reason. Something about the Presbyterian way of being calls to them and is where they find a home. This is likely because of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s denominational distinctives, which are hugely important.
Most of the texts in the liturgical resources that the PC(USA) publishes tend to be very sacramentally rich. They tend to allude to baptism often, for instance. A very simple thing to do is to take your “bird bath” (font) out from the corner and put it at the entrance of the church, uncovered and filled with water. Kim Long, the former editor of this publication, has often reminded me of the richness of baptism in her presiding style by also using copious amounts of water when presiding from the font. Those actions can speak really loudly and have the power to teach.
We can challenge sessions to really think about the fact that monthly communion, which many have come to see as the norm, is not actually normative within the Christian tradition nor the ideal for Presbyterians. Sharing Eucharist more frequently should be considered normative. Melanie Ross, in her book Evangelical versus Liturgical: Defining a Dicotomy, calls Gordon Lathrop and others to task when they say that weekly Eucharist should be normative, but I’m pretty much in Gordon Lathrop’s camp here. It’s clear if you’re looking either at denominational distinctives from Calvin or at the other magisterial Reformers: weekly Eucharist should be the norm for Christian worship.
Reading more Scripture in worship is also really important. It is not unusual at all when I worship with Presbyterians for there to be two Scripture readings, maybe not even one from both Testaments. Even at a daily Mass in my Roman Catholic context, there’s at least going to be a Hebrew Bible reading, a psalm, and a Gospel reading, let alone all the other Scripture references that come up in the liturgy itself. If we are no longer in a place where people are reading their Bibles at home (there’s a relatively recent stat from a Pew Research poll that 17 percent of people in the US who self-identify as Christians say they have read “little or none at all” of the Bible in their life. Seventeen percent!) Add to this the fact that most active members of the congregation don’t go to Sunday school or any sort of Bible study on a weekly basis. If you’re not reading the Bible at home, and if you’re not attending something like Sunday school, then how are you learning the Scriptures? How are you learning the faith? The only other place, and what should be the primary place, I argue, is in worship.
SAM: Yes, it is in enacting sacraments and proclaiming the word that we are formed. We learn the faith by doing it.
JH: That leads me to something else I wanted to discuss: there are liturgical theologians who have done so much to reshape our understanding of worship. Everyone who has taken a worship class has encountered the short phrase lex orandi, lex credendi, the idea that the law of prayer establishes the law of faith. But this is not quite, I think, a complete Reformed way of understanding the concept. A Reformed understanding, to my mind, is much more about a dynamic interplay between our theologia prima (the liturgy, the lex orandi) and our theologia secunda (our systematic theology, the lex credendi). The Catholic theologian David Fagerberg has been really great at fleshing this out. Aidan Kavanaugh, who was a Baptist-turned-Catholic later in his life, also discussed this. Even Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox theologian, talks about the dynamic interplay between prayer and faith. We go to liturgy in order to be nurtured in the faith, and that liturgy also enables us to go out and live our faith. Liturgy is both source and summit. The World Alliance of Reformed Churches, which is now the World Communion of Reformed Churches, made a great statement called “Worshiping the Triune God” that says the same thing in another way, in a section of the statement called “Formation for Worship”:
Wise are congregations that invite and challenge believers of all ages and abilities to “grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ” (2 Pet. 3:18). Blessed are congregations that nurture the faithful interplay of scripture, doctrines, practices, and the fruit of the Spirit. Wise are congregations that deepen worship through reflection on and teaching about the meaning of worship practices.3
This is the World Communion of Reformed Churches articulating to itself this kind of dynamic interplay that needs to occur between worship and Christian life and Christian doctrine. We sometimes lose this in the Reformed tradition because we lean so heavily on a great tradition of systematic theology. When people want to study Calvin’s thoughts on worship, for example, they go to the Institutes, where he’s railing against Roman practices of the time or, in some cases, just broader late medieval practices. Rarely do people go to the Forme of Prayers or Calvin’s Psalter and look at that as a microcosm of his theology. Statements like the one above from the World Communion of Reformed Churches point us toward a more dynamic interplay, and I want to see that happen for the good of our faith communities.
SAM: Thank you for this—yes, worship teaches by being itself, and doing it is how we learn. There’s also another angle to the question about worship and formation that many pastors may have. How do we educate about worship and liturgical theology in or around the practice of worship? Are there ways to give more context to our actions as we are doing them?
JH: A United Methodist Lukan sibling of mine named Daniel Benedict really opened my eyes to the power of mystagogical catecheses in a modern context. When I’ve been part of gatherings in the order of Saint Luke, we have done these rich liturgical encounters with the sacraments and the Word, and then afterwards we sit around and discuss what has happened. We will often bring the printed worship order with us to aid in this kind of reflection. I think that could be a marvelous tool for congregations, too. In the Order of Saint Luke, we’re all a bunch of worship nerds anyway, so it works really well because we get together and have a shared lexicon to talk about issues of worship. But you could do something similar in a congregation with a list of questions to guide people, something that doesn’t take a lot of staff time to put together because you have a standard list of questions by which to reflect on your worship each Sunday. When I gave the talk at the Calvin Symposium in 2020, the first thirty-minutes were a monologue from me that laid the theological groundwork to establish worship as the primary activity of the church and the primary way that the church is formed. But then I had gathered a whole bunch of different bulletins from congregations across the US, and in the last thirty minutes, we looked at one worship bulletin and did that kind of mystagogical reflection together. It involved a little bit of text criticism, but also looked at structural and aesthetic questions all as a way of considering worship as a formative activity.
SAM: Speaking of aesthetic questions, we have talked about the ways in which the central elements of word and sacrament make worship an edifying encounter with God. This happens in both verbal, auditory, and material language. How do Calvin’s aesthetics and the functional, visual, and material components of worship space become part of this conversation about pedagogy?
JH: I think there is some really great work that’s been done by Presbyterian liturgists, especially in the latest revision of the Book of Common Worship, that gets away, in a purposeful way, from the reactionary stance of Calvin aesthetically. A lot of the elements that have been added into the Affirmation of Baptism service, for example, are straight out of late medieval confirmation practices, like anointings with prayer texts recuperated from the late and earlier medieval eras. There are even references to the use of incense in some liturgies, which, of course, Calvin would be turning over in his grave about. But those practices are so innately human! We are starting to recover a sense of embodiment that can be really important, but it’s also something to wrestle with, because our Calvinist theological heritage, filtered through Puritanism, then American reactionary stances against Catholicism, and also the Evangelical movement in the nineteenth century, has stood in opposition to what we might call the more “liturgical” (read: aesthetically rich) traditions. We have to balance our denominational distinctives, one of which is aesthetic simplicity, with the potential that all these rich aesthetic, material elements hold for us. These elements are part of the way we humans relate to the rest of creation and to God.
SAM: I really appreciate this conversation about the language of material in formation. Another component of the aesthetic realm is music or sound. Could you talk a little bit about how you think about the categories of liturgy and music, given your background? I often wonder about not only the ways that those categories inform one another, but also the ways in which the boundaries or the distinctions between them could be complicated. At what point does music become liturgy, and at what point could liturgy become music? And what role can this nuance play in developing worship that is more edifying?
JH: Liturgy is a loaded word, right, because it’s really difficult for different communities to define. I’m using it synonymously with worship, again, drawing on liturgical historians like Paul Bradshaw who talk about leitourgia as the idea that we are a community coming together to do a service on behalf of something else. It’s very much a purposeful, communal kind of activity. In that sense, I use it interchangeably with worship. But I know that a lot of other people use liturgy specifically to talk about texts and structures. So I try to use the terms “liturgical texts” or “liturgical structures” when speaking about pieces of liturgy. When I use “liturgy” by itself, I’m just talking about worship.
To me, music is a weird thing in contemporary English because we think of music as a discrete concept. This is breaking down a bit through new philosophical concepts like musicking. Jeremy Begbie has really been the one developing ideas around theologies of musicking. But we still have this very strong idea of absolute music, a thread from the nineteenth century that music includes discrete “works” that can be separated from their performance. This is starting to break down among theologians, but in popular understanding, it is still very much at play.
We also have this idea in the English language, and in other Western European languages, of music being a discrete discipline rather than a mode of being human or a way of humaning. I remember having my mind blown when I was first studying liturgy and sacred music history, learning that in a lot of Mediterranean language contexts at the time that both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament were written, there was not a firm concept of “music” or “not-music.” That is, the relationship between speech and song was extremely fluid. We see this play out in the way that Western music develops, with ideas of cantillation, speaking more or less with a musical tone. Where is the line between speech and song? I have listened to many well-polished preachers, particularly in Black church traditions and contexts, who use so much musicality in preaching (the “sung sermon”) that I couldn’t say whether it’s singing or speech. So how can we separate out music as something separate from a mode of speech or a mode of humaning?
If I beat my chest, is that musical? Is that a rhythm? All these kinds of philosophical questions arise in music and in liturgy. It’s really useless from a philosophical standpoint to talk about music as a discrete type of liturgy. Rather, the entirety of liturgy and the entirety of worship is a ritual activity that has musical modes within it. When you think about it that way, all the things you talk about as worship and as pedagogy can be accomplished in a musical mode. I don’t think it’s useful for us, in general, to talk about music as a separate pedagogical tool from all of worship. I think, rather, we should talk about all of worship as a pedagogical tool, a formative activity, and musicking is one mode of doing that.
SAM: Yes, this nuance is so helpful. I wonder, too, if this perspective might help answer some of the challenges leaders face in the area of musical participation in worship. Music has become highly professionalized in some contexts. A sense that music is a mode of worshiping instead of a professional element placed into the service between spoken elements could transform the way many experience worship. I think about all the other contexts in which we learn through musicking, as in alphabet rhymes that seep into all other modes of being when you have a young child around. Transforming the way we think about music opens many possibilities for worship to form us as Christians.
JH: I think that’s exactly the right way to frame that. Yes, because it’s so poisonous in a congregation lifting its voice together to have a sense that there’s a dichotomy between “professional musicians” who can and “amateur,” regular people who can’t. That distinction doesn’t play for me. Even though it’s anachronistic to say in this context that we as a culture still hold onto the nineteenth-century concept of what we might term “absolute” music, and that concept divorces music from the human person.
Additionally, the different Directories for Worship in the Presbyterian tradition have always talked about music in relation to congregational singing. That is, the entire assembly, leaders and people, singing together. So they retain the idea that singing is a mode of being in worship and is inseparably related to being community. We see this even going back to Calvin, again, affirming the richness of his aesthetic position in having the congregation sing the creed, the Psalms, and even the Decalogue. This is a mode of liturgical participation that embraces our humanness and that involves everyone. I think that’s actually one of the distinctives that the Reformed tradition can offer to the rest of the church. We do, at least in our official documents, still understand musicking as an activity of the entire assembly, and these categories of professional and nonprofessional don’t exist.
SAM: It echoes our theology of ordination and our polity, as well, if we think about the priesthood of all believers. It also raises questions about the role of paid staff in worship and the balance between the ordination of those who are called from the body to serve certain functions of leadership and the egalitarian nature of our ordination to the Christian life in baptism.
JH: Yes, I’m of two minds here because most of my job is being a professional church musician, right? I don’t want to be out of a job! I used to joke with a congregation I served about this, a large congregation with several professional musicians on staff. People would talk about how well the choir did and how well we did as music leaders, and I used to respond, “Well, you know, I really loved the way the congregation sang today.” Then I used to joke with them that my job is to work myself out of a job. If I’m sitting on the organ bench and I don’t need to be there to support the congregational singing, I’m going to stop playing, because my job is, to use one of the popular buzzwords from the Hymn Society in the United States and Canada, to “enliven” the people’s song, to be a channel of the Spirit’s energy in worship. If I don’t need to be at the organ to do that, then why would I? The organ’s job for me as an organist is to support the people’s singing, and if they don’t need that support, then I don’t need to be there as a professional organist.
Though I know this is not the reality, in an ideal world for me conceptually, at least, there would be no professional musicians in the church because they would not be needed. We would understand musicking as a basic way of worshiping, reflecting the fervor of a congregation who has been formed fully in what it means to be a joyful, active, justice-seeking disciple. This would not require anybody egging them on to participate. But we may never get there this side of heaven, as the saying goes, right?
SAM: Maybe not in some contexts, though many small or rural contexts do navigate worship each week without paid staff. It seems to me that for ministers of music or music directors, this is a nuance that may help form the way they consider or frame their vocation as teachers supporting the congregation, as you suggest. This makes musicians ministers of musicking, gifting congregations with the tools to be formed as disciples. I wonder as we conclude if there are any other key hopes that you have for worship when we think about its relationship to Christian education?
JH: Worship should be both a doxological and a formative encounter with God. In a day and age when people are not experiencing catechesis in Sunday school, or at home, or wherever else, we really need to shift and reframe our worship positively, actively showing and proclaiming who we are in the liturgy through a richness of gesture, word, and song. What I ultimately propose is that we reclaim the importance of liturgy as the primary activity of our community in a way that reflects our Reformed heritage, but also in a way that is more expansive with regard to both aesthetics and ritual action for the sake of Christians today, those people who are with us now, and those in the future. Set from another angle, I propose that we Presbyterian Christians and Reformed congregations generally take a really good, hard look at our worship practices to see whether and how we’re teaching or forming, building up, edifying our members into faithful Presbyterian Christians, vis-a-vis that centrality of Word, Baptism, and Eucharist. But what I’m not suggesting—and we haven’t talked about form and freedom today—I’m not suggesting that we misuse our freedom. I don’t say that we should misuse that freedom by disregarding the liturgical forms and liturgical texts that we’ve inherited from those who have gone before us, to varying degrees. Worship is our primary act of being Christian, the ritual that forms our corporate and our individual identities as the bodily icon of Christ. Eschewing our inherited liturgy de-centers our identity and thus destroys our ability to do the continuing cyclical theological work, the theologia prima, that is the liturgy.
SAM: Thank you so much for this conversation. I appreciate your background in liturgical history and music. Your research at the intersection of all these ideas is a gift to the journal as we continue to think together about what it means to worship.
