Worship as Mission

Looking Out My Window

My research of late has been focused in the area of worship. In the past two decades, we’ve experienced a bursting forth of new theological thinking

about liturgy. In this article I am summarizing three different ways of articulating the relationship between worship and mission. (Articulated by Thomas Schattauer, a Lutheran liturgical scholar in a collection of essays edited by him and entitled Inside Out: Worship in an Age of Mission (Fortress, 1999).

The first approach Schattauer calls “inside and out (conventional).” In this understanding, worship is an activity for insiders, designed to nurture and prepare them for mission outside the assembly. Worship spiritually enables the worshippers to take up their mission in the world. “Worship serves the purpose of mission, not because it directly accomplishes the tasks of evangelical proclamation and diaconal service but because it offers access to the means of grace the propel the individual and the community as a whole into such activity. Worship and mission, however, remain distinct activities within clearly demarcated spheres of the church’s life---inside and out.” (Schattauer, p. 2)

This understanding correctly draws a boundary between the believing community and the world. However, it fails to grasp the unity between worship and mission and can lead to an insular style of worship with little sensitivity to the public nature of worship and to the presence of those who do not share the faith perspective of the worshippers. It reduces worship to an instrumental role, preparing us for mission.

A second approach actually reacts against that one. Schattaeur calls the second approach “outside in” (contemporary). In this understanding the “outside” work of mission is brought within the church’s assembly. One subset can be found in the megachurches and in contemporary worship settings where liturgy becomes the scene of proclamation and evangelization, especially in seeker-focused churches like Willow Creek, Chicago and Saddleback Church in California. A second subset makes of liturgy “a platform from which to issue the call to serve the neighbor and rally commitment for social and political action.” (Schattauer, p. 3) The civil rights movement setting in African American churches in the south would be an example.

In both cases, the relationship between worship and mission is viewed instrumentally but in this second approach that happens more directly than in the conventional approach. “The church’s worship is reshaped to take up the tasks of the church’s mission, construed as evangelical outreach, social transformation, or both. The tasks of mission become the principal purpose of the church’s worship--outside in.” (Schattaeur, p. 4).

These orientations share two weaknesses. First, worship is divorced from mission and has an instrumental relationship to mission in the sense that worship serves mission. Second, both approaches assume an insider/outsider dynamic—worship focuses inside the assembly and conceives of the world as outside.

The third orientation Schattauer labels, Inside/Out, Radically Traditional. The assembly falls within the arena of the mission of God in the world. This approach dissolves the dichotomy liturgy versus mission by viewing the liturgical assembly as a public assembly in which the mission of God to the world is enacted in the liturgy itself.

The liturgical assembly is the visible locus of God’s reconciling mission toward the world. The seemingly most internal of activities, the church’s worship, is ultimately directly outward toward the world. The judgment and mercy of God enacted within the liturgical assembly signify God’s ultimate judgment and mercy for the world. Like a reversible jacket, the liturgy can be turned and worn inside out, and by so doing we see the relationship between worship and mission--inside out. (Schattauer, p. 3).

This perspective avoids making worship a private, insider activity that newcomers and the unchurched have difficulty penetrating. It also avoids covering over worship as praise and adoration and displacing it with mission, as does the second approach. In this approach, worship and mission join hands and dance together. The boundary of faith that distinguishes us from the world still exists, but that boundary becomes far more permeable than in the first approach. This approach invites newcomers and those without faith more fully into the church’s worship and constitutes a more overt invitation to faith while still being worship that uplifts and nurtures believers.

This refreshing orientation to the relationship of worship and mission had an Anglican precursor in the seminal work of J. G. Davies (1909-1990), who served as professor of Theology at the University of Birmingham. His little monograph Worship & Mission (New York: Association, 1967) provides inspiration for the work of Schattauer and others.

By dissolving the dichotomy between worship and mission, worship no longer has an inward and instrumental focus; rather, worship gets thrust outward as an expression of the missio dei and mission becomes a worship activity. (Davies, p. 111)

Lutheran liturgical scholar Gordon Lathrop, addressing the relationship of the assembly to outsiders, put it so clearly and trenchantly that I’ve carried this quote around in my mind for two decades as a central guiding principle. “The task of the assembly is a task of polarity: make the center strong, the symbols large, the words of Christ clear, and make that center accessible, the circle large, the periphery permeable.” (Gordon W Lathrop. Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993, p. 132.)