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Happy Epiphany, everyone! I hope you had a blessed Christmas and a well-deserved break (for those of you who work in a church).

During the remaining weeks before Lent, we’ll be honing in on one key topic:  reinvigorating your liturgy for your congregation.

Growing up, I adored church. We attended more or less every Sunday. And, unlike most kids, I grew up sitting through the whole service–and I liked it. 

But when I turned ten or eleven, I began to complain to my mom. Church was getting boring. After a decade of Sundays, I’d memorized the liturgy by heart. How was I supposed to connect with God when I was bored to tears?

I suspect most of you can relate to this feeling on some level, at some church you’ve attended. Maybe you, too, got tired of the repetition. Or maybe you didn’t connect with the liturgy because you didn’t like the theology. 

For almost all of us, at some point or another, the liturgy has failed to inspire prayer, praise, learning, or relationship with God.

When this occurs, it’s a key turning point. Ideally, this is when the pastor would help you into a new understanding, leading the way to an insight or spiritual experience and reinvigorating your liturgy for you.

Often, though, clergy don’t step into that role. So people just check out. Or declare church “irrelevant” and leave.

If you’re the pastor, you’ve had the opportunity to think through liturgy pretty carefully in seminary training. But what about your congregation? 

Do they understand why you say the things you do? Do they know why your denomination or your leadership team elected to have this structure and theology in the first place?

In other words, when boredom or confusion strikes, do they have the resources they need to reconnect with your liturgy? 

After all, you wouldn’t preach the exact same sermon on a familiar Bible story every time it comes around in the lectionary. After the first few times, the text and sermon would get boring. People would check out.

Instead, you preach a different sermon every year. You give a fresh perspective on it, a new window into how the Spirit might be speaking to you and your congregation. And, rather than getting bored or leaving, your congregation accesses God in a new way.

The same principle applies to the liturgy. Except that the liturgy repeats every week, not once in a lectionary cycle.

So, for the next few weeks, we’ll be exploring several different, concrete ways you can be reinvigorating your liturgy with meaning. Most of these methods will involve interaction with your congregation, helping them understand why you choose the liturgy you did.

But today, we’re going to focus on the basics—helping you, the pastor or lay worship leader, get reconnected with the liturgy. After all, it will be hard to enliven the liturgy for your church if it’s not fully alive for you.

I’ll start by posing a question—Why is your liturgy the way it is? Why do you use those prayers? Why do you have that number of Scripture readings and pieces of music, in that order? Why do your prayers and creeds espouse that theology and not something else?

Maybe your answer is, “Because I recently thought through this liturgy and discerned that it is God’s will for my congregation.” If so, good for you!

But perhaps your answer is, “Because that’s how it was when I came here.” Or, “Because that’s what we decided ten years ago, and we haven’t reevaluated.”

If so, that’s okay! But if your congregation is going to understand and get behind your liturgy, you need to understand and get behind it, first.

So, if you haven’t had the chance to evaluate your liturgy in some time, here are some strategies for reinvigorating your liturgy for yourself.

Reinvigorating your liturgy with purpose

First of all, what is the point of your liturgy? What is the principal aim of each section in your service? 

The answer, of course, will differ denomination to denomination and church to church. For instance, your Liturgy of the Word may focus on convincing the congregation of Biblical truths. Alternatively, the goal may be to challenge their understanding of how God is working in their lives. 

Communion, on the other hand, may focus on a direct connection with Jesus’ physical presence. Or, it could be about remembering Jesus’ life and reflection on how we can be better followers of him.

Once you’ve assigned an aim to each part of your service, think about what it all adds up to. What’s the main aim of the service? Is it to facilitate a stronger relationship with God? To build religious/Biblical knowledge? To reinforce belief in specific things?

Most importantly of all:  does your current liturgy meet this aim?

Reinvigorating your liturgy with theology and flow

Here’s another angle to consider:  try breaking down your liturgy by theology and flow. 

Is the theology in your liturgy congruent with that of your denomination? What about your personal beliefs? How about the beliefs in your congregation?

For instance, many mainline Protestants no longer subscribe to substitutionary atonement as their theology of the crucifixion. But most Eucharistic prayers still have substitutionary references. That merits further evaluation.

Additionally, how is the liturgical flow? Does the order make sense, building elements together in a way that facilitates the main point of your service? 

What about the length and complexity of certain sections? If you want to attract families, but you’re using a long and dense Eucharistic prayer, squirmy kids will be less inclined to pay attention and parents will have to focus on their children, not the liturgy.

Maybe your denomination has stricter guidelines about the liturgy (Episcopalians, I’m looking at you). Perhaps you can take this chance to reevaluate the options you do have. 

Pull out your Book of Common Prayer and Enriching Our Worship, or their denominational equivalents. Read all the prayers. Take a look at alternative Creed options that are available. Think about the pros and cons of two Scripture readings versus three. 

If you want to keep what you have, fine. But in order to get your congregation on board, make sure you’ve got strong reasoning and discernment behind your choices. Not just, “That’s how it’s always been done.”

Reinvigorating your liturgy with new perspectives

Finally, try checking in with your congregation. Perhaps others with liturgical or theological training can offer a differing perspective that will hone your own.

And, don’t forget to see what the non-experts have to say—even the youth or children. What is the most meaningful to them? When do they tune out? They could help you see the service through a whole different set of eyes.

Whether you end up making changes or not, reexamining your liturgy afresh will set you up to reinvigorate the liturgy for your congregation. This is the crucial foundation for helping your congregation connect to the liturgy in the coming weeks. 

If you’re not connected to the liturgy and inspired by it, they won’t be, either.

Stay tuned for next week’s installment:  sermon series on the liturgy.

A few years ago, I sat down with a pastor in the middle of a job hunt. I asked her how it was going. 

She shook her head.

“All of these churches say they want to grow. But I know that, when it comes down to it, they don’t actually want to change.”

She was talking from experience. She’d served in congregations that had claimed they wanted change. But she’d found that the reality was different.

If you’re pastoring a declining church, chances are, it’s a story you’re familiar with. Why is this happening? Why is there such a disparity between what congregations say they want, and what they really want?

It’s because there’s emotional work behind church reform. 

People see the unused Sunday School buildings. They read the dwindling finance reports. They note the decreasing baptisms and confirmations.

The more invested members of the church may even be keeping up with statistical analysis that discusses the reasons behind religious decline.

They know these trends aren’t sustainable. They know it can’t go on forever.

So they ask for a pastor who will change things up. They know they need one. But they’re not really ready.

Why? Because there’s emotional work behind church reform that’s rarely discussed or acknowledged.

There are plenty of resources on how to modernize your liturgy or programming. But it’s very hard to find blogs or books on the emotional work behind church reform. One exception is Diana Butler Bass’s The Practicing Congregation, which first alerted me to the issue.

But very few other religious thinkers are examining the emotional work behind church reform that must be done before we can actually embark on the complex journey.

Why is there so much baggage?

A few weeks ago, in my OK Boomer blog, I touched on the pain that our increasingly secular society can bring. Back in the 1950s, the Church stood as a pillar of society. Clergymen were an easy source of authority. Social circles centered around religion.

People could, more or less, assume that their friends and neighbors believed similar things. They could count on their children and grandchildren sharing the same religious heritage.

In other words, mainline Protestantism held an elevated, shared place in society. No longer.

In the last few decades, the Church has become relatively de-centralized from society. It’s been removed from the center of social life. It no longer unites families and the country in the way it once did.

And for people who grew up in a time when the Church was central, this new world can be difficult to get used to. It can be heartbreaking to not share the same religious convictions as your grandchildren. It can be unfathomable to imagine generations of children raised without religious education.

I spent four years attending a church mostly made up of Boomers and the Silent Generation. People never stopped asking me why there weren’t more young people in the pews. They always wanted to discuss how my friends could be more attracted to worship.

But underneath the practical, intellectual questions, I sensed deep grief and fear.

Grief that their church wasn’t as vibrant as it once was. Fear that generations of cultural and religious heritage could be lost.

Maybe those aren’t just the emotions of your congregation. Maybe those are your feelings, too. Church decline can lay the heaviest burden on religious leaders.

If that’s the case, the three considerations below are worth your attention to support the emotional work behind church reform. If you experience fear and grief when you think about church decline, use these resources for yourself first. Then, your congregation will benefit from your insight.

Empathy First

If you read Reformation 4.0, you’re probably focused on the future of the Church. Where is the Holy Spirit calling us next?

But elders in your congregation might need to reminisce about the past before they are ready to move forward. So when I meet an elder who wants to talk about church reform, I first ask them about the church of their youth.

I ask them what they loved—what made it vital and alive for them? What made them fall in love with church in the first place? 

What was it about this place that made them so loyal to their denomination or congregation, so loyal to the institution?

Chances are, they will mention the community or the spiritual vivacity. This is a way to transition from reminiscing about the past to envisioning the future. If they enjoyed these things so much, might they be interested in creating rich community or spiritual vivacity for young adults nowadays, too?

Their needs matter, too.

Around the time that I first began thinking about church reform, I spent every Sunday with my grandma. I’d come back from church all aflutter about my ideas to make mainline Protestantism more welcoming to Millennials.

One Sunday, my grandma chimed in.  “What about us?” she asked. “If you’re so focused on meeting Millennials’ needs, where do we fit in?”

I felt horrible. Of course, her spiritual needs mattered just as much as mine. So I began to ask her and others what they needed from their church communities.

Asking about the spiritual needs of elders reinforces their importance in the congregation. It helps them know that church reform does not mean shutting them out to bring in younger generations. And, it can provide you with clear points of reference as you revision what your congregation will look like.

The emotional work behind church reform

When they’ve reminisced and expressed their needs to you, you can start talking about the emotions this new religious landscape brings. There’s likely some grief that the traditions of the past can’t be taken for granted. Perhaps there’s fear about losing a generational religious identity.

You likely have your own theology and pastoral skills that can handle these emotions. Whatever your style, set up ways for them to express and process their emotions about detraditionalization and church decline.

One thought that has been comforting to me in my own emotional work around church reform: the Holy Spirit is at work now as She has been throughout church history. We are not alone in our reform, and we never have been.