laypeople

Planning Worship with the Laity

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Because worship is a drama involving all the people, planning should involve not only the ministers, but also (and perhaps especially) the laity.

Worship, in the Christian tradition, is commonly understood as “the work of the people.” This is, in fact, a literal meaning of the word “liturgy.” By this is meant that worship is not intended to be a “spectator sport” but an activity involving everyone.

A timeworn but useful analogy by Sφren Kierkegaard invites us to compare what happens in corporate worship with a drama. The problem comes when we see the congregation as the audience, the clergy and musicians as performers, and the Holy Spirit as the prompter. If this is the model, then our worship will involve the congregation passively at best.

Kierkegaard suggested we should change the roles. Worship for Christians is indeed like drama. Only it is God who is the audience, the clergy and musicians who are the prompters, and the members of the congregation who are the actors. Worship is what we all do in praising God—some of us have enabling functions, but the worship belongs to the whole people of God.

If we take this approach seriously, then we will involve lay people in the planning, preparing, and leading of corporate worship more than is customary.

What follows is a personal account of how one church has attempted to address this issue. This is, therefore, descriptive rather than prescriptive, and, it is hoped, suggestive of what might be done in other situations.

Laity Services

There was a time in most Protestant churches when we had what was known as “Laity Sunday” on an annual basis. One Sunday was given over to lay people to plan and to conduct public worship. It was a chance for the clergy to get “the view from the pew” and for a few people to get a better appreciation of what went into a Sunday service. In our church, Union Presbyterian Church of Schenectady, New York, there are about seventeen “laity Sundays” each year. These are very different from the old once-a-year version, but spring from some of the same values as well as new ones.

There are three different kinds of “laity Sunday” services in our planning: those designated simply “laity services,” “family services,” and “summer services.” The “laity services” are the responsibility of assigned church groups—three Sundays a year are set aside in this category. The “family services” are planned by families of the church for those Sundays when the entire church family (including children) is present for the full service—these are set for special days such as the first Sunday in Lent or Pentecost, and the first Sunday after summer vacation concludes. The “summer services” are the ten Sundays in the summer—members of the worship department each select one to plan and recruit other laypeople to help. (In addition, other special services, such as Christmas Eve and Easter Vigil, involve lay people in the planning).

The Role of the Worship Department

All of these services are the responsibility of the church’s worship department. This group, comprised of three members of the session [the governing body of the Presbyterian church] and laypeople at large, with musicians and the pastor, schedules the services and recruits the planners.

For the “laity services,” groups of the church are formally invited to take responsibility for a service. When this process originated, the session set a good example by serving as the first group to plan and to lead a “laity service.” The board of deacons and the trustees followed suit. Since then, groups such as the Membership and Evangelism, Christian Education, Mission, Support, and Worship Departments have planned services, as well as the senior choir, the high school choir, fellowship groups, church social teachers, and others.

The invitations are issued to these groups on a more-or-less rotating basis. By now, most of the groups have had several opportunities to plan and to lead services. Other groups, such as adult classes, have also been asked, or have volunteered, from time to time.

Each group usually selects a committee of its members to plan the service, although more than the committee may take part in the service.

For the “family services,” the pastors usually recruit families of the church at the suggestion of the Christian Education Department. A list is kept of those recruited to avoid undue repetition.

For the “summer services,” the members of the Worship Department select one of the Sundays and recruit members of their own families, friends, or whomever they please. Sometimes people new to the church are included as a way of involving them early. Members who have had questions or concerns about worship are also involved at times to give them opportunities to express themselves.

The final responsibility of the Worship Department is to evaluate these services. Time is given at each department meeting following any of the services to discuss the effectiveness of the service and to note suggestions for future planners. Once a year, the department evaluates the whole process as it looks ahead to scheduling for the ensuing year.

The Role of Laity in Planning

At least one planning session is held for each service. Usually there are several lay people involved, and in the case of “family services,” several children (grade-school age or older) are present. The pastor is also present, and for the optimum effect, so are the musicians.

The planning session begins with the group discussing the Scripture set in the lectionary for the Sunday in question. The texts are read aloud, and several translations are available around the table.

As the passages are read, lay people are encouraged to identify what speaks particularly to them—“What do you need to hear in that passage?” or “What would you want to hear in a sermon on that passage?” are good questions to ask.

Sometimes those passages set in the lectionary are not very useful, and the people find in them too little they can relate to or that seems timely. When this happens, there is freedom to let other passages come to mind.

The next step is to let a theme surface. Often this happens quickly, and some dimensions of the theme can be explored. When there are many ideas or concerns prompted by the Scripture selections, it may take longer to focus on a theme. But it is important to identify the theme so that the whole service can be built around it.

The preacher will want to invite the others to make suggestions about the sermon. Personal insights about the Scriptures will be welcomed, as well as questions to be addressed by the sermon. This experience in the planning stage not only gives people ownership in the sermon, but allows them to grow as they talk about their faith with one another.

Hymns and other music are discussed in light of the theme. The musicians are often ready with suggestions because of advance planning. Sometimes lay people will have ideas about anthems or responses. Hymns can be selected by the group as a whole.

Prayers of the service are sorted out so that laypeople may write or select their prayers. The pastor will want to be available to those writing prayers, but often little help is needed—prayers composed by laypeople are often fresh and vital. The content and style of the service’s prayers are discussed by the whole group at this point.

Other actions or visual aspects of the service are also explored. The use of banners, the manner of serving communion, processions, and countless other considerations may be given for the fullest participation of the congregation. It is the unique contribution of the laypeople in planning to suggest what is meaningful to people in the pew.

It is important that the musicians have a comprehensive view of the year’s worship experience as well as an understanding of the particular services. Awareness of the flow of the church year and the dynamics of each service is essential for musicians to make the maximum contribution.

This means that the musicians, with the pastor, will do considerable advance planning for the whole year, noting those Sundays that will involve laypeople in detailed planning. In the course of the advance planning, themes of the church year will be identified and the lectionary reviewed in its broad outlines. Some details of the lectionary will suggest specific pieces of music and should be noted in the advance planning.

When the actual planning meeting with the laypeople occurs, the musicians will be prepared with resources to offer. It is good to have more to suggest than can be used, so some selections can be made.

If the musicians are participating in the planning process, new ideas will occur to them on the spot, and they will find their own creativity stimulated. Listening to what the lay people are saying, then, is an important role for the musician. The musician’s purpose is to help the lay people give musical expression to the service they are designing.

The musicians are also teachers. They have an educational contribution to make in the planning so that all the others are better informed about the content and quality of church music and about the particular liturgical goals of the musicians. Something of the history and development of church music is often of interest to the laypeople, as is the background of many of the hymns.

While the musicians are leaders in worship and have particular talents to bring, and while they are resource people to the planning meeting, they are mainly partners with the laypeople and pastor in shaping the worship experience. It is this sense of partnership that is most important.

The pastor is the key person in this process. As “minister of the Word,” the pastor has particular responsibility for the worship experience. But it is not an exclusive responsibility; rather, it is important in the planning stage for the pastor to include others in the fulfillment of that responsibility.

First, the pastor needs to listen to the people. Where are their needs for the gospel? What special insights of faith do they bring? How can they more fully participate in the acts of worship? These and other similar questions should be in the front of the pastor’s mind during the planning.

Consider the sermon, for example. If the pastor is listening to the people about where they are and what they hunger to hear, the sermon will have a relevance beyond what is possible in one devised in isolation. Even specific illustrations will be suggested or quotes offered, and the sermon will have a vitality and authenticity not otherwise achieved. Children often have wonderful and quotable things to say in the planning sessions. At the very least, the preacher’s pump is primed and creative thought is prompted.

Preachers who have not tried this will likely be somewhat threatened by this approach. But those who have experienced it are aware of the enormous benefits to be gained.

Another role the pastor plays in planning is that of a teacher. Throughout this process, over a period of years the pastor has an opportunity to teach about liturgy that is unparalleled. Each planning meeting is like a class in worship. Basic education about the theology and dynamics of worship takes place painlessly. Those doing the planning are eager students, as they would not otherwise be there.

This means that the pastor will have to be prepared and will have to do homework. The pastor is the resident theologian and, therefore, needs to study constantly. Teaching courses on worship in the church’s education program will force solid study. One role of the pastor in the planning meeting is to be a teacher for worship. And the pastor will have to know more than anyone else to fulfill this responsibility.

Toward the end of the meeting, it is good to review the various responsibilities. Who will be reading Scripture, or writing what prayers, or leading what part of the service are some of the many details to be nailed down.

Then there will be follow-up conferences. If someone needs help with a prayer or guidance about which translation of Scripture to use or whatever, there will need to be an opportunity for checking with each other. Any unresolved issues should have a definite way of being resolved.

Those who actually will lead worship should have a chance to practice. The pastor and musicians can be helpful in coaching. It is important to make sure the leaders feel comfortable to minimize distractions from the worship resulting from their nervousness or lack of preparation. More than that, the leaders should finish with a sense of having done a good job and with positive feelings about their participation in leading the service.

The overall effect of this process of lay involvement in planning and designing corporate worship at our church is that there are more people growing in their appreciation of the richness of worship. They have learned, not deductively because someone told them this is the way worship is supposed to be, but inductively because they have struggled with designing a service and discovered a new significance to worship.

The benefit to the pastor is that the sense of isolation is minimized. The pastor will be less inclined to be defensive about criticisms of worship or even the sermon because others are involved. Sometimes perpetual critics make excellent planners when they are given a chance to share their gifts in a positive and concrete way. A broad appreciation of worship from this kind of experience tends to give criticism a more helpful flavor.

This process also forces the pastor and musicians to be prepared. It requires study and work in advance and an openness to learn in the process. It is always educational for the professionals.

The participation of children in planning worship is essential. This need not happen every time, but it ought to happen some of the time. This prevents us from thinking about what we can do “for” the children in worship and leads us to consider with them the purpose of our public worship. Children are potent interpreters and leaders if we have the wisdom to listen and the grace to follow.

The purpose of all this is to praise God with all the fullness of the worshiping community. Worship belongs to the people, and it is appropriate that planning for worship include representatives of the whole family of faith.

Recovering the Gifts of the Laity

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The significance of the release of spiritual gifts for worship has been rediscovered in the contemporary church. It is part of the recovery of the theology of the laity, the “people of God.” Within the worshiping community, each member may contribute to the corporate life and celebration through the expression of his or her particular gift.

One of the predominant and easily observed features of the contemporary movement for liturgical renewal has been the recovery of the ministry of the laity, together with the stress on the distribution of the gifts of the Holy Spirit throughout the body of Christ. This emphasis has been both a precondition and an effect of the renewal of liturgy. In churches where the leadership of the service had long been virtually restricted to clergy, laypeople have emerged in highly visible roles: reading the Scriptures, leading in prayer, assisting in the administration of the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper, and performing other ministries of significance. Paradoxically, those denominations in which the laity have historically had a greater degree of participation in these aspects of worship are perhaps those least affected by the renewal movement of this century, no doubt because the more limited role of the minister in public worship has lowered the priority of liturgy as a theological concern.

Spiritual Gifts and the Body

The rise of lay visibility in worship has gone hand in hand with the recovery of the scriptural emphasis on the “peoplehood” of the community of faith. The English words “lay, laity” are derived from the Greek laos,“ people,” which the New Testament uses to designate those called into the new covenant. For example, Peter calls the church “a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people [laos] belonging to God,” using phrases borrowed from the Old Testament narrative of the Sinai covenant (1 Pet. 2:9; Exod. 19:6); he further stresses the concept of peoplehood in elaborating, “Once you were not a people [laos], but now you are the people [laos] of God” (2:10).

In the writings of Paul, the peoplehood or calling of the laity is expressed chiefly through the concept of the body of Christ, and it is in the context of the life of the body that Paul sets his discussion of the operation of the spiritual gifts (charismata, pneumatika). A major locus for Paul’s treatment of the gifts is 1 Corinthians 12–14, where the apostle makes it clear throughout that the gifts of the members of the body are exercised not to promote the individual believer, but for the benefit of the body as a whole: “Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good” (1 Cor. 12:7). Indeed, the “body” or “people” remains in focus wherever Paul discusses spiritual gifts. The differing endowments of the members of the body, he states, exist because “in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (Rom. 12:5); the ministry gifts are given “to prepare God’s people for works of service” (Eph. 4:12).

Paul offers several lists of gifts, the contents of which partially overlap. Those enumerated in Romans 12:6–8 may be termed the “serving gifts,” which address the encouragement and corporate well-being of the assembly. Two series appear in 1 Corinthians 12: the “manifest gifts” which reveal the presence and power of the Holy Spirit (12:4–14), and the “administrative gifts” which facilitate the operation and activities of the church (12:28). The list in Ephesians 4:11–13 sets forth the “equipping gifts,” which consist not of abilities but of people given to the church by the ascended Christ for the enabling of others in ministry. These lists are evidently not intended to be comprehensive; the New Testament refers to other gifts and skills (especially those of service) exercised by members of the community.

From the New Testament descriptions of spiritual gifts, we can, in general, define a “gift” as any activity or skill or even person which contributes to the church’s ability to fulfill its mission of worship, witness and service, including those functions which add to the personal welfare and spiritual development of the members of the community. In this sense, “each one” (as Paul states) has one or more gifts, something to offer to the common good, and those gifts are regarded as conferred by the Spirit even when they coincide with what we today would regard as natural skills. C. Peter Wagner provides this definition: “A spiritual gift is a special attribute given by the Holy Spirit to every member of the body of Christ according to God’s grace for use within the context of the body” (Your Spiritual Gifts Can Help Your Church Grow [Ventura, Calif.: Regal Books, 1979], 42). Wagner catalogs and describes twenty-seven such gifts including martyrdom, celibacy, intercession, and others not specifically enumerated in the Pauline discussions. Clearly, when it comes to gifts that may be offered in the celebration of God’s glory in worship, the list could be extended to include skills in the liturgical arts, particularly in music, drama or choreography, and in architectural and other visual arts. The spectrum of such gifts is so broad that their practice cannot be restricted to a core group of ecclesiastical professionals; it is the laity that must exercise them in the fullest measure.

Loss and Rediscovery of Lay Involvement

Due to historical factors, the concept of the gifts of the laity was largely lost following the earliest centuries of the Christian movement. Among these factors was the institutionalism which settled upon the church in the Constantinian era. When the church made the transition from a persecuted minority to an increasingly established force within the fabric of Roman society, lay initiative in worship or any other crucial area became problematic. Liturgical functions in particular came to be concentrated in the priesthood. The demise of the Roman Empire and many of its institutions in the period of barbarian ascendancy left the church as one of the few viable structures of social organization, and the constant threat of societal disorganization further encouraged clerical authoritarianism within the church. With the retrenchment of old institutions for the transmission of education and cultural skills, and with an emergent sacramentalism which de-emphasized the service of the Word in the Christian liturgy, there was little opportunity for ordinary worshipers to equip themselves, through exposure to biblical teaching or other learning, for the exercise of their distinctive gifts.

The situation began to change with the period of the Renaissance, marked by the recovery of classical learning in non-ecclesiastical circles. The rise of humanistic scholarship, coupled with the gradual emergence from the feudal system of a class of independent “burgers” or townspeople of business and trade, began to produce a stratum of people better equipped to exercise the calling and initiative of the Christian laity. This social development, along with the rediscovery of biblical doctrine and authority, contributed to the partial recovery of the role and responsibility of lay people in the Protestant Reformation. Furthermore, the limitation of gifts of worship leadership to the ordained priesthood was challenged in the Protestant tenet of the “priesthood of all believers.”

Yet even here older patterns remained largely unbroken; the persistent link between church and state inhibited the exercise of the gifts of the laity in the context of public worship. It was chiefly within the smaller communities of the Reformation, the radical Anabaptist movements, that lay involvement and leadership began to come to the forefront in community celebration. The rationalist Enlightenment, which broke down the mystique of the church/state authority structure, helped to pave the way for a more democratic thrust within the Protestant churches, as seen in the Puritan movement. The ideals of the Enlightenment and of Puritanism combined to set the tone for both political and religious life in the newly formed United States of America, where the lay leadership movement took root in several denominations, particularly on the frontier where clerical expertise was frequently unavailable. However, the growing cultural sophistication of the new nation brought a professionalism to the practice of Christian liturgy, resulting once again in the need for renewal in the exercise of lay giftings and capabilities.

On the North American scene, two factors seem to have contributed to the rediscovery of the gifts of the laity in the setting of corporate worship. The Pentecostal revival of the early 1900s, followed by the charismatic movement in the “mainstream” churches beginning in the 1960s, focused attention once again on the gifts of the Holy Spirit within the body of Christ, especially the “manifest gifts.” In the post-World War II period, neo-orthodox theology with its stress on Reformation themes brought to the major Protestant denominations a new emphasis on the priesthood of all believers. The accompanying “biblical theology” movement further exposed the church to the recovery of the corporate nature of biblical faith, and especially to the theological force of the concept of the laos or people of God.

Protestantism remained largely divided between those groups open to the exercise of New Testament charismata and those stressing Reformation themes. Unexpectedly, it was within the Catholic community that the concept of the people of God exercising their Spiritual gifts emerged with a major impact on worship. The aggiornamento to which John XXIII and Vatican II gave voice saw liturgy literally break open in Roman Catholicism. One might claim that the renewal movement within the Catholic Church represented a belated acceptance of the Reformation principle of the priesthood of all believers. The introduction of lay participation in worship came as a culture shock to many of the faithful, for whom the Latin Mass, hitherto largely the province of the priest, had served as a backdrop for personal devotion. Now, with the liturgy in the vernacular and with heightened lay participation in both leadership and congregational response, worshipers were disturbed in their privacy and required to pay attention to what was happening in the corporate action. For many, the transition to the new liturgy was a disconcerting experience challenging their comfort levels. For those who caught the vision, however, the experience was one of exhilaration. In many parishes, the participation of Catholic laity through the exercise of their gifts eclipsed the liturgical involvement of their Protestant counterparts. All this began to take place even before the rise of the Catholic charismatic movement.

The growing participation of Protestant laity in the leadership and conduct of public worship has been, in large measure, a response to the example set by the Catholic community. First lay participation has been written into Protestant renewal liturgies. Many of these are influenced by the shape of the liturgy which came out of Vatican II, itself an attempt to recover the pattern of early Christian worship with its sequence of entrance, service of the Word, service of the Lord’s Table, and dismissal. At the same time, the Pentecostal/charismatic movement has spawned the “praise and worship” pattern, with its extended service of song; conducted properly, the praise and worship style allows for and indeed requires, lay involvement in creative musical expression (as in the “song of the Lord” or the support of the worship team) and occasional exercise of liturgical gifts such as prophecy or the dance. Finally the emerging phenomenon of “convergence worship” brings the traditional praise and worship streams together, to create a heightened celebration of the peoplehood of the covenant community before its Lord. Worship of this type depends upon the willingness of worshipers to release themselves as channels of the manifold gifts of the Spirit.