Copyright: © 1997 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

The attractive young woman seated on the other side of my desk had made an appointment with me to ask my permission to drop out of my class on "Introduction to Christian Worship". The semester had only just begun; the class had met, at best, less than a half-dozen times. But she had had enough time, she said, to understand my approach to the subject. "And", she concluded, "it's clear that you and I have different views about worship."

I granted her permission to withdraw from the course. Of course. But her statement rankled then; still rankles now, in memory. And I wonder if she could have dared to make that statement to the teacher of any other of her courses: "You and I have different views about Hebrew," for example. Or, "You and I have different views about Systematics."

Granted: Teachers of worship in seminaries are often not a little paranoid about their subject, over against the other disciplines of divinity, a paranoia not unlike -- and related to -- the paranoia of divinity schools themselves at a university over against, say, disciplines like the "hard sciences," or even other liberal arts. In both cases, the paranoia arises out of the question, "Is this really a legitimate field of study?" " Is this discipline subject to the kinds of objective scholarship and criticism that inform and constrain other disciplines?"

The answer, increasingly, has been yes: the study of faith and of "religion" has won respectability and even stature, in recent years, even in the skeptical secular University. (See my previous essay in this series, Essay 9: "Bonhoeffer Was Wrong.")

But that ambivalence lingers, that misgiving about regarding worship as a legitimate field of study. And only very recently -- in my own lifetime! -- have most Lutheran seminaries in North America added the study of Christian worship to their curriculum, and hired full-time faculty to teach. In my days at seminary, forty years ago, only Concordia in St.Louis and "Mt.Airy" in Philadelphia had courses (and faculty!) in Liturgy. Now, of course, the situation at Lutheran schools has marginally improved: All of our Lutheran Seminaries now regularly offer courses in worship, church music, church architecture, and related subjects.

But the ambivalence, the suspicions, the misgivings, about the study of worship remain, not simply in the student body, but also among faculty and administrators. It's a suspicion observable, at seminary, in no other field but worship. And that suspicion is often consciously or unconsciously legitimated, by faculty and administrators still struggling under the mis-apprehensions of a former age, now long since discredited.

What is the source of this ambivalence about the study of worship? I see it as the consequence of a type of piety I've criticized before in these essays as sectarian. (See my Essay 3: "Word-Reductionism, Popular Piety and the Three R's of Ritual".) It's a largely regional piety, but it's observable in all our seminaries, and indeed, I would suppose, in all denominations.

I'd summarize it in the often-unspoken attitude toward the study of worship: "I've been a Christian all my life; I've been praying all my life; why then do I have to learn how to pray at seminary?" And further: "Who dares to judge my prayer? Only God can do that!" And further still: "My prayer, my leadership of prayer as a seminarian, is my gift to God: who will dare to critique that gift?"

Observable in each of these questions is a confusion of private prayer with corporate prayer, and indeed of private piety with corporate piety. Sure, your private prayers are, in a sense, your gift to God; sure, no one but God can judge the human heart. Sure, the scriptures remind us that God hears the prayers of even the least of us; that God's Spirit provides the words for our prayers when the best we can do is sigh or groan. (See Romans 8:26.)

But the scriptures also suggest that not every prayer -- not even every private prayer! -- is righteous; that God flatly rejects the prayers of some. (See Amos 5:21).

Further, and most importantly: There is a significant difference between one's private, personal prayer, and the public, corporate prayer of a community.

And when you, as a seminarian -- or pastor, or lay leader -- step into the chancel to lead public worship, you are presuming to take on a terrifying, a frightening responsibility: not simply to pray out of your own heart, but to lead the people of God in the prayers of their hearts.

And so you had better know what you're doing. And you had better be reasonably good at it, or at least be willing to work at gaining the competence that goes with being reasonably good at it. Or else you are presuming too much; you had better be prepared to re-think your vocational commitment.

I am arguing here, once again, out of a posture that respects "religion." (See, again, my essay "Bonhoeffer Was Wrong.") I am arguing that there are specific skills, specific competences, specific disciplines that worship leaders need to know; skills and competences and disciplines that are indeed subject to human evaluation and criticism.

In the leadership of corporate Christian worship, loving Jesus is simply not enough. I don't want competence held captive by piety.

Loving Jesus is surely a first step, for seminarians. But in no other discipline of divinity -- Biblical studies, systematics, church history, even homiletics -- is it sufficient simply to love Jesus. We expect more of seminarians than simple piety, in every other field of seminary studies. Why should we not expect the same in the study of worship?