In this wide-ranging examination of ‘postmodern’ worship trends, Brian D. Spinks, Anglican priest and professor of liturgical studies and pastoral theology at Yale, surveys Western Christian worship from Vatican II to the present. His focus is principally Britain and the United States. Two metaphors provide the conceptual clothesline on which to hang disparate data. One is the ‘mall’ where individuals pursue their pleasurable desires and purchase both things to consume and personal(ised) identities. The postmodern self selects worship experiences from various speciality ‘stores’ in a continuing search for self-fulfilment. The other metaphor is ‘bricolage’, the picking and choosing of liturgical and musical elements without regard for their historical, theological, geographical or ecclesial contexts. In this mall, one can assemble a liturgical style from an array of outlets to create something new and compelling for consumers of transcendence.
The survey begins with blended, fusion, or synthesis worship including the Finnish Lutheran ‘Thomas Mass’, the ‘U2charist’, the Duke Ellington Mass, the Hip-Hop Eucharist, the danced liturgy of St Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco, and an Anglican High Mass at Marquand Chapel at Yale, in which the author has served as priestly celebrant. Common to these various eucharistic rites is their use of ‘mix and match’ liturgical and musical elements. Apart from the Thomas Mass, all the others are described as celebrated in American Episcopal or British Anglican contexts. Here the Prayer Book provides the essential structure and often the key texts. Innovation largely lies in the packaging provided by distinctive ceremonial, iconography, vestments and, especially, music. While Spinks notes St Gregory's ‘parody of Ethiopian Orthodoxy’, even he presides at Yale's Marquand Chapel with a thurible for censing and a theotokos icon while vested as a Maronite priest. As long as the Book of Common Prayer and its authorised clergy exercise control, then flexible concessions can be made to the postmodern sensibilities of Protestant seminarians and hip Californians.
Spinks also gives us an orientating overview of ‘consciously postmodern’ worship, including ‘alt.worship’, ‘post-nos alt.worship’, and ‘fresh expressions’, familiar in Britain, and ‘emerging church and emerging worship’, and ‘liquid worship’ from the United States. His criticism of these fluid movements focuses on their constant creation of ‘meaningful rituals’ which make most sense to those who create them and require a kind of exhausting explication to outsiders reminiscent of modernity's didacticism. He also finds much of the liturgical style and exercise in ‘retrophilia’ with intimate public prayers, use of the arts and audio-visuals (albeit updated), typical of the ‘experimental worship’ of the 1970s.
Recognising the sacramental status of praise and worship (P&W) music among charismatic congregations, Spinks surveys John Wimber's Vineyard churches, Hillsong in Sydney and London, the British Ichthus Fellowship, and the Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship. As with much popular music which entered and departed Anglican churches in the late eighteenth century, Spinks doubts much is likely to survive the deeply felt, commercially successful, but theologically vacuous P&W corpus. Bill Hybels, Joel Osteen and Robert Schuller are treated under worship as entertainment. The author then moves on to locally enculturated forms of worship found in the African Independent churches, Korean Minjung and Kuk-Ak services, Amish and Wenger worship, and the snake handlers of Appalachia. These all stand over against the perceived domination of larger oppressions stemming from colonialism or capitalism. Here pre-modern scriptural literalism and supernaturalism find more hospitable welcome in a postmodern mall than the standard brand stores of modernity.
When Spinks asks, ‘What is Celtic about contemporary Celtic worship?’ the answer is almost nothing. Here the liturgical historian patiently debunks a growth industry of propagandists peddling Celtic spirituality in ways which completely misrepresent the ascetic, austere and Augustinian liturgical heritage of the Roman church in ancient Ireland and Britain.
Spinks concludes his visit to the worship mall by stopping at its ‘anchor store’ – the Roman Catholic Church. Like Brooks Brothers, it is usually slow to change and continues to debate its last merchandising update a half-century ago. He notes that the recent language changes in the Roman liturgy stem from the conservative takeover of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL). This reaction leaves the ICEL texts from 1973 stranded in the mainline Protestant denominations which adopted them, even as Rome now reverts to more archaic language. This attempt to mitigate the modernity or alleged linguistic banality of the Paul VI Mass in English has thereby ‘been bought at considerable ecumenical cost’. While contemporary Roman Catholic worship thus juxtaposes elements of ‘something old and something new’ typical of postmodernity, Spinks finds its most recent liturgical revisions unprepared for a postmodern world. While that may be true, it must also be noted that since the publication of Spinks’ book Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, a monument if there ever was one to postmodern ‘pastorpreneurship’, has filed for bankruptcy and been purchased by the Roman Catholic diocese in which it stands.
