I’m Orthodox, and we don’t really see a difference between articles of faith and church services. Lex orandi, lex credendi, and all that. In fact, I daresay one would learn more about what we believe by attending services for a year and listening to the hymns (which are essentially theological treatises in poetic form) than by reading books on theology. Furthermore, we believe that the sacraments are the primary means God uses to interact with the world, e.g. the eucharist is literally the body and blood of God, the holy chrism is literally a conduit for the Holy Spirit, etc., so how rituals are performed is taken very seriously. If you have the flesh and blood of the creator of the universe sitting on an altar in front of you, you want to be sure you’re doing things correctly.
Different Orthodox traditions have slight variations in services, such as what style of chant they do, replacing certain psalms with others, etc. The greatest schism in Russian Orthodoxy was due to a reform of church services by Patriarch Nikon in the 1600s. Wikipedia has a pretty good article about it. This was a massive schism that still isn’t fully healed, that was caused by exceedingly minor changes.
Dunno; I have just moved from a fairly free evangelical Methodist church to a more traditional (although not stuffy or staid) C of E; I’m finding the ritual a bit perplexing; some of that has been a good thing, because it’s making me think a lot about everything and it’s always a good thing to think more about stuff you do, but… I dunno… I can’t help thinking the whole bundle of formalised stuff is just absurd, compared to what Christianity was founded as.
On the other hand, we’ve got a new vicar who has instigated a switch from those odd little wafers to a single loaf for communion and that’s a meaningful change, to me…
I suppose it depends on how radical the changes were, and how I felt about them. I don’t think that any sort of change to the ritual of (say) the Holy Communion service would be enough to make me reconsider, provided that the basic nature of the service wasn’t changed.
I would be far more likely to leave if there was a major change of what might be called “policy” - if, for example, our vicar was replaced by someone with strong views against homosexuality. I also stopped going to a church that adopted a translation of the Bible (the NJB) that used the word “Yaweh” where the NIV and KJV have “the LORD”. I’m not as strict as some of my Jewish friends about the Third Commandment, but that still made me very uncomfortable - irrational, perhaps, but it was enough to get in the way of my relationship with that church.
I’m a born and raised Episcopalian and I sing in my church’s choir, so obviously I like the ritual involved. On the other hand, I’ve attended a wide variety of services, including a Baptist-style service (the preacher was a former Baptist) and Wiccan circles. When I attended my first Wiccan circle, the friend who was hosting was amused by my reaction to the L-Burp he used to cast the circle – I said it was “noisy”.
I like the rituals I was raised with. I find them comforting, supportive and quite powerful. On the other hand, I’ve worshipped without words, vestments, or trappings of any kind under a clear blue sky and found that as powerful as anything I’ve known in church. I can also see how having to juggle a hymn book, a prayer book and, at an Episcopalian confirmation service I attended once, a lit candle can be a distraction from worship. If I were to walk into my church and find that, instead of having the standard Book of Common Prayer Service, we were having the kind of free-form service I experienced at that Baptist-style church, I’d find it disconcerting at first, but not disruptive. Being called on to witness at the Baptist-style church was disconcerting; as I recall the first words out of my mouth were “You have to understand, I’m English. We don’t do this kind of thing.”
Forms of worship vary even from church to church within the same denomination. I find exposure to different forms challenging and thought-provoking. Obviously, for routine worship, I prefer the style I’m accustomed to, but each church I’ve gone to has done things slightly differently. Ritual’s lovely, but not essential. If the Spirit is true, the trappings don’t matter.
Ritual provides a sense of community and familiarity that can be comforting. What’s your family’s process for dealing with gift opening, breakfast, etc., on Christmas morning? That’s ritual. Do you attend meetings and like to see them conducted in accordance with Robert’s Rules? That’s ritual.
When churchly ritual is not invested with meaning, it can be deadly. But when it is, it becomes very much symbolic and appropriate. I have numerous stories illustrating each of the previous sentences. But suffice it to say that it’s less what is done than what you invest in it personally that matters.
We can discuss what a typical service (“free form” or liturgical) includes and why the symbolism is included at the points it is, if there’s enough interest.
I am a traditional Roman Catholic person and the traditional (at least the way it’s been performed in my lifetime, which started at the time of Vatican II) service is very important to me. It is the foundation upon which I build my inspiration and unique prayer. It makes me happy that Catholic people throughout the world are experiencing the same service.
I find changes very jarring, especially when I interpret them as self-conscious or making-a-point by the celebrant. They’ve changed a couple of details in the past year and I’ve taken a little while to get used to them. A variety of music, decor and church design doesn’t bother me too much (except songs from the 70s and forward, which are meaningless and hard to sing) as long as the Mass is celebrated consistently.
This is the great miracle we have among us; don’t mess with it!
Pedantic note: Luther’s break was on theology and some practices, but he mostly left ritual alone. It is still possible, today, to walk into the Sunday service at some Lutheran/Evangelische churches and recognize most of the Catholic mass. In 1523 Luther arranged the mass to simply substitute some prayers for others and it was not until his second revision of 1526 that he began substituting German for Latin and eliminating several other prayers of the mass. Even the change from Latin to German was only recommended for the congregations where the majority of people no longer knew Latin (so that services at universities continued in Latin for some time).
While pieces from the whole loaf does make you feel fuller , in the Catholic church I believe the restriction is bread made from wheat and water only. So not only are the little crumbly pieces with a touch of honey not correct, but they make me paranoid about making sure to eat every crumb and not inadvertantly drop any off my hand. :eek: (Don’t worry, it’s not scrupulosity unless I worry about it on a molecular level )
Although I am an agnostic, I still attend Byzantine Catholic liturgy with my parents from time to time. All it has to offer me is the comfort of familiar ritual. The ritual with which I am familiar has been taken away from me. At least in the Diocese of Pittsburgh there has been an effort to purge the Byzantine Church of Roman trappings and return it to its roots. The thing is, those Roman influences had been in place for about a century and were all I ever knew. Church has just about noyhing to offer now.
Generic Protestant speaking -
In the churches I’ve attended, there have only been two sacraments (communion/baptism), and it’s more important that they be done than the manner in which they are done. (Though I will always have a preference for individual communion cups or intinction. Always.)
Ritual is odd to me. I didn’t really grow up with a lot of ritual in churches, so it’s unfamiliar. When I visit more ritualistic churches, I have a hard time figuring out what’s going on. (At least Episcopaleans tend to give you a clue while you are juggling 18 books and random pieces of paper. Catholic and Orthodox and even Lutheran churches tend to not even give you a clue (“everyone is sitting. why? Oh no, they started singing. No, not everyone. Only half the people. Which half am I supposed to be in? WHY ISN’T THERE A BULLETIN? And what are the words?”))
But I can see how they are comforting. Doing the same thing exactly the same way puts you in the right frame of mind. I like the smell of Orthodox churches. Even when I’m struggling to figure out my place, I can see how the customs lead others to a place where they’re ready to worship in spirit and in truth.
Dressed differently - I’m not sure I would notice for quite a while (my current church they wear robes (Geneva gowns) in the morning service & I think business casual at night services). Same with the candle lighting (not really part of the service). I’d notice the absence of a sermon, because some of my pastors are incredible speakers - but not having one for a week every so often wouldn’t really bother me. And of course, knowing my church, any change that we got would be accompanied by a detailed explanation as to the change and the reasons behind it (we went from being debtors to tresspassers about a year ago. There were at least two essays on that one.)
There are too many people in this world who fail to understand how important ritual is. It provides continuity and binds peopel together into something more than a random assortment of bodies. Without shared ritual, a family is just a genetic resemblance. A nation is just a random pack of everyday joes.
The ritual of the Church bonds does change, but the core stays the same. Moreover, it provides contiuity both in time and in place. I can go into a Church right here in Tennessee, and hear a Mass said in Latin in much the same style as priests said it a thousand years ago.
Protestant, raised Methodist, planning to join the Episcopals.
Intellectually I don’t think the ritual is important at all. It’s not like a set of magic spells where if you don’t do it just right, the altar boys will explode or something.
But I personally find that non-liturgical churches just don’t resonate for me. It wasn’t until I started attending the Episcopal services that I really began to feel the connection both with God and with the history of the Church and its relationhsip to God. Formalizing it made it more clear to me than in the Methodist services I attended. With the rituals, I feel like an active particpant in the worship service. In the Methodist services, I attended, we really just sat and listened. It felt more like going to a lecture.
This is only my experience of course. I’m sure any number of peoples’ mileage varies.
I’m probably atheist because Gramps got distressed from a change in the church service.
He left the church when they switched from Latin to English at a baptism. He said when he understood the words he realized for the fist time that he didn’t agree with what baptism was all about, and just quit on the spot, and nobody in the family went back.
I remember - a good few years ago, when I was still at university - the change from Series 3 to ASB80, and “time of trial” back to “temptation”. Of course, most of us still preferred the traditional version, and made a point of saying “which” rather than “who”.
I’m Catholic but otherwise **yBeayf ** has got it in a nutshell. I like ritual at mass because it underscores my beliefs. The main reason I returned to the traditional Latin mass was because I found the ritual spiritually uplifting, unlike the rather insipid informality that’s rampant in most Novus Ordo parishes.
Long answer:
I’ve been raised Methodist, and agree with those who say a certain amount of ritual is comforting. I don’t care whether the pastor wears street clothes or a robe (although jeans bug me a little), I don’t care much what the congregation wears. Communion can be served with wafers or bread, I can tear the piece off the loaf or have it handed to me (though I did think the pre-sliced cubes of white bread were weird), grape juice can be red or “white” (red’s better, more symbolic of the whole blood thing) wine is ok intellectually, but jarring in practice, I’ve even seen a grape used (for my grandmother, who opted to have communion served in the pew, rather than trying to make her way up front). Communion can even be served in the pew or by intinction, or whatever.
Music is very important to me. I like a mix of traditional hymns and contemporary praise songs, but could give up the contemporary stuff easier. (Give me decent lyrics and an actual tune, please). Piano, organ, praise band, they’re all the same to me (in principle). Familiarity is the big thing. Variety is good too, in moderation. I’d have a hard time belonging to a church that didn’t have a choir(which I would likely sing in).
I love watching a new church to see how they pass the offering plates- I’ve seen a number of different techniques for getting a plate in front of everyone.
If I were looking for a new church home, Music would be the first thing I would look for (listen for?), and the next would be whether the minister’s beliefs appeared compatible with mine, after that I would look for programs that reached out for me.
I don’t think that ritual for the sake of ritual is important. Still, I feel quite strange at happy-clappy type churches. I think it has to do more with the sense that a liturgical service seems to be the entire congregation (the body of Christ) worshipping together as opposed to the highly individualistic type of worship in modern services.
I’m a pantheistic hedonist, but sometimes I really enjoy/am comforted by a Latin Mass. My wife is Catholic, so I go with her sometimes. I don’t know…just something about it makes me feel…good.
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