The Role of Liturgical Catechesis in Christian Formation

What Is Liturgical Catechesis?

Worship is at the heart of Christian existence. The church can be involved in many noble deeds in the world, but “worship is what distinguishes the church as the church.”3 The worshiping church is where we learn who God is, who we are, and what’s really going on. The church doesn’t exist just to proclaim the kingdom but to be a foretaste of the kingdom here and now. Liturgical cat- echesis is not worship. It is how we are taught by and for worship. We can think of it as a two-way dynamic movement in which (a) we enter more deeply into

In my own Anglican tradition, we call these two approaches catechesis “from the front porch” and catechesis “from the font”—that is, the baptismal font. The for- mer is about preparing adults for entrance into the church from the “front porch” of the church; the latter is about building faith from infancy. This approach is outlined in a report from the Anglican Church in North America’s Catechesis Task Force en- titled “Toward an Anglican Catechumenate: Guiding Principles for the Catechesis Task Force, Anglican Church in North America,” published in 2010. The use of “front porch” to describe catechesis originally comes from Tory Baucum, Evangelical Hospi- tality: Catechetical Evangelism in the Early Church and Its Recovery for Today (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow, 2008).
2.SimonChan,Liturgical Theology: The Church as Worshipping Community (Down- ers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2005), 42.

the triune life with God and (b) our everyday lives are ordered by the rhythms and practices of worship.

Why Liturgical Catechesis Matters for Worship

First, though, what is liturgical worship? By liturgy, I mean a church’s struc- tured patterns of organization for worship. We refer to some churches as “litur- gical” and others as “nonliturgical,” but really all churches have set patterns and practices for worship. What is important is how these liturgies both express and shape our relationship with God and other people. By liturgy, I would include the standard rituals of Sunday morning worship, which include things like the call to worship, the public reading of Scripture, the sermon, prayers of the people, tithes and offerings, confession of sin, Eucharist, and dismissal. But we would also want to include the seasons of the Christian year, such as Advent, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, and Ordinary Time, as well as the celebration of certain holy days. Liturgies may also include regular patterns of daily prayer, as well as other major rituals that occur at specific moments in a person’s life: baptism, confirmation, marriage, and so forth.

A proper theology of liturgical worship does not begin with our actions but with God’s actions. Liturgy begins with the mutual self-giving love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This love enters into human life through Christ’s incar- nation, which in turn generates a return to the Father in which we are caught up in the Spirit’s sanctification through being incorporated into the Son.4 Worship, in other words, is not telling us something about God’s redemption. Worship enacts it. As the late Robert Webber used to say, “worship does God’s story.”5 Worship is the actual lived experience of our ongoing redemption.6

Worship is what the church does when it is most fully alive. It is not just a means to an end but the end itself. As a result, worship is a powerful site for theological and spiritual formation. Liturgies direct our most basic de- sires, habits, and intuitions. More than just changing what we think, worship changes what we love. But this doesn’t happen automatically. We all know Christians who regularly participate in Christian worship but who lead lives

Liturgical theologian David Fagerberg describes Christian liturgy, in a dense but theologically rich formula, as “the Trinity’s perichoresis kenotically extended to invite our synergistic ascent into deification.” David Fagerberg, On Liturgical Asceticism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2013), 9.
See, for example, Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Worship: Proclaiming and En- acting God’s Narrative (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008).
For this argument, see Khaled Anatolios, Deification through the Cross: An Eastern Christian Theology of Salvation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020).

of abject moral turpitude. Many massive failures of the church happen right alongside frequent participation in liturgical worship.7 We should never imag- ine our projects of spiritual formation as being untouched by the Fall.

At the same time, we can approach liturgical catechesis in better or worse ways. It is not just an exercise in the history or theory of ritual. We want to facilitate participation in the church’s liturgy so that Christians can perceive all of reality anew—to have their eyes, ears, mouths, and hearts shaped by beholding images of Christ and the saints, by hearing the Word, by tasting the Eucharist.8 Liturgical catechesis is about unlocking the spiritual senses and learning to see all reality anew.9

What, then, does liturgical catechesis entail? First, most basically, liturgical catechesis involves a symbiotic, back-and-forth relationship between instruction and liturgy, that is, a back-and-forth interchange between teaching about worship and the actual experience of worship. In worship, we do the liturgy. And this activity generates new questions. Why do we stand at this point? Why do we kneel here? Why does the reading of Scripture happen in this way? In litur- gical catechesis, we allow these questions to surface, not simply to explain them away but to help others reenter worship the next time with a heightened awareness of what’s at stake. Experience and instruction go hand in hand.

Liturgical Catechesis Shapes Daily Life

Second, liturgical catechesis orders daily life in accordance with Sunday wor- ship. If worship exemplifies in the present age the fullness of divine-human communion that will one day characterize all of life, then liturgical catechesis brings that reality into effect. The rites of Christian worship have a “spilling over” effect. What we experience in worship affects the way we live day by day—what Tish Harrison Warren calls the “liturgy of the ordinary.”10 Take the practice of confession and the passing of the peace. Each Sunday, Christians get down on bended knee, admit their failures and need for healing, hear the

6.Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Lauren Winner, The Dangers of Christian Prac- tice: On Wayward Gifts, Characteristic Damage, and Sin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). For a response to this critique, what he calls “the Godfather problem,” see James K. A. Smith, Awaiting the King: Reforming Public Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2017), 165–208.
See here Timothy O’Malley, Divine Blessing: Liturgical Formation in the RCIA

(Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2019).

We’ll develop this idea in more detail in chapter 7, where we look at the role of Scripture and the sacraments in catechesis.
See Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Ordinary Life (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2016).

word of forgiveness proclaimed over them, and then stand and exchange a greeting of peace with their fellow believers. By the weekly performance of this rite, our bodies and hearts are “learning” several abstract truths: that we are forgiven sinners, that Christ has broken down barriers of our own making, that we have peace with one another through Christ. And yet by Monday afternoon, how often are we holding a grudge against our spouse and refusing to give and receive forgiveness? Liturgical catechesis offers an opportunity to expand the logic of the liturgy into everyday life—to make explicit the implicit modes of living inherent in Christian liturgy.

Liturgical Catechesis and Christian Experience

Third, liturgical catechesis fosters deeper engagement in worship. This means that liturgical catechesis holds a place for the role of experience in Christian worship. For some, “experience” is taboo, signaling a touchy-feely faith dis- connected from belief, a fuzzy spirituality without any substance. That’s a le- gitimate concern in many corners of American evangelicalism. However, the proper response isn’t rejecting experience but articulating experience theolog- ically. We cannot avoid experience, but we can ground it in Scripture and the life-giving teaching of the church.

Teaching Worship Through Liturgical Catechesis

One practical point is worth noting here. It can be tempting for clergy to teach laypeople about the liturgy from their experience of gathered worship. That is, after all, what clergy know best. But that is not the experience of most people in the pews. Most laypeople don’t think about whether the musicians are in place, whether the candles are lit, whether the readers remember what to read. They have different concerns: squirmy children, wandering atten- tions, sniffling neighbors. Helping Christians enter more deeply into worship through catechesis begins by taking their perspective and confronting the ob- stacles that they face in worship.Liturgical catechesis teaches what the liturgy means and how it constitutes a formative effect in our lives. It involves a dialogue between worship and teaching, and above all, it connects liturgy with life, showing what it means for all of creation to become a means of abiding with God.