Will Anglicanism solve my problems?

Four questions for Claude Atcho

I’ve been seeing headlines about liturgy and ritual having a resurgence in the West. In some ways, this is easy to understand—amidst a well-publicized loneliness epidemic and the erosion of trust in public institutions, participating in rituals that bind us to one another across time and geography can be an irresistible prospect.

I sometimes find myself wondering about this trend, and if I would change for the better by surrendering to the rhythms of the liturgical calendar. It’s not always clear to me whether I am experiencing genuine spiritual longing or a desire to escape the pettiness and isolation of contemporary life. So, I brought my questions to pastor and scholar Claude Atcho. Claude is the author of the award-winning Reading Black Books. Last winter, he released Rhythms of Faith: A Devotional Pilgrimage Through the Church Year. In other words, he seems primed to discuss my questions around culture, belief, and whether liturgical practice has the potential to transform us.

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Yi Ning: As an Anglican priest, I imagine you’ve spoken to plenty of people like me. How do you lead people through investigating what the liturgical church is, and what it can and cannot do?

Claude Atcho: I pastored in a non-denominational context and made the shift into a more liturgical context about four years ago, so when we talk about the attraction towards liturgical churches that we’re seeing in our broader culture—that’s an attraction I’ve seen in myself.

Every church is liturgical in the sense of having its rhythm and routines, but for our purposes, we’re talking about liturgy in the sense of a formal structure rooted in historic Christian practice, incorporating patterns of call and response, weekly communion. I think one of the key parts of pasturing people who are being drawn towards liturgical worship is to temper expectations that liturgy will be a magical, spiritual cure, and to help people recognize that the beauty of Christian liturgy is that it leads us to encounter Christ communally.

It’s not magic medicine that alleviates all problems in the spiritual life. It does provide grounding, it does provide a sort of rootedness. It does provide people with stability and removes the unpredictable emotiveness that can characterize a lot of American evangelical church worship. So I get all of its benefits, but I try to help people recognize that it’s not just a new and shiny toy. I also try to help people recognize that it’s best to experience rather than analyze it. I invite them to inhabit it for several weeks in a row, to read and study, but to also experience liturgy in a community.

YC: I’m curious to backtrack a little bit for you and for others that you’ve pastored through this process. Can you share about the factors that might lead people to transition into liturgical communities, whether it’s from evangelical backgrounds or even non-religious backgrounds? What’s pulling people into formal, ritualized relationships, especially when there’s not a whole lot else in our culture that teaches us to behave this way?

CA: I think that’s part of the answer—there’s not a lot in our culture that offers ritual to convey our connectedness to one another and to the Lord. In the chaos of contemporary life, especially in societies where people don’t live near family, where many of us are on Zoom meetings all the time, we don’t have many opportunities to feel embodied and connected. In these contexts, liturgical worship is like a fresh glass of water.

People who visit our church, and other liturgical churches, will often comment on the fact that there are no screens incorporated to the service. That alone is something they find provocative and appealing.

With liturgical worship, there is an embrace of a more tactile, visceral expression of faith. The center is not just preaching in the pulpit, but also the Lord’s table—bread and wine, meaning the encounter with Jesus through communion. And I think people find that as a really healthy corrective to church experiences where they may come and sing and hear a sermon, and then go home. In those settings, they’ve not had a sacramental encounter, so to speak. They’ve heard the gospel, hopefully, but they haven’t tasted and seen that the Lord is good through a physical act.

So I think people are looking for a sense of encounter that’s embodied and grounded, and I think the Lord’s table really provides that. There’s clearly a reason that Jesus has told his followers to “do this in remembrance of me.”

YC: I grew up in a Pentecostal evangelical background, and I think a big part of the draw for folks who end up in Pentecostal and evangelical settings is the idea that you are the authenticator of your faith. You make the decision about what you want to believe; you relate to Jesus as your own personal Lord and Savior. I know that you can’t speak for the entire nation, but I’m curious to hear your perspective on why that version of faith seems to be losing its shine for folks.

CA: I think there’s a pretty heavy burden there. It makes me think of the line from O. Alan Noble—I think he has a line about the unbearable burden of self-generated meaning or something like. I think this concept applies to our spiritual practice, where there’s the concern that we must be ready to express our devotion to God through maintaining a spiritual high. We take it upon ourselves to authenticate the depth of our devotion to Jesus and the vibrancy of our spiritual life. This is a really heavy burden.

Liturgical worship foregrounds the fact that worship is less about us expressing our devotion to God, and more about us receiving and being formed by his grace. That’s part of the logic of coming to the Lord’s table every week. That’s part of the logic of repeated prayers and responses, because God uses them to do his Spirit-empowered work. Sunday after Sunday, as we stand, sit, kneel, and say the same words, we are submitting ourselves to habits that create, over time, these deep grooves in our hearts and in our minds. They are intended to invite the Lord to transform our imaginations, and, hopefully, our actions as well.

YC: You know what’s interesting? Everything that you’re saying to me is a radically countercultural framing of what relationship should be founded on. When we talk about things like marriage or dating in our culture, we emphasize passionate, companionate relationships in which we can’t help but be with this person because the mutual attraction is so undeniable. I think people have that same framing when they think about religious practice and community. They will say things like “wow, that teaching spoke directly to me,” or “I found my people.” There’s an underlying notion that community should be bespoke to you.

What you’re describing here is interesting because it conceptualizes religious community as a set of relationships you’ve inherited. Generations of people have accrued into the church that you are now entering into. I can see how that may be a refreshing counterpoint to our culture, and I can also see how this approach to community might be hard for people. Once the novelty has worn off, they have to just deal with the fact that they are embedding into a group of people, with rituals and traditions they will be asked to observe whether or not they feel like it. How do you help people persist with this form of relationship when it seems so counter to Western norms?

CA: I don’t think we explicitly get to the point of naming that with people, but I think the way that sort of emerges is, People raise questions and concerns such as “how can I say these words in church if I don’t really feel it or mean it?”

There’s a prizing of authenticity as expressed through spontaneous emotion, exemplified by our belief in notions like the uncontrollable nature of romantic love. There’s a pragmatic answer that I and others give gently in these types of conversations, which is the reminder that all of us will have periods in our spiritual lives where we are just going through the motions. When that happens, when the enthusiasm or the inspiration peters out and needs time to be reignited, do you want to go through the motions with liturgy that’s informed by Scripture, or do you want to go through the motions with habits that are arbitrarily determined?

It’s a given in our spiritual life that our hearts are not always going to be leading the way with emotive power. I think maturity is the recognition that sometimes God’s grace calls us first to faithful action, which then allows our emotions to follow. That’s not hypocrisy. That’s not inauthentic. That’s a recognition of our frailty, that we’re prone to wonder.

There’s something formative in offering God our worship, even when emotionally we might be struggling to do so. God meets us there in a way that can be profound, so we shouldn’t denigrate that approach, nor should we let our emotions be the engine that drives how we worship or whether we worship. We need a different sort of leading measure.

YC: You know, if you’re in any church setting, hopefully you are hearing about the idea of the church as one body with many parts. If your church doesn’t behave as if this is a reality, this notion can seem to be nothing but a metaphor, but what you’re describing here sounds like a way to enact the concept.

You have phrases and practices, formed by Scripture, that are passed down to you. These traditions are given not just by the congregation that you’re physically with, but the many congregations that preceded you. And maybe you don’t feel the truth of those historic confessions in every moment, but it’s almost like you borrow the faith of other people to lead you through.

You talked about going from a non-denominational setting into an Anglican one, so I’m curious how this has changed your sense of what Christian community is supposed to be, or what it is for.

CA: I like C.S. Lewis’s analogy of the church as a house. You can’t live in the hallway; you have to find your room, and yet we’re part of one house. My experience of moving into Anglicanism specifically, but a liturgical tradition more generally, has helped me to recognize that the church is the body, and there’s these different gifts in these different rooms and denominations and traditions. Obviously, we pray along for the unity of God’s, you know, one holy Catholic apostolic church, of course, as Jesus prayed in John 17.

My view of Christian community has expanded to see the beauty of the different streams in the church. I think there’s a tendency to find the new, shiny thing, the new tradition, the new denomination, and then look back at your old home with contempt. I’m just thankful that God has helped me to not do that and is helping me to walk in more humility than I think I could have on my own. I’ve found this “new to me” thing in the church, but I’ve also seen and appreciated the gifts that I had in a place as I was before. For example, in the Baptist context, there is a real drive to missionary work, which is a gift that Anglicanism and other traditions can receive. I’ve become more aware of other, similarly distinct gifts in other places within the body.

And you know, I think I laugh more these days with my friends in Christian community, especially fellow pastors who are in different denominational settings. We admire the strengths that we have in our various traditions, and we laugh about our quirks, and we also recognize those sort of friendships and connections as important because they’re different gifts and graces in these communities. We need all of them.

YC: I love that so much. I was not expecting this answer. I’m really glad that you have community where you are able to appreciate the different ways you each enrich the body of Christ.

I have one more question. For some of us who are external to the Anglican church, we look at it and find so much that is attractive—and we also find a visceral reminder of the church’s complicated history. The Anglican church is the home of King Henry VIII and also the home of Archbishop Desmond Tutu! There’s such richness in the church’s heritage, and also distressing reminders of how the church has been compromised through its relationship to power. How do you think through this? How do you help others think through this?

CA: Yeah, for sure. I think that’s a slice of the larger question—how do we reckon with Christianity, given the ways that it has been co-opted? That question is downstream from the larger question of what we should do with the serious and real historical abuses of the Christian faith, knowing that the faith is good and true, and yet has often been distorted to affect real harm. I’ve found it helpful to recognize that I’m asking a question that has been asked before.

I think about the best impulses within my tradition and how this has confronted, and sometimes corrected, its worst impulses. Within Christianity’s pre-Reformation times, we had serious abuses happening within the institutional church, such as common indulgences being promoted as a way of fleecing the poor, who would pay money in order to spring family from purgatory. This money was lining the pockets of clergy, being used to build cathedrals, contributing to all sorts of abuses.

In addition to this, worship did not happen in the language of the people. People could hardly listen to the Gospel or partake in communion, but only watch the rituals from afar. Within that context, English reformers worked to present the Gospel to the people so that they could become spiritually freed through their encounters with Christ, and also not socially downtrodden and exploited. The Book of Common Prayer emerged from that context, as did the movement to translate Scripture and worship services in order to make them truly accessible.

I aim to recognize the impulses that are scriptural and good within my tradition, while simultaneously acknowledging how sin and pride can pervert and co-opt these things. As a Protestant, I’m helped by our shared belief that the church is not an institution without sin. We recognize that our churches and institutions can err, so we have to always renew by returning to Christ and by returning to the Scriptures, which must be read not just by one person or persons, but with the church and with Christian community. As we do that, we can, I think, receive each other’s corrections and hopefully guard ourselves from repeating some of the errors of the past.

I’m also encouraged when I look at liturgy from places like Kenya, where even within the shadow of colonialism, the faith has grown and become indigenous. The stream of Anglicanism in which I participate is led by African clergy. There’s really a beauty and a brokenness to behold in the church, but I think by returning to the Scriptures with the desire for renewal, we can hope to grow in humility and holiness, to walk faithfully and to turn away from the errors of the past.

There’s one more thing I’d like to add—There’s a book called Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail that came out in 1989, about the growing attractions of liturgical tradition. That book helped me realize that the contemporary move towards liturgy is something that’s been happening for some time. There’s a draw to the gifts of historic Christianity: the church year, the sacramental view of life, the weekly communion. I think these things belong to all Christians, and I think there are ways to inhabit these gifts and receive them within any denomination that’s faithfully preaching the gospel, so I also try to encourage people to consider what it would look like to receive these things where they are.

God may be calling you to change communities, and maybe you do need to do that. But I also think liturgical traditions are gifts for Christians, period. I just want people to recognize that these are gifts for them where they are, and there are ways to receive them.