Liturgies for a world in crisis
A guest blog by Dr Mark Porter
At a recent online workshop we posed the question of what comes to mind when thinking about green liturgies and worship. Whilst there were a range of different responses, it was interesting to observe how frequently the answers returned to the harvest festival celebrations or the season of creation. For much of the church, there is a short designated period within the rhythm of the year where themes of creation really come to the forefront of our worship, and a much longer period in which they lie dormant or retreat to a more-secondary status. This is not to say that they completely absent from our worship outside of this season – it is rare to get to the end of any service without some use of nature imagery over the course of a song, in scriptures or in our prayers – rather, outside of special occasions, they rarely form part of the primary goal of what we we are trying to do with our liturgies.
If we reflect upon what our acts of worship are designed to do, a whole range of different answers might come to mind depending on both our tradition and the occasion. Most obviously, perhaps, they are there to offer worship and thanks to God. But this is not the only way of thinking about liturgy and what it is supposed to do. We can think of liturgy’s potential to shape us as Christians, to take us on a journey, to offer intimacy and encounter with the Spirit, to express or manage emotions, to direct everything back to God, to act as a witness to others, to shape and sum up the rest of our lives in the world, to draw us together as community, to teach us, or to give us space for introspection.
Our liturgies perform a broad range of different tasks, and reflecting on this situation can lead us to pose a further question: What might we need them to do in the midst of ecological crisis? And what might they be capable of? Perhaps we have an idea of their core purposes that is relatively unaffected by ecological issues. But perhaps we sometimes begin to question whether they might be able to do more. Do we believe they might help to nurture better relationships between us and other beings? That they could change our attitudes or those of others? Do we want them to offer us stories of hope? To nurture action? To stir our imaginations to imagine new horizons and alternatives? Do we believe, perhaps, that they might even help to save a world in crisis?
There are lots of subtle ways that ecology can make its way into these spaces, and lots of ways that it can radically shake them up if we want it to. Liturgies of protest and of mourning, liturgies in outdoor spaces, liturgies with little hints of ecological themes scattered where people might be most ready to accept them. All of these, and many others have taken shape as a result of individual and cooperative acts of creativity over the course of recent years. Perhaps we need to start to expect something more of our shared or solitary worship. Perhaps as we seek to fashion worship that is about more than simply humans and God we will find our liturgies changing and evolving, and perhaps we ourselves will help them to bring about this change.
Mark Porter has published numerous books and articles on Christian music and worship, including his most-recent publication For The Warming of the Earth, which came out earlier this year with SCM Press. He is programme chair of the Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives conference and currently works as a lecturer and researcher at the University of Erfurt in Germany.
Watch the recording of the workshop Composing Green Liturgies
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