Since it was a proposed standard in the Roman Catholic Church’s Sacrosanctum Concilium (1963), “full, active, and conscious participation” in corporate worship has been assumed by many worshiping traditions to be a fundamental goal. The topic of participation was a prominent, multifaceted goal in the Liturgical Movement. In less systematic ways, it has been a crucial issue among evangelicals, especially the ones practicing contemporary worship. Indeed, these are the ones who often assume that concrete forms of the worshiper’s “full, conscious, and active participation” in worship’s divine realities are necessary if it is to have any real efficacy, a means of validating that one “really worshiped” at all. While not always stated explicitly by evangelical thought-leaders, the assumption in contemporary worship is that full and faithful participation stems not only from the agency and intention of the worshiper, but also from his or her experience of divine presence in the public gathering.
Worship leaders, too, know that their effectiveness is not measured only in their own performance, but especially in terms of the worshipers’ sincere and active engagement. When evangelical authors do explicitly focus on “participation,” especially with an ecumenical and liturgical awareness, it is often through a reclamation of earlier horizons of participation. However, these theological systems, while regularly applied to a variety of ecclesial and liturgical contexts, remain either foreign to evangelical worshiping traditions and/or fail to fully account for evangelicalism’s particular theology and practice of contemporary worship and what its assumed effects are for and by worshipers in the twenty-first century.
This paper identifies and summarizes three clarified schemes through which current evangelicals attempt to conceive of a grounding theology for faithful and efficacious participation in worship, a participation that privileges both subjective/anthropocentric and objective/divine realities. Representing the evangelistic emphasis for which evangelicals are traditionally known, the “biblical theology of encounter” depends on a largely Pentecostal vision of worship’s musical practices while also seeing in these rituals a means of effectively reaching contemporary people. A second constructive proposal is emphasized through “sacramental recovery,” a vision which sees in a retrieval of Christianity’s “Great Tradition” theology and practice, often crystallized in some version of the four-fold ordo, a means of faithful participation in divinely rooted, Christocentric worship. A third construction, “faith seeking understanding,” is especially rooted in a quest for intellectual knowledge and clarity. In this case, a theology of worship that is grounded in study and a search for understanding as the basis for its “truth” undergirds faithful and efficacious participation in worship.
A more constructive proposal is offered for theologically conceiving of the evangelical’s participation in public worship, one rooted in postmodern theories of participation, experience, and identity-construction. In so doing, a postmodern scheme, rather than a pre-modern, medieval, or more fully modern retrieval, is presented as a viable means of clarifying the evangelical’s particular participation in corporate worship and as a lens through which we can speak of evangelicalism’s contributions to the wider Church at worship.