Chapel at Western Theological Seminary
Theological Notes
ORDO
Many students come to WTS familiar with a classically Reformed order of worship that looks something like this:
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Approach to God
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Proclamation of the Word
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Response to God
In some contexts, this order has morphed into this:
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Singing
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Preaching/Teaching
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Singing
However, this isn’t the only structure for worship Christians have developed in two-thousand years.
Long ago, communities of monastic Christians, united by educational and ecclesial bonds, followed ancient Jewish patterns of corporate devotion.The Holy Spirit used these patterns to shape these communities into deeper Christ-likeness. Their occasions of daily worship weren’t intended as pep-rallies, music concerts, therapy sessions, or motivational talks. They served as a way to frame everything else they did — reading, writing, eating, sleeping, weeding, sewing — as prayer, as living before the face of God: “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do everything for the glory of God.” (1 Cor. 10:31)
At WTS, we are also a community united by educational and ecclesial bonds. So our daily chapel services seek to learn from the wisdom of our monastic forebears, practicing daily worship in patterns they set forth centuries ago, yet open to creative adaptation. You can learn more about some of the basic patterns we use at WTS in the links located in the “Service Types” menu above. Our hope is that familiarity with these "building blocks" of worship will allow you to adapt them for use in whatever ministry context to which you are called.
On Mondays through Thursdays, it is mostly students or staff who prepare and lead chapel at WTS, offering a service of either Prayer or Proclamation, or some innovative adaptation of these basic forms. In a riff on the typical "Lord's Day" liturgical ordo, Fridays find a faculty member preparing the community’s worship service. She/he will preach with a sacramental eye—that is, preaching to the Table, articulating the promises of the gospel of which the loaf and cup are our sign and seal.
STRUCTURE
A recent WTS graduate once compared the structure of a worship service to a jungle-gym. The bars can look restrictive, but they’ve actually been engineered to provide support and safety. Their sturdiness is liberating, rather than limiting. They enable deeply creative play.
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A good structure helps worship reliably to remain worship—so that it doesn’t devolve into a lecture, a concert, or some idiosyncratic form of self-expression.
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A good structure pulls us out of ourselves, and reminds us that worship isn’t about US—about what we like and don’t like; what excites us and what doesn’t. It’s about what God doing in a great, wide, broken world, and how we might join in that mission.
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A good structure with repeated patterns connects us with the ‘cloud of witnesses’—receiving from them, and passing on to others something of which we are only stewards.
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A good structure encourages the movement of the Holy Spirit—both in prayer-filled planning and in surprising moments within worship.
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A good structure always points to Jesus. It helps us to bring all of ourselves honestly into relationship with him so that we come to know Jesus more deeply, and love Jesus more truly.
SHOW AND TELL—SACRAMENTS
The richest worship is characterized by careful use of language in both proclamation and prayer. It is also characterized by non-verbal meaning-making activities–i.e., by the generous use of symbols and ritual actions. These attend to our embodied nature as humans, making use of a wide range of physical postures (standing, hands outstretched), gestures (dipping hands in a font), and other tangible, sensory, ritual actions (clasping hands, lighting a candle, washing feet, smearing with ashes, eating bread and wine, etc.) that employ the daily stuff of embodied lives. All of this affirms the Incarnation, and points to the whole world as a place of sacramental encounter with God. They remind us that worship is not just “Tell,” but “SHOW- and-tell.”
So, for example, you will find that the templates typically outline a handful of fixed responses (spoken or sung) and accompanying ritual gestures with which to begin a chapel worship service. These direct our attention to central symbols of the faith: the Bible, a Christ-candle, the Cross, and the baptismal Font. By doing so, we remember that we gather and are sent not primarily because we’re so awesome or pious or whatever. We do so because Jesus the Living Word speaks to us; Jesus the Light of the World shows us the Father; Jesus the one who died on the cross loves us; Jesus the the one upon whom the Spirit descended at his baptism—this Jesus—calls us, a Spirit-filled people, to new life and mission.
We often speak or sing words during this “show and tell” time -- and some model words/songs are provided in the templates located elsewhere on this site.
ART
It is not uncommon these days for folks to think of “singing” as a part of worship, like talking or standing. But “singing” isn’t a liturgical act—it’s an artistic or expressive one. When we sing in worship, that singing is done to serve some other activity: praise, lamentation, confession, dedication, testimony, etc. Likewise, art, dance, meditating on visual images, performing ritual actions, and so on can all be used to deepen and enrich any part of worship. And of course, silence and stillness are the contexts out of which rich sounds and actions come forth.
Our goal at Western, then, is to be sure that artistic expression is disciplined to serve the purposes of worship. We want to employ our creativity so that so that art does what it does best: touches us deeply in emotional and visceral ways in order to allow its beauty to call forth our full selves into prayerful engagement with God. Our early 21st century North American cultural moment places a high value on everyone’s entitled right to personal self-expression. But at WTS, we want to subvert that individualistic impulse, or at least to channel it in appropriate ways. Like the musical structures that allows jazz players to improvise beautifully and freely, disciplining art this way ensures that our creativity serves God, shaping a context for prayer and proclamation that is authentic and hospitable for the whole community, and that stretches us into the new people God is making of us.