Renewing the Mainline

Renewing the Mainline April 17, 2015

Ronald Byars knows that mainline churches are in trouble, and in Finding Our Balance, he lays out a program for renewal. Much depends on restoring a positive notion of authority and a bounded orthodoxy, since “every community, including the ecumenical church, needs boundaries” (46).

Doctrinal renewal is not enough, though, and Byars’s program for renewing the mainline dovetails with efforts to renew Evangelicalism in his discussion of the anti-ritual bias of Protestantism. Worship is reduced to “personal devotional exercises in public,” which is what worship necessarily becomes “when we have inherited a tradition that tells us that ritual is ritualism, and that ritualism is bad. We have heard that ritual is bad, perhaps even idolatrous, because it elevates doing prescribed things above thinking about things or stirring up pious feelings. Ritual is bad because it is possible to go through the motions on automatic pilot. Ritual is bad because it can leave you self-satisfied at having shown up for a ‘religious’ event that has nothing to do with what is in your heart or mind, but that presumably polishes your public image.”

Byars is aware of the problems, but he insists that recovering ritual is essential to recovering the mainline: “Worship is about more than processing words. Rites mean something, and the meaning can be pondered, reflected upon, and even explained to a point, but the meaning is embodied in the action, in the doing of the rite. Trying to explain it while it is going on kills the rite.”

Without a sense of ritual, worship gets reduced to utilitarian purposes—it teaches, evokes, moves. That that just puts worship into the pragmatic mold that is dominant in our culture. Anti-ritual sentiment swims with the stream, not against it. As Byars says, “the marginalization of the sacraments, only beginning to be reversed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries by Episcopalians and Lutherans in particular, with Presbyterians and United Methodists far behind but catching up in some places, has played a huge role in legitimizing the sort of flat rationalism that disdains rite in favor of worship imagined to be ritual free” (62–3).


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