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A Working Theology of the New

When I first heard, ‘‘Your liturgies are so creative!’’ I beamed with pride, the integration of creativity with congregational life being one of my big hopes. However, over time I noticed that this remark was often followed by, ‘‘But we couldn’t do them in a real church,’’ and this did not please me at all. The whole point of my teaching about new ways of worship, be they in the ecumenical chapel at Yale or at workshops around the country, was that they would be of use in real churches, so if people were encountering them as creative but impossible, then I had a big problem. I turned to writings on liturgical renovation and was reminded of the daunting nature of managing even small change. Like many before me, I cultivated ways of articulating, step-by-step, ordinary applications of any creative process I advocated, and from other disciplines I borrowed techniques for empowering community ownership of change processes. Still I met with resistance, so I set out to investigate the perspective of those who thought creative worship unworkable. I discovered a common perception that there was a choice to be made between creativity and fidelity to tradition; new was seen to be at odds with tradition. The worship acts I encouraged others to craft were indeed creative and thus innovative, but they were inextricably based on the rhythms of the ordinary rites of the real church, and so I realized I needed to emphasize the roots in tradition of the liturgical actions I proposed. One example is the service of sung morning prayer which we have developed for the daily ecumenical worship program at Yale Divinity School. There are many versions (Taizé prayer, global hymnody, songs from the Americas, music from Gaelic Scotland, and others) but in each the community engages in half an hour of almost entirely sung worship. The service order might look as follows: