|
|
Seminar 14:
|
|
Liturgy, as the public work of the people of God, generates its own culture in terms of leadership roles, calendar, and institutions (sacramental in this case). Liturgy also absorbs and transforms for its own use expressions of the worldly culture in which the church lives. There will always be a tension between these two. Liturgical culture embodies the values of the community of faith; secular culture embodies the values of the world in which the church lives. For the church to suppress the former in favour of the latter is to be unfaithful to the faith once delivered. But to ignore the latter in order to protect the former is to be irrelevant to the needs of the world, and often of the church's own members. Will Frank Senn provide a way out? No, only comfort from the knowledge that this is the way it has been for the church for nearly 2,000 years, and tools by which to discern what is happening today. A joint seminar presented by ISS and the Australian Academy of Liturgy, the 2004 Austen James Lecture.
|