The Worship Compass

I recently did an article featured on the Pelican Brief entitled "The Charismatic-to-Trad Pipeline," which discussed how, for all their differences, traditional Catholics and charismatic Catholics actually have a similarity in their shared belief that worship should be transcendent, which accounts for why so many traditional Catholics are former charismatics. From the article:

Trads and charismatics actually hold one extremely important value in common that I think accounts for why so many charismatics become trads. I’m talking about the belief that divine worship should be transcendent. Transcendence in divine worship refers to the experience of contact with God through the ritual act. It is the sense that the liturgy is not merely a human act directed upward, but a true encounter with something genuinely other, something that breaks through the mundane workaday world and puts us in contact with the sacred. Christian worship is transcendent to the degree that the worshipper is oriented away from the self and toward the Trinity.

Whether the charismatic experience is an authentic encounter with the divine is beside the point; we are not discussing what objectively happens in the spiritual world, but what people believe about worship. This allows us to compare trad and charismatic worship as sets of "spiritual values" that will appeal to those who share those same values. Trads and charismatics both value transcendence in worship and, consequently, reject the immanentist "horizontalism" that is becoming increasingly common across all Christian groups. Again, from the article:

This shared orientation toward the transcendent implies a shared enemy: what is commonly called immanentism or “horizontalism”—the tendency in modern liturgy to turn the congregation inward upon itself. The horizontalist impulse [leads to]...a flattening of the distance between the human and the divine. Whereas traditional worship exists to help the worshiper ritually traverse this divide, horizontalist worship dumbs down the liturgy to the point that the divide itself is obliterated.

Both the charismatic and the trad sense this flattening and reject it, though they reject it in different registers. The charismatic's rejection is visceral: he wants the Holy Spirit and fire, not fellowship. Whatever criticisms one might level at charismatic worship (and there are many) horizontalism is not among its characteristic sins. The charismatic is not in his pew to celebrate the community; he is there expecting God to show up, and he orchestrates his worship accordingly. He sincerely believes his worship is about a direct encounter with a power beyond human understanding. The trad's rejection of horizontalism is more structural, rooted in the Church's historic rites rather than in experiential expectation, but it amounts to the same refusal: worship ought to be directed at God rather than reflected back at man.

Trads and charismatics are strange bedfellows, but it makes sense when you consider the shared stress each places on transcendence in divine worship, which (at least in this regard) makes them allies. 

The Worship Compass

This got me thinking about how different values across Christianity can explain the ideological relations different Christian groups have with one another as it relates to divine worship. I therefore created a "Worship Compass," which is a typology of liturgical opinions plotted on two dimensions: rubrical and spiritual.  On the X-axis we have the spiritual, measuring to what degree the worship is oriented towards God as opposed to man, with our two poles being "transcendent" and "immanent." On the Y-axis we have the rubrical, measuring to what degree the worship is conducted according to a fixed ritual, with our two poles being "structured" and "unstructured."The X-axis considers the worship according to its content, the Y-axis according to its form. 

The Traditional Latin Mass is highly structured according to a well-defined textual tradition and is also highly transcendent, focused profoundly on the adoration of God. The TLM would, therefore, be located at the extreme upper right corner of the compass as both structured and transcendent to an eminent degree.

Charismatic worship, on the other hand, is far less structured. Charismatics are known for "moving with the spirit." What this means varies from place to place; sometimes there is still a discernible "service", as in Catholic charismatic Masses, while sometimes there is no structure whatsoever, as in Protestant low-church Pentecostal sects. Charismatic worship is oriented towards the transcendent, however—they believe the purpose of worship is the praise and adoration of God and orchestrate their worship accordingly. We thus place charismatic-pentecostal worship in the lower right quadrant, transcendent but unstructured. 

Moving to the left side of the compass, we have the sects of Christianity whose worship is characterized by immanence: focus on man, on celebration of the community, on social justice, political change, etc—in other words, the "horizontalist" schools of thought. In the upper left we have groups whose worship is structured but is entirely a celebration of man or the community. Now, I realize that my characterization is biased from a trad-Cath perspective, but even setting aside my own opinions, I don't think representatives of these groups would deny that their worship is highly oriented towards community and social justice. For the sake of simplicity I am going to use Episcopalians as a prime example of this quadrant, but this is really just a stand in for every church with a rainbow flag over the door and social justice messaging on the marquee.

What, then, would an unstructured immanent church look like? Examples here are fewer, because to be both immanent and unstructured is antithetical to the spirit of Christianity. Generally, a Christian community is unstructured because they believe it will make their worship more transcendent, so it is difficult to find examples where liturgical structure and transcendent orientation are simultaneously rejected. Such assemblies do exist, however, a prime example being Protestant megachurches, whose preaching is extremely anthropocentric while their services are more akin to a loosely organized concert than a structured worship service. Another example would be something like the Marxist-Christian communities you find in Latin America. Their Marxist orientation lands them squarely on the immanent side of the compass, while the loose structure of their "services" resembles a socialist political rally more than a structured worship service. 

I think you could plot every Christian sect somewhere on this compass, though I am not familiar enough with all of them to do so. And some are complicated because there can be great variety within a denomination. Imperfect though it is, I think the compass explains why, for example, there is a real pipeline between the charismatic renewal and traditional Catholicism, as explained in the Pelican article. This is also why there is a similar pipeline on the left side of the compass: one will frequently see a free interplay of leftist people and ideas migrating back and forth between the immanent structured and unstructured quadrants as progressive Christians search for a community that reflects their progressive values. 

You also see lateral movement between the quadrants, especially as Christians change their views on the role of God in worship and the place of the Church in Christian life. For example, I have known many Christians who shifted from the lower right quadrant to the lower left (unstructured transcendent > unstructured immanent). A person begins his Christian life in the charismatic community, deeply focused on trying to experience the supernatural presence of God and discern His will in his life. In time, however, the wackiness you often find in these communities makes them jaded about the entire prospect of the supernatural will of God. He ends up migrating along the X-axis to the world of the megachurch, because the preaching in the megachurches is vastly more focused on the pragmatic side of Christianity, the "love thy neighbor" stuff without a lot of doctrine. "Love thy neighbor" is straightforward, uncomplicated, and allows the believer to feel like he is doing his Christian duty and doesn't have to worry about disputed theological problems he doesn't understand. 

An interesting question is where the Novus Ordo would be situated on this compass. I placed the Novus Ordo squarely in the center, at the intersection of the X and Y axes:

You may be thinking that the central location of the Novus Ordo makes it ideal, as it avoids the extremes often found at the further ends of the quadrants. From the perspective of engaging worship, however, I do not think this placement is ideal. People come to worship looking for something specific—what that is varies, but they all are hoping to find a type of worship that prioritizes what they value. The Novus Ordo sits in a place where it has a little bit of everything but avoids committing to anything: It retains a very basic structure while also permitting enough optionality for it to change drastically depending on the celebrant; it retains enough of the transcendent orientation implicit in the canon of the Mass, but also does everything possible to elevate the place of the community. It tries to please everybody and ends up pleasing nobody; it paints with such a broad brush that no one is entirely sure what they are looking at. In seeking to be all things to all men, it spreads itself too thin and fails to communicate any specific spiritual value with enough clarity to be compelling. Sure, a celebrant can nudge it further along into one or the other quadrants by the options chosen, but this ultimately confirms to the rite's inherent malleability.

The lesson of the Worship Compass is that worship attracts people by committing to a set of spiritual values and embodying them without apology. The TLM knows exactly what it is; so does the Pentecostal revival meeting; so, for that matter, does the Episcopal parish with the rainbow flag. People sense this coherence intuitively, which is why the pipelines run where they do: the charismatic disillusioned with wackiness but still hungry for transcendence finds a home among the trads; the progressive Episcopalian drifts toward the megachurch or the base community as his horizontalism sheds its remaining formality. Movement across the compass follows values, and values are only legible where worship states them plainly.

This is also why the center is the loneliest place on the map. A liturgy that hedges on every axis asks the worshipper to supply the meaning himself, and most will eventually go looking for a community that supplies it for them. This is why the stock remedy to the problems of the Novus Ordo is always "more catechesis": the NO requires the worshiper to be intensively catechized to understand it because the rite itself doesn't commit to any quadrant of values. The worshiper is expected to bring his own meaning. Whatever one makes of my particular placements (and I concede they are drawn from a trad's vantage point) I think the compass is useful because it explains movement, not just position. Christians rarely convert across the diagonal; they migrate along the axis of shared values from one quadrant to the next. In this sense, the directional "flow" of the pipelines over time reveal which spiritual values a person is starving for.