Now this is helpful: it gives us a useful definition of the place of ritual in congregational worship.
Our liturgy is sacred ritual because it creates anticipation and receptivity to the Spirit of the Risen Christ in the experience of the participants.
This sentence reminds us that anything we do or use in worship is provisional: it is only something that serves to help us on the one hand and which God may graciously engage with by the Spirit so that it may be a point of encounter or of God-willed growing for us. Part of our understanding and evaluation of worship needs to take account of the human dimension; things have meaning for us and are part of our semiotic vocabulary which may be used (or not) in worship. The question is how these things help or hinder us in ‘anticipation’ or ‘receptivity’ to the Spirit.
And, of course, I don’t just mean the spontaneous or spectacular when relating to the Spirit: it may be the ongoing work of informing us, encouraging us, challenging us, confirming us; it may be routine and ‘ordinary’. The issue is whether the human forms are capable and apt for helping ‘this’ bunch of worshippers to be open to whatever it is that God has for them singly or corporately. It means that all of those things to do with group dynamics and tacit understandings and perceptions of power all have their place in helping us to make it more or less possible for people to anticipate and be receptive to God’s revelation and empowering for mission.
It uses “ordinary” materials such as fire, bread, wine, clothing, and books and proscribed words and gestures as its elements. We bring verbal forms, structures of meaning, objects and patterns of behavior, not to show God their elegant lines and shapes but to pray that God’s Spirit will break them open and show us the backside of the Holy.
It is this thing of ‘breaking open’ that is the point. And I would suggest that breaking open is partly affected by things like our familiarity and degree of comfort with whatever it is. If we are asking people to struggle with learning something new together, it may be that a lack of sufficient familiarity can get in the way: we need to let people practice a song or a prayer or an action just enough to let them begin to pray it rather than simply perform it; to move from a kind of self-consciousness about it to a degree of confidence in it. And so we need to recall that this dynamic lies behind new technologies. Let’s not forget that we already have incorporated all sorts of technologies into our worship. Some of them caused a stir at the time of their introduction but are now quite comfortably part of our worship: think of bells, clocks, printing (or rather printed matter), paper, various forms of lighting, instruments (in most churches but Orthodox and some groups like the wee frees and the Churches of Christ) and so forth. So,
Conceivably, “electronics” can be brought into worship along with any other ordinary object from our daily lives. The question is: can the object be “broken” open by God’s spirit and disclose the Holy or does the object and its usage call attention to itself? Ritual performances that call attention to the objects themselves are in danger of losing their evocative power.
And I think it is that issue of calling attention to itself that is implicated in what I wrote about gaining confidence in something we use in worship together. It’s not a matter, always, of losing their evocative power, sometimes it is of gaining it by the accretion of enough familiarity with it.