The PC(USA)’s Immersion conference takes a deep dive into worship assumptions

Philadelphia’s director for Faith-Based and Interfaith Affairs challenges conference-goers to consider how ideas about God are embedded, affirmed and disrupted during worship

by Mike Ferguson | Presbyterian News Service

The Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart (Photo courtesy of the City of Philadelphia)

LOUISVILLE — Appearing via Zoom Wednesday from Philadelphia, “where it’s sunny and our team is in the World Series,” the Rev. Naomi Washington-Leapheart engaged participants in The Immersion conference in thinking of worship as “a call to faithful reckoning and divine accountability.”

Washington-Leapheart is the city of Philadelphia’s director for Faith-Based and Interfaith Affairs and an adjunct professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University.

She offered three claims about worship:

• It’s where we learn about the nature of God. For each of her three claims, Washington-Leapheart offered pictures of humorous church signs, including “Need a lifeguard? Ours walks on water” and “I saw that — God.”
• It’s where we learn to make sense of our lives. One church sign was on point: “Life has no remote: Get up and change it yourself!” “These are funny,” Washington-Leapheart said of the signs, “but there’s an ethic embodied.”
• It’s where we learn how to respond to the world. Here’s how one church sign put it: “Let the church help you forgive your enemies. It messes with their heads.”

“Worship forms us theologically, but it also forms us relationally and politically,” she said, displaying a photo of a church meeting during the 1920s attended mainly by robed Ku Klux Klan members. “One thing I do in the classroom is explore how ideas about God are embedded and affirmed and disrupted in worship. Also, whose doubts are reflected in worship? And what lessons about pain, suffering, death and loss are taught by your worship?”

“Fully embodied worship takes into account the breadth of human realities, and joy is not my disposition 100% of the time,” she told attendees of the conference being offered at Montreat Conference Center by the Office of Vital Congregations. Faith communities can “hold in tension” that worshipers “feel joyous and grateful and heartbroken all at the same time.”

Worship “has to first be honest before it can be transformative,” she said. “Are we proclaiming things that actually don’t pan out in real life?”

At Villanova, Washington-Leapheart teaches a course called “Do Black Lives Matter to God?”

“In our class, we put God on trial,” something that’s also been done in literature, she noted. She called the course “fourteen weeks of dropping down into the muck and mire of human suffering and rejecting the platitudes so we can come up with something better.” During the trial, Job and others are called as witnesses. Washington-Leapheart serves as judge.

“What if we saw worship as a site of reckoning, not just with God but with each other?” she asked conference-goers. “How are we wielding the power we have? What is the consequence of our faith? These are the questions that animate the trial. It is a disorienting experience for most students — even those who don’t see themselves as particularly religious.”

Worship “should mimic the rollercoaster ride of the journey,” Washington-Leapheart said. “Some people will say, ‘I didn’t come to church for this. I came to escape the complexity of life.’ It’s not going to be appealing to everyone in society which has already cultivated us to be anesthetized.”

“We follow a Christian calendar, in part because it’s countercultural,” she said. “We mark time in ways that run counter to the way everyone else is. In the same way, worship should be a disruption, an intervention.”

“I’m not saying that faith has no hope,” she said in response to a participant’s question. “But hope is only as potent as the despair that hope is lifting you out of. I don’t want an impotent hope, a hope that cannot lift me out of the depths of despair.”

One way to help highlight hope is to examine biblical accounts from the vantage points of biblical characters we don’t normally think of. An example is the poet’s Jaha Zainabu’s “Dear Isaac,” which can be heard here.

“What do you say to Bathsheba, to Job, to Mary the mother of Jesus, to Judas? I invite students to hear the text from the place of doubt and ambiguity,” she said. “We don’t need to be Job or Isaac forever, but we should sit next to Isaac awhile, sit next to Jairus awhile, to ask what it was like to have a daughter die waiting on Jesus.”

“Those are conversations folk are having,” she said, “just not at church.”

She also has questions for Jesus: How did you feel in the garden that night, knowing what was coming and powerless to stop it? To be betrayed by a friend?

“Worship is a site where people know they can bring all their questions,” she said, “and not be accused of faithlessness.”

She had even more questions for worship leaders, including:

• Who is liberated by our liturgy?
• Whose chains are pulled more tightly as a result of our liturgy?
• Whose liturgy is it, anyway?
• What is the theology embedded in “that prayer we always pray?”

“God is not afraid of our questions,” noted the Rev. Carlton Johnson, coordinator of the Office of Vital Congregations, “and we shouldn’t be afraid to ask them.”

“Every time my students sink down into that human place, they write beautifully. Let’s put some stuff down!” Washington-Leapheart urged, naming three books worship leaders can use to help them do just that: Cole Arthur Riley’s “This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation and the Stories that Make Us,” Terry J. Stokes’ “Prayers for the People: Things We Didn’t Know We Could Say to God,” and Claudio Carvalhaes’ “Liturgies from Below.”

The Immersion conference concludes Thursday with a pair of talks by Dr. Obery M. Hendricks, Jr. and closing worship being led by the Rev. DeEtte Decker. Watch for additional Presbyterian News Service reports on Friday.