Liturgies from Below - UK Edition. Carvalhaes, Claudio
then World Alliance of Reformed Churches, which at its 2004 General Council in Accra, Ghana, explored its meaning within the context of economic globalization and emerged with the Accra Confession, a confession that has had widespread transformative impact on the way churches and ecumenical organizations have understood and engaged God’s mission since.2 At the heart of the Accra Confession is the conviction that God is the “Creator and Sustainer of all life”; and that God “calls us as partners in the creation and redemption of the world.”3
CWM, in response to this confession, observed that life is in danger and hence showed the prophetic courage to declare that the context in which we understand ourselves to be carrying out God’s mission is Empire. And we used as a definition for Empire that which came out of the Globalisation Project—Uniting Reformed Church in South Africa and Evangelical Reformed Church in Germany:
We speak of empire, because we discern a coming together of economic, cultural, political and military power in our world today, that constitutes a reality and a spirit of lordless domination, created by humankind yet enslaving simultaneously; an all-encompassing global reality serving, protecting and defending the interest of powerful corporations, nations, elites and privileged people, while imperiously excluding even sacrificing humanity and exploiting creation; a pervasive spirit of destructive self-interest, even greed—the worship of money, goods and possessions; the gospel of consumerism, proclaimed through powerful propaganda and religiously justified, believed and followed; the colonization of consciousness, values and notions of human life by the imperial logic; a spirit lacking in compassionate justice and showing contemptuous disregard for the gifts of creation and the household of life.4
The CMW Theology Statement 2010 provides the theological basis for CWM’s existence today. It identifies Empire as the context in which we are called to be partners with God in God’s mission to transform the face of the earth. Engaging in mission in the midst of the Empire is not a new slogan. God’s mission has always taken place in the midst of the Empire. God became flesh in Jesus Christ in an imperial world. From the time of his birth Jesus’s life was threatened by the Empire. We learn from the Gospel accounts that it is the Empire and its allies who eventually killed Jesus. So we are called to continue this missional engagement in the midst of the Empire. Here we need to understand and name the diverse manifestations of the Empire in our midst. And we need to contextualize the missional trajectory of Jesus in confronting the Empire as we engage in the mission of God.
We understand Empire as that which claims absolute lordship over God’s creation and commodifies God’s people, disabling their agency to amass wealth and exercise control and domination over them. Empire is hence an ungod that rejects God and God’s plan for the world. So it is a faith imperative on all of us to resist all manifestations of Empire in order to protect and affirm life. When we resist the power of Empire, we are reclaiming our agency to liberate our lives and our world. The hope that sustains us in the context of Empire is the possibility to live in opposition to the logic of Empire. When we live out our faith rejecting the claims of Empire on our lives and our world, we witness the God of life. So, mission in the context of Empire is our absolute allegiance to the blossoming of life, exposing and confronting the imperial forces of death and destruction. The politics of Christian witness in the context of Empire is to resist the temptation to be co-opted by the Empire, and to find the nerve to come out of the Empire. In that politics, we experience a profound spirituality. It is the mission of God in which we, the people of God, are invited to partner with God.
Why This Initiative?
We affirm that our worship should offer a distinct form of life-giving spirituality inspired by experiences of worship in the harrowing rupture of life amidst the hopelessness and death-dealing catastrophes of Empire. More than just a set of religious actions carried out within the context of the gathered community worship, at its very core worship speaks to a lifestyle involving every facet of daily living. Indigenous civilizations have continued to rival dualistic forms of spirituality and devotedness to God and offer us gifts that inspire our cost of discipleship, embodied in our whole lives together with creation as life-affirming worship and praise to the God of life. Council for World Mission’s commitment to mutually challenge, encourage, and equip churches to share in God’s mission beckons us to look again at the worship life of our churches and our obedience to the mandate given by Christ.
We must ask, in breaking the seals of Empire (Rev 5) does our worship life subvert Empire? Our worship should underscore the idea that all religions are dangerous, including the religion of revelation within Christianity. The history of religion in the whole world is disappointing, Christianity included. Yet religious consciousness in human beings is something we deny at our own peril. The body has its parts, the mind has its parts, and the soul has its parts too. The religion of Empire targets the soul of humanity and colonizes faith as the currency for its religious outlook. Empire engineers spirituality and harnesses our sources of spirituality to subject humanity and creation to its worship. The violent usurpation of God from God’s throne and the defilement of God’s holiness by the ideology propagated with clichés (such as “there is no alternative”) by the current economic system requires not only devotional surrender of humanity, creation, and cosmos to Empire but also coercive and blind devotion to its antics against the good news of the gospel.
In engaging the priority of developing our congregations, we urge a reexamination of worship within our members. Christianity as a global faith is in perpetual danger of associating itself with forms of worship, surrender, and discipleship that bend to the religiosity of neoliberal economics and power. By constantly unveiling the distortions of worship in our gathered communities, we undertake to liberate Sunday from cultic forms of worship and prosperity, and develop material that will reenergize our worship to reclaim our spiritual resources from the temples of Empire. We affirm the symbolic and sacramental knowledge of indigenous peoples of the world in our quest for alternative life-affirming spiritualities.
This book will enable members of our local congregations to worship relevantly in their own context. It will help them to imagine and write worship resources from their daily experiences of pain and struggle. In that process, God will not remain a distant deity but a co-sufferer in their daily life.
We understand from all the participants that this enriching process transformed their view on worship. They mentioned that they won’t be able to continue teaching in their class on worship in the same old way. We hope and pray that a new movement of liturgy from the margins will emerge and grow and this book will initiate that process.
This book is an invitation to resist the temptation to be co-opted by the Empire, and to find the nerve to come out of the Empire, creating counter-imperial alternatives.
Sudipta Singh
Mission Secretary, Research and Capacity Development, Council for World Mission, Singapore
1.Abraham Joshua Heschel, “On Prayer,” in Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, ed. Susannah Heschel (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 262.
3.“The Accra Confession,” World Communion of Reformed Churches, accessed May 20, 2020, http://wcrc.ch/accra/the-accra-confession, article 17.
4.“WARC/Global Dialogue on the Accra Confession,” accessed May 20, 2020, https://www.reformiert-info.de/WARCGlobal_Dialogue_on_the_Accra_Confession-4370-0-12-2.html.
PRAYING WITH UNWANTED