Individualists are incapable of worship

The awesomely corporate act of public worship assumes, requires, demands a celebrating assembly of believing persons who have not lost the sense of being part of humanity, the sense of relation to, interdependence with, even identification with every other human being—as consequences of the love of God. People who approach that act, who gather on Sunday as self-contained unites, individuals for whom all others are merely competitors or makes, are simply incapable of it. Any sensitive pastoral minister has long since observed that the Sunday assembly's liturgical problems (participation, engagement, understanding, experience) cannot be solved by liturgical reforms alone.

Of course the church needs continuing liturgical reform. The bed of a living tradition has to be dredged constantly, as a maxim has it. One of the glories of this confusing and promising century is the resumption of that invaluable service in so many parts of the faith communities of Judaism and Christianity. No question about it. Pressing those issues is a most important contribution to the life of faith.

But it is insufficient in itself. the cancer of Western and American individualism infects that Sunday assembly and produces as church that is barely capable of celebrating the eucharist or any other liturgical rite. We cannot blame the liturgy for the fact that we who celebrate it, the faith community, are so mesmerized by the idol of rugged individualism that it is dreamy to call us a "community" at all. It is quite impossible to see in our corporate life a community of biblical faith committed to witnessing in the world the advent of God's reign of justice and peace.

—The Rev. Robert Hovda, Worship, January 1991