Luther at the Movies: Piepkorn on Services in the Service of Evangelism
Luther at the Movies: Piepkorn on Services in the Service of Evangelism
I reproduce below some interesting comments from the late Arthur Carl Piepkorn, culled from the Arthur Carl Piepkorn Center for Evangelical Catholicity website:During the Good Shepherd Insitute conference this year (2006), someone asked "How can we used Matins if we're practicing weekly communion?" Weekly communion is the trend. Slowly we're moving back to the historical practice (not the 20th century but before that!) Less and less do you see congregations only having communion twice a month. Rev. Wieting's book The Blessings of Weekly Communion published by CPH is an example of this trend. My opinion is its a good idea. Yet the question remains. How can we do the "lesser" orders of Matins, Vespers, Responsive Prayer, and such if we're having a Divine Service every sunday? Rev. Piepkorn's solution is.... have them, just not on Sunday morning. Now there's an idea! Church doing church all week? Church being about Church 24-7 and not just on the Lord's Day? Profound! His main point of the lesser orders providing a better entrance into the Divine Service for new believers or unbelievers is well said. I thought I was original in advocating this in Missions class. I guess not. Ancient practice was to dismiss non-confirmed people from the sanctuary before the Service of the Altar. So such a practice of not presenting something wholly unintelligible to an unbeliever (Christ's presence at the Supper in bread and wine). Catechize first, then come to the meal."In October 1951 a pastor wrote to Piepkorn for help with a paper on the use of the Liturgy for evangelistic purposes that the pastor was preparing for delivery at a pastoral conference. Piepkorn replied:The subject is interesting and you should be able to do quite a lot with the evangelistic emphasis in the Confession of Sins, the Nicene Creed, the Common Offertories, the General Prayer, the Preface for Advent, Lent and Easter, the Agnus Dei, the Words of Institution and the Aaronic Blessing. At the same time, you ought to give due consideration to the fact that the Liturgy is part of the Church’s private culture and was never designed or intended for evangelistic purposes. The propaganda service of the early Church was the synaxis [the Service of the Word], not the Eucharist. The synaxis consisted almost wholly of lections and instructions—no prayers. In this connection let me commend to your reading Dom Gregory Dix’ The Shape of the Liturgy. My own feeling is that we should not try to make the Liturgy do too much. We should probably do better if we held special services (weekly or monthly, or daily for short periods) for the evangelization of the unchurched. . . .I have observed that parishes which scaled the Liturgy down in the interest of evangelization (abbreviating it, miscegnating it with "popular" hymns, and eliminating the traditional ceremonial) have never been able to return to a really more adequate worship level. My own experience is that my people and I can do more with pagan and Protestant inquirers in a service designed especially for their needs—strongly educational and evangelistic, as informal as possible without vulgarizing the subject matter, and with plenty of give-and-take (achieved through such means as discussion, panel presentations, audiovisual aids, pulpit dialogue, and a question box). After they have been adequately instructed, then they can be brought into a normal Lutheran service and participate in it with spiritual profit.(Letter of October 16, 1951 to the Rev. D.)"At the same time, Piepkorn was 'profoundly skeptical of "informal"' worship services. In November of 1952, he wrote in reply to another pastor:I am no foe of experimentation; I have done my share in my time, and please God, I shall keep on doing so. I am profoundly grateful for every valuable insight that I have been able to obtain from the experimentation of other people. After eleven years in the military service, during most of which I occupied a supervisory position where I was compelled to be present at literally hundreds of religious services of all denominations, I am profoundly skeptical of "informal†worship. . . .I have repeatedly insisted that one service a week in our churches is inadequate and that we ought to have a considerable variety of services to meet a variety of needs and, what is ultimately probably more important to accomplish, a variety of functions. Part of the problem, of course, is the size of our parishes. This is only one of many areas where we are paying what seems to me to be too high a price for uneconomically small parochial organizations. At the same time, I believe that each ought as a minimum to offer its membership at least one service a Sunday and other major Holy Days in which the Blessed Sacrament is celebrated according to the order of service prescribed by our Church. If this were done, it would seem to me to be quite within the province of the pastor and the parish to engage in as much legitimate experimentation at other hours as the facilities of the parish permit.(November 6, 1952 Letter to the Rev. S)Now, Rev. Piepkorn's struggles with the LCMS, the LCMS's struggles with Rev. Piepkorn, charges of rigorism on the one hand and of heresy on the other, notwithstanding—what say you to his suggestion regarding alternate services in the aid of outreach and evangelism, rather than transforming the Lord's Day primary service into a squishy "seeker-sensitive" hybrid? Is this realistic given the small sizes of many parishes, and would this mean straining resources to the breaking point?
