I'm not sure if Starbucks in the UK are using the same strap-lines and branding as they are here in North America - if they are I hadn't noticed until a fortnight ago. But every door of every branch (to be found on every block) is blazoned with the legend Take Comfort in Rituals. Now if there was ever a slogan that the Church ought to have grabbed first, this surely is it. And I don't mean that negatively at all. Rituals are fundamental to out basic human behaviours - and those who fancy they can enable worship devoid of any ritual are quite frankly kidding themselves as well as being rather dull and unobservant.
In the same way that walking through the glass door into your local Starbucks and nestling down with a coffee and a magazine is a way of creating some safe space for yourself (or so the marketeers would have you think), so the Church ought to function in a similar way with its public worship - as I think at one time the CofE did. But we've seen the safe-space, offered by a broad Church with a responsibility to the nation, be eroded by a demand for truth. I don't mean truth in a spiritual sense, but truth in a literal sense - and the two are not necessarily the same at all. The more faith becomes focused on literal truth, the more the Church's public worship begins to demand something from those who are present, whether they are dyed-in-the-wool-regulars or drifters-in. As more demands are made (both practical and creedal) so the public worship of the Church becomes less safe. Less comfortable.
This isn't about dumbing down, but rather it's about getting real. Neither is it about trying to woo people by being cuddly, but simply about being accessible. Not a single moment too soon, we are discovering that every fibre of our being as the people of God ought to be missional. It was never really meant to be any other way, but somehow the Church quickly got the idea that the best (or should that be 'most convenient') way to operate was to set up shop in a back street and hope for dear life that people would stumble across its many blessings when the time was right (a kind of Diagon Alley approach to mission and ministry....). Consequently public worship should be right there at the forefront of our missional activity. It must not be a holy mystery for the initiated, or a confessional knees-up for the convinced. That may well have been the practice of the early Church but it is not a model that will serve us well now. In out current cultural climate, we need to provide a safe space in which people can be welcomed and allowed to encounter the risen Christ.
For those who saw that superlative episode of Rev., I'm not suggesting that we should wheel in white sofas and a smoothie bar. The Church already has what it needs to create and maintain that safe space, and as Starbucks remind us, that is ritual. It doesn't need to be flamboyant (in fact it shouldn't be) and neither should it be fiddly and complicated. But it should be clear and allowed to speak for itself, rather than be numbingly didactic. At the end of the previous paragraph I initially typed 'a safe space in which people can be welcomed, engaged and encouraged to meet the risen Christ' but deleted it because even that sounds too busy, too deliberate, too 'sales-pitch'.
Printed on the paper bag in which I was handed my ginger & molasses cookie was the following epithet:
Flavours my senses,
sweetens my disposition,
stirs my imagination,
nourishes my dreams.
To make that claim for a cup of (generally overpriced) coffee is nothing short of absurd. But for the worship offered by God's people.....?