CRCNA Inside Baseball #2: Coasting on Formation
This is probably not unique to the CRCNA
If we use Lindbeck’s category and think about a denomination as a culture, it helps us make sense of some things that are going on. I want to pick on one of these things which is formation. Formation is the what happens when you take a piece of information in or you absorb a part of the culture in and make it part of your life. To bring up Canada again, I have been formed by my country to say sorry as a default response in a lot of situations. It’s just a part of who I am now, and not something I think about. Formation doesn’t exclusively happen through ingesting information. Sometimes it does, but it’s more often supported by practices and culture. To explain what I mean, it’s best to talk about a specific example.
At one point in time, if you went to a CRC, the Ten Commandments were read every week during Sunday Morning worship before the prayer of confession. This practice came out of John Calvin’s theology which said that one of the ways we use the Law is to convict us of our own sinfulness. By reading the Ten Commandments each week, we would be reminded of the ways in which we have broken various parts of the law, and then we would confess our sins more honestly.
This practice of worship also connected with our catechesis. There’s an RCA pastor named Stephen C. Schaffer that I have followed on social media fora few years. I saw him comment once that the Heidelberg Catechism makes a lot more sense as a teaching tool when you’ve been exposed to the Ten Commandments in the worship service every week. This makes sense. If you’re a teenager in catechism class and you get to the section on the Ten Commandments, you’re suddenly given an expansion and explanation for part of the worship service that previously seemed confusing to you. So we had this practice that fits into the culture by connecting to our theology and our confessions.
Most CRC congregations I have worshipped with don’t read the Ten Commandments weekly anymore. It seems to have begun getting dropped sometime in the 90’s although I am sure there are congregations who still do it. Why? Well reading that specific passage can become quite rote. If the full eighteen verses of the Ten Commandments are read by the minister every Sunday, you start to respond to its reading by saying “I get it” internally. It doesn’t necessarily hit you the same way every week. A pastor told me a story of how one time they left out one of the ten commandments in their reading of the law, and then asked later in the service if anyone had noticed which one was missing. No one in the congregation did. I also probably would not have noticed.
Eventually someone says “why don’t we just take it out?” Everyone already knows the Ten Commandments. We don’t need to keep saying it every week. We get it. Formation accomplished! So it gets taken out.
Initially this makes no difference in the life of the community. The people have been formed by reading the Ten Commandments every single week for years. If it’s not read again for a while, the people still retain that formation. Culture doesn’t go away overnight. Their understanding of some parts of sin has been shaped by the repeated hearing of those words over and over again.
But now the community is doing what I would call “coasting on formation.” When you develop a thick culture through repeated practices, it forms people in a particular way and creates a certain amount of momentum. When you take away the practices, the work of that formation persists in the community and keeps having an effect. If the members of a congregation interact together, then newer members of the church will absorb some of the implicit teachings of the Ten Commandments just through conversation and interaction with older members. The formation created by that practice persists in the community for a time. Culture and practices build momentum, and that momentum keeps going if everything else stops.
Eventually, in the absence of regular practice, coasting slows down and then eventually stops. People in the community grow older. Knowledge goes from explicit to implicit. If new practices don’t replace what was taken away, then that formation eventually disappears. In a congregation with very few shared practices, this coasting runs out of steam even faster. As people tend to act more individualistically in churches, keeping to themselves and their families, there isn’t a chance to pass on the formation without practices. You can imagine one day going into the same church and discovering only a few people can name all of the commandments.
Just to be clear, I don’t think we have to read all Ten Commandments in worship every week. I think there are ways to include them in other ways or other forms to keep people engaged and deal with the “I get it” effect that repetition can create. But this is an example of the kind of practice that used to be part of our culture which was removed without necessarily thinking a lot about what kind of long term effects it would have. Sometimes we take things away without thinking about what to replace them with and we don’t see a problem because of the way in which we’re able to coast on that formation for a while.
If the CRC wants to continue existing, then we need to take the work of formation seriously. I think it’s going to mean agreeing on some shared practices. This is not a thing which we have traditionally done. I have a copy of the 1930 Acts of Synod which include a rejection of a synodically mandated liturgy for worship. But one of our strengths in the past was creating a thick culture that deeply formed people. I work with the remnants of that formation every day and give thanks for them. I also know that it’s going to take a lot of work to get that kind of formation back into place.