Multicultural Worship at Church of the Savior

Seeing artwork of a Cameroonian Jesus, an Indian Jesus, a Korean Jesus. Singing songs in Swahili, Korean, and Spanish. Why are we incorporating global art and music in our worship at Church of the Savior? 

Before we talk about the "why," let's first talk about "what" multicultural worship is. Multicultural worship is when multiple cultures are celebrated and multiple cultural elements are utilized in the worship. This celebration of diverse cultures could be done by using visual art, musical forms and styles, languages, stories, testimonies, instruments, dance, drama, communion elements, prayers, and gestures that reflect diverse cultures.

So why do we do multicultural worship at Savior? Here are some of the reasons.

1. Multicultural worship reminds us that God loves people of all cultures. God shows his steadfast love and faithfulness toward the nations (Psalm 117).

2. Multicultural worship shows that God welcomes diverse cultural gifts. C. Michael Hawn, in Gather into One: Praying and Singing Globally, writes that Revelation 21:24, 26 shows how God welcomes the cultural gifts of the nations into the Holy City, a place of perfect worship in the coming Kingdom of God.

3. Multicultural worship gives us a glimpse of worship in heaven. We see in Revelation 7:9–17 a great multitude “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages” (7:9) worshiping God in heaven. This multicultural worshiping community in heaven is a community we look forward to joining one day.

4. Multicultural worship was part of the church from the beginning. The church was born on the day of Pentecost when God was worshiped in multiple languages, spoken by "Jews from every nation under heaven" (Acts 2:5). Early Christian worship was multicultural, drawing from Jewish roots and Greek ideas, and the cultural symbols of the Greco-Roman era.

5. Multicultural worship enriches the global church. Multicultural worship reminds us that every culture has something to share with other cultures. The American church has something to receive from the African church, the Asian church, the European church, and vice versa. By cross-cultural sharing, our worship experience is enriched.

6. Multicultural worship reminds us that we are part of the global church. When we worship God using cultural expressions of others, we are reminded that we are part of something bigger, the global body of Christ. And when we sing songs from the global church–since songs are the prayers of the people–we are praying with the global body of Christ.

7. Multicultural worship is an act of loving our neighbor. When we embrace the many cultures around us, we show that we love our neighbors.

8. Multicultural worship allows the people from those cultures to worship God using their heart language. When we sing in Korean, it will be a foreign language for many at Savior, but for me, that is my heart language. As a Korean-American, when I see artwork of a Korean Jesus or sing worship songs in Korean, my heart is stirred and I feel more closely connected to God.

As Soong-Chan Rah writes in Many Colors: Cultural Intelligence for a Changing Church, the purpose of multicultural worship is to “honor the presence of God in different cultures . . . [and] to see God at work in all cultures, not just in one.” My prayer is that Church of the Savior continues to honor God's presence in all cultures, love others by embracing their cultures, and love the God of all nations.

Cover image: Kungfuman, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A Reflection on Embodied Worship

For years I’ve been trying to articulate for myself and for others what makes the way we Anglicans celebrate Holy Week and Easter unique. In my time in the Anglican church, I have been deeply formed by Holy Week. Holy Week has profoundly shaped how I think about the church as the family of God, God’s Kingdom, and the purpose of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. It’s been difficult for me to find the words to describe what I feel and have experienced. But this year, I’ve realized that the Resurrection is embodied to me through our worship in a way I hadn’t experienced before becoming an Anglican, and it’s our embodied worship that makes an immense difference in our discipleship.

Holy Week is a deeply embodied experience. In our celebration, our bodies play an active role. Our bodies are active in our worship across the church calendar: we sit, we stand, we kneel, we taste, we sing. But during Holy Week, we take this embodied worship to the next level by marching around outside the church and waving palms, by washing one another’s feet, by touching the wood of the cross. We can feel the heat from the new fire and the candles. We hear the announcement of the good news in the ringing of the bells. We dance around the aisles, sweating because we’re so tightly packed and the air conditioning can’t keep up. At the end of Holy Week, on Easter Monday, I always feel bone-tired.

All of this lively worship leads me to contemplate death. I think we find it easy to think about Jesus’ death in the abstract only—we don’t yet know Jesus’ literal body personally, and he ultimately wasn’t dead for very long. It’s more comfortable to disembody Jesus’ death than to identify with Jesus’ death in our own dying bodies. We like to think about Jesus as a person who ate and drank and ran and danced and enjoyed his body in the ways we enjoy ours. It’s scary to think that Jesus’ body experienced the destruction of Sin and Death the way that ours do and will. In our Communal Lament devotional for Lent this year, the stories and their authors returned to the idea of bodily suffering again and again. I was struck by how even our mental and emotional suffering affects our bodies. We don’t want to die, but Holy Week doesn’t let us escape the truth that it is only in dying that we will find true life. Jesus could only give us life through the death of his own body.

A few weekends ago, at our youth retreat, we focused our teaching and reflection times on the theme of “Embodied Spirituality.” We wanted our students to wrestle with the mystery that we are “embodied spirits” and that at the same time we are made of “spiritual flesh.” We wanted them to contemplate the importance of their bodies primarily because our internet saturated culture is literally killing the bodies of young people. Suicide is spiking among teenagers, and I suspect that it has something to do with how having a “life” on the internet can denigrate our embodied lives. Hating our bodies is not new to humanity, but the internet allows us to think that we can get away from our bodies or that we don’t really need our bodies to be ourselves. This kind of death does not bring life.

In all of this, I am reminded of Paul’s message to the Corinthian Christians about what the gospel has to do with bodies:

Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.
For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. . . .
But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man. For as in Adam all die, so in Christ all will be made alive. But each in turn: Christ, the firstfruits; then, when he comes, those who belong to him. Then the end will come, when he hands over the kingdom to God the Father after he has destroyed all dominion, authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death. For he “has put everything under his feet.”

— 1 Corinthians 15:1-6, 20-27, NIV, emphasis added

I love how this passage brings to light for us both the humanity and divinity of Jesus’ body. The post-resurrection appearances of Jesus demonstrate that there is a clear degree of similarity between Jesus’ old body that died and his new resurrected body. But most importantly, Jesus’ resurrected body is a new body, and both of those aspects are important. Our bodies are now subject to Death. In his resurrected body, Jesus defeats death. And someday, we will also have death-defeating, resurrected bodies. They will be similar to our earthly bodies now, but they will be also be transcendent, resurrected, and almost unrecognizable in their resistance to death. And as we look forward to Ascension Sunday, we can be confident that we have an Advocate who stands on our behalf at the right hand of the Father in his body. This is the same body that we share now in the Eucharist, and this is the same body that we will share at our own resurrection.

So when I think about how God met me during Holy Week, how he continues to meet us through Easter season, how he meets us in our Anglican worship, I continue to be humbled and encouraged that he meets us in his body.

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Ellen works at Savior as the Youth Coordinator. She is also an Editor of Bibles & Reference at Tyndale House Publishers; she has worked there since 2014. She has worked and volunteered in a variety of youth ministries over the past decade and she began attending Savior in 2017.

Candles and Holy Water: Embodied Worship During Lent

In the non-liturgical tradition in which I grew up, we seldom thought about worshipping God with our bodies. We thought about theology and invited Jesus into our hearts as we emphasized the spiritual and intellectual aspects of faith, but we talked very little about what it meant to worship God in our physical bodies as we live in the material world.

Only when I discovered liturgical traditions did I encounter a form of worship that sought to engage the whole person, not just the mind and heart. The "smells and bells" that had baffled me as a child and young adult suddenly clicked into place as forms of worship that engaged our senses.

Kneeling in prayer, walking forward for communion, standing for the Gospel reading: all of these physical movements involve our bodies in worship. Our physical postures also reinforce our worship, as we stand to show respect, bow our heads to show contrition, shuffle along the pews with our neighbors as we commune with Christ as a body.

The colors of the vestments and altar cloths direct our minds to the seasons of the church year: purple for the fasts, white for the feasts, green for the growing time. We feel the bread in our hands as we receive the body of Christ, taste the sweet acidity of the wine. The water of baptism runs down our heads.

Without doubt, we learn about and experience God in intangible ways. But we also experience God through the material world and in our embodied existence, a reality towards which the motions of our liturgical worship point.

During this season of Lent, Savior makes available two different tangible ways to connect with God in worship: through the holy water in the baptismal font at the entry to the sanctuary and through the candle table available during the Eucharist.

The baptismal font, filled with holy water, stands first as a reminder of our own baptism. Even in this season of Lent, when we remember our great need for a savior, we take comfort in our baptism, in knowing that we are Christ's own.

Additionally, the baptismal font at the entrance reminds us that Jesus was baptized by John immediately before he went out into the wilderness to fast for 40 days, during which time he experienced temptation. Like us, Jesus suffered and was tempted in the wilderness; like us, he could cling to the assurance of his baptism as he suffered hunger and temptation.

Perhaps simply seeing the font is enough to remind you that you belong to Christ and that Christ suffered like you and for you. Dipping your fingers in the cool water and making the sign of the cross, physically engaging your senses and your body, can also be a powerful reminder of the cleansing waters of baptism.

Like the physical presence of the water, the candle table offers a tangible representation of our prayers. The light of the candles, flickering upward, can remind us that our prayers are ascending to God; the flame itself might remind us of the Holy Spirit, present with the people of God, or of the light of Christ.

However, no matter the tradition we grew up in, candles can feel a little strange, a little too ritualistic — as if we are catching God's attention through our actions. The candles we light are symbolic, but not magical. They are a physical representation of something spiritual, but they do not give our prayers special weight.

Lighting a candle for a prayer can be meaningful, but it is never necessary; do not feel obligated to light a candle if you are uncomfortable with the idea. But as you see the lit candles flickering on the table, your own or those of others, take a moment to prayer for the needs represented there. We all know that others in our community are praying for many things; as we see a physical reminder of those prayers, let it also remind us to pray for our community.

Lent is time to remember that we experience and worship God in our bodies as well as our minds and hearts. The ashes imposed on our foreheads at the start of Lent and the traditional spiritual discipline of Lenten fasting forces us to remember that we are embodied, we are dust.

Whether you engage with the candles or the water, Lent is a good opportunity to reflect on what it means to be embodied people whose Savior also became embodied with us, suffering as a human being for our sakes.

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Sarah Lindsay currently serves as the Director of Communications and Coordinator of Children’s Ministry at Savior. Sarah has a background in teaching (English literature and writing) and she enjoys reading and writing. She has been an Anglican since she discovered liturgical worship in college; she and her family joined Savior in 2017.