Abstract
Gathering Disciples is a fine set of essays honoring the life, artistry, scholarship, and ministry of British theologian-pastor Christopher J. Ellis. The British Baptist editors and contributors to this festschrift recognize the “rich tapestry” of contributions Ellis has made, and continues to make, to British Baptist life and theology (p. x). Considering his wide-ranging gifts as a pastor, Baptist college principal, Baptist Union president, theologian, ecumenist, hymn writer, liturgist, musician, and artist, “polymath” may be an apt descriptor of Ellis.
Ellis is arguably Baptists’s most significant liturgical theologian of his generation. As the editors claim in their introduction, “Chris has been our key thinker with regard to Baptist worship” (p. xiii). In collaboration with Myra Blyth, Ellis edited Gathering for Worship (Canterbury Press/British Baptist Union, 2005). As Steve Harmon has rightly noted, Gathering for Worship is “the closest approximation of the Book of Common Prayer issued by any Baptist Union to date” (p. xiv). As the editors assert, Gathering for Worship “will perhaps be [Ellis’s] most long-lasting legacy” (p. xiv). Ellis was also one of the editors for an earlier worship manual, Patterns and Prayers for Christian Worship (OUP, 1991).
He is also the author of Gathering: A Theology and Spirituality in the Free Church Tradition (SCM Press, 2004), the most significant work in liturgical theology by a Baptist thinker in recent memory. In many respects, Gathering testifies that worship matters because it touches upon the source and sustenance of Christian faith and belief.
As a testimony to his gifts as a theologian-liturgist-song writer, a unique and welcomed feature of this festschrift is that each chapter is prefaced by a hymn text written by Ellis. Some contributors exposit, to varying degrees, the hymns given. Other contributors use the hymn text as a point of departure or a framing device to explore a particular theme and its place in Baptist life (p. xvi). This reviewer gladly commends the hymn texts, in their own right, as worthy of study and reflection.
Although the book is not formally divided into parts, the book moves from several essays which explore the potential formative character of Baptist worship to a couple of essays on discipleship to a set of essays on how theology is shaped by worship practices (reading Scripture, baptism, and holy communion); from essays on ecclesiology (communion of saints, ecumenism) to a final set of essays on doctrine (the Trinity, divine sovereignty, and the “missionary God”). Such movement testifies to Ellis’s argument “that Christian worship is ‘a way of learning more about God and our experience of God’” (p. xvii). The breadth of these essays also witnesses the catholicity that characterizes Ellis’s theology and ministry practice.
Space does not permit a full treatment of each contribution to the festschrift. So, let me draw attention to select essays that caught my attention. Robert Ellis, brother of Chris Ellis, considers how worship can be theologically and intellectually formative. Robert Ellis’s essay offers one of the most sustained analyses of the given hymn text, which demonstrates how the hymn gestures toward key themes in his brother’s theology. The essay also provides a helpful biographical section on Ellis’s life, work, and passions (music, reading, and the arts). Craig Gardiner’s excellent essay on the “askesis of worship” (p. 30) focuses on how, on the one hand, worship rehearses and disciplines the community of faith to live in a Christ-like way in defiance of worldly principalities and powers and, on the other, to perform the truth of the gospel in the world (p. 30). Like Gardiner, Ashley Lovett explores the convergence of discipleship and liturgy by specifically attending to how the Eucharist can form the body of Christ. Lovett theologically analyzes three Eucharist patterns in Gathering for Worship (“A Simple Pattern,” “Hungering for Justice,” and “Re-membering and Reconciling”) to discern the ways these liturgies have the capacity to morally form the community of disciples gathered at Christ’s table. Shona Shaw offers a wonderful essay on the affective-formative character of congregational song. In singing together, congregations are “literally rehearsing and performing” theology (p. 47). By emphasizing somatic ways of knowing, Shaw effectively reminds the reader of the problematic tendency to privilege the intellect, thereby subordinating “all other noetic functions of the body in worship” (p. 56). Like Lovett’s essay, Shaw draws attention to importance of the human body in worship.
Myra Blyth’s essay on the Lord’s Supper offers an important historical survey of Baptist worship manuals since 1960, with attention to how changes in holy communion liturgies have affected British Baptist theology and polity. Impacts of these changes are: (1) an evolving trend “towards ever more open table fellowship” (p. 146); (2) a re-discovery of covenant theology as central to Baptist identity and ecclesiology; and (3) how this renewal of covenant ecclesiology, in convergence with communion ecclesiology, has provided “rich language” for Baptist-Roman Catholic ecumenical dialog. Offering an anamnetic-pneumatic-pastoral argument, Ruth Gouldbourne’s stellar essay on the communion of saints rightly asserts that while Baptists’s “formal theology may pay no attention to communion and community of saints,” Baptist worship, especially hymnody, “and our experience reflect a different truth” (p. 176). Her essay wonderfully complements the recent book Baptists and the Communion of Saints (BUP, 2014) by Paul S. Fiddes, Brian Haymes, and Roger Kidd. Of all the essays in this volume, Paul S. Fiddes provides the most thorough theological analysis of the hymn text given. In developing a doctrine of God as a triune creator through exploring the theological depths of Ellis’s hymn “Living God, we come to worship,” Fiddes’s rich essay bears witness to the truth of the ancient dictum, lex orandi, lex credendi.
At least two features of Ellis’s theology emerge from these essays. First is Ellis’s insistence that worship is embodied theology. As we pray and proclaim, sing and be silent, confess and profess, eat at Jesus’s table, and baptize in the Triune name, we are immersed in the experience of God and in the language of faith. Filled, soaked, and saturated with the story of God, we press and write the grammar of faith upon our hearts, minds, imaginations, and bodies. The best theology has always been deeply doxological, and the best worship richly theological.
Second, worship reveals identity. Because worship is meant to express in the lives of the faithful what it is to be a church, it must also express the self-understanding of the body of Christ as a church. Building upon this foundation, Ellis argues that the story of Baptist worship reveals what he calls “the Baptist soul.” Hence, questions of Baptist identity can be addressed by examining the embodied convictions within Baptist worship practices. Reflection on the practices and theology of the worshiping life of Baptist communities is a quite refreshing approach to the issue of Baptist identity. When historians and theologians tell the Baptist story, they often do so by paying attention to the stories of assemblies and conventions, the patterns of progress and decline of various Baptist bodies, the influence of key figures and personalities, stories of rapid growth along with conflict and division, and missionary successes, sacrifices, and even failures. Yet, rarely have such historians and theologians told the Baptist story through the lens of the central practice of the Christian community, its worship of God. Hence, Ellis’s study of Baptist worship not only yields an historical description of the worshiping practices of such a diverse people as Baptists. Demonstrating the influence of James William McClendon Jr., worship also lays bare certain theological convictions held by Baptist communities. Thus, worship reveals and performs identity.
Some essays are more pastoral and practical in character and tone; other essays are more academic. This combination reflects the depth and wholeness of Ellis’s ministry as a pastor, artist, liturgist, educator, and academic theologian. Although some variation in the quality of the essays exists, no essay is weak. I do wish some contributors might have engaged more substantially the influence of Alexander Schmemann’s thought on Ellis’s liturgical theology. And very little discussion attends to Ellis’s contribution to recent liturgical theology.
Indeed, this excellent volume of essays honors the life, ministry, and theological scholarship of Chris Ellis. And these essays collectively testify to the abundant wellspring of the church’s primary theology expressed in its worshipping life. I highly recommend this book.