Worship & Mission through Beer & Hymns

This issue of Liturgy dealing with “Innovating Adapted Traditions,” guest-edited by Nicholas Zork, explores the many ways worship leaders are creatively addressing contemporary needs.

What follows is an excerpt from Ron Rienstra’s study of the new Beer & Hymns Movement. –– Melinda Quivik

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Alan and Eleanor Kreider, in Worship & Mission after Christendom, make the argument that the relationship between worship and mission—two of the church’s fundamental activities—is undergoing a massive upheaval. The church, they suggest, especially in the West, is moving from a culturally established Christendom to ... whatever comes next: a “Post-Christendom.”

Their argument posits that wherever the church has taken hold, either worship or mission has been prioritized to the detriment of the other. In Christendom cultures (i.e., for most of the church’s post-Constantinian history), worship has been at the center and mission at the margins. Churches with a common cultural history have worshiped in a relatively homogenous, expressive style. They have adopted a common worship “language” received and passed on in some sort of printed prayer-book or hymnal. Mission, meanwhile, is undertaken in places and to people deemed “other”—the “benighted heathen” of Charles Haddon Spurgeon and Reginald Heber’s “From Greenland’s Icy Mountains.”

In contrast, when the church finds itself in post-Christendom contexts, mission is placed at the center, as each individual and community reclaims the Great Commission as a gospel mandate: How can we prioritize sharing the good news of God’s inclusive love? At the same time, worship is decentered from the life of the gathered community, and it takes on increasingly heterogeneous forms.

This dynamic—a post-Christendom church emerging from a decidedly Christendom context—may help explain much of what is going on at Beer & Hymns events. If the situation of people singing a Christian repertoire together creates Christian congregations, then anytime and anywhere such people sing together, whether inside or outside an institutional church, they are engaging in “participatory religious musical practice capable of weaving together a religious community,” and church happens. Anyplace people sing from this repertoire, it’s worship. And anyone you’re singing with is your Christian community.

The originator of Beer & Hymns in Portland, Oregon, Amy Piatt, is the senior pastor at First Christian Church and a sixth-generation Disciples of Christ. She says that in this postmodern age, what it means to attend church is changing. “It’s probably, in the very near future, not going to be at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday morning wearing your best shoes and tie or dress. It’s going to be something different. I mean, what that is, we are still finding out, we’re still learning together. But it’s still holy, God is still there, and that’s what’s most important.”

The Beer & Hymns event in Raleigh says that their motto is from Martin Luther: “It’s better to think of church in the alehouse than to think of the ale-house in church.” Martin Luther almost certainly didn’t say this. Yet it does point to a significant dynamic. It may be that the increasing popularity of “Beer & Hymns” as a cultural phenomenon is one way that church people—and nonchurch people—are responding to the shift from Christendom to Post-Christendom.

Or maybe it’s just the beer. Turns out people like beer.

Find the full essay in Liturgy 34, no. 4, available online by personal subscription and through many libraries.

Ron Rienstra, “ Slightly Sloshed Spiritual Singing: The Beer & Hymns Movement in North America,” Liturgy 34, no. 4 (2019): 44-54.