In This Issue: "Revival Through Trauma-Informed Worship: A Theologian’s Guide to Practical Matters"
The issue of Liturgy entitled “Revival,” guest-edited by Melanie Ross, explores the meaning of Christian revival in the multiple forms that have used that term. This excerpt by Jan Rippentropp Schnell entitled “Revival Through Trauma-Informed Worship: A Theologian’s Guide to Practical Matters” explores the hallmarks of worship practice that attend to the needs of people experiencing trauma. Those practices intend to “settle the body” toward healing. –– Melinda Quivik
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Revivals’ goals, understandings, and methods have impacted US religious and cultural landscapes, especially as revivals accounted for religious affect and the transformative agency of God and worshipers. As a liturgical theologian from a tradition that does not draw a distinct historical line to Charles Finney’s revivals, I come to this article not as a denominational insider but as one who studies the philosophy of emotion and the impact of worship practices in the everyday lives of worshipers. It is important to me in this article that I neither take revival as “renewal,” a term around which my denomination has greater comfort, nor make Finney’s revival into mere starting blocks to write an article I could have written without considering his tradition. Instead, revival will impact fundamental aspects of this article, including the guiding questions and structure.
By the end of the article, we will have considered how trauma-informed worship may itself
participate in the revival of assemblies. First, some definitions, methods, and purposes of revival
worship ground the discussion. Then, the bulk of the article explores what it might look like
to view trauma-informed worship as reviving assemblies by looking at four trauma-informed
practices I find resonant with revival goals: acknowledging brokenness, nurturing connectivity,
noticing God’s movement, and settling bodies. For this article, trauma will be defined according
to therapist and trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem. “We typically think of trauma as the result
of a specific and deeply painful event … but trauma can also be the body’s response to a long
sequence of smaller wounds. It can be a response to anything that [the body] perceives as too
much, too soon, or too fast.”. . .
In his 1868 Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Finney gave a definition that will be used in this article. He wrote that a revival “is the renewal of the first love of Christians, resulting in the awakening and conversion of sinners to God. In the popular sense, a revival of religion in a community is the arousing, quickening, and reclaiming of the more or less backslidden church and the more or less general awakening of all classes, and insuring attention to the claims of God.” Revivals renew people’s love of God and result in people waking up, converting their hearts, and returning to God. In public, revivals have looked like energized crowds and motivated individuals whose feelings assure their restored attention to God’s claim on their lives.
Finney was clear that revival worship involves a process with at least three agents: God, truth,
and sinner. God and (the speaker of) truth move a sinner from conviction through repentance
to reformation. In the revival setting, conviction occurs when truth and sinner come into con-
tact. Finney saw this as God’s work, saying “[God] brings the sinner where the truth reaches
his ears or his eyes.” The truth of God’s word alerts one to notice the sin in their life. The
next step is repentance. . . In repentance, a person begins again a path of obedience toward God.
Three moves of conviction, repentance, and reformation were key to Finney’s revivals.
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Jan Rippentrop Schnell is a Lutheran (ELCA) pastor, liturgical theologian, and religious ethicist, and the associate professor of liturgics at Wartburg Theological Seminary, Dubuque, Iowa.