Liturgy 40.1: How the Pandemic Has Changed Worship

Issue 40.1 of Liturgy is entitled “How the Pandemic Has Changed Worship” and is guest-edited by Taylor Burton-Edwards. What follows is Burton-Edwards’ introduction to the issue.

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The Covid-19 pandemic undeniably changed the world in myriad ways, large and small. Indeed, the pandemic created one of those indelible markers in how we think about time itself, of the way life was before it came, the many ways life was different while the pandemic was at its most virulent, and now in the aftermath as we all live into what has become the new normal.

This was no less the case for Christian communities, and more particularly, the practices of Christian worship, than it has been for the basic building blocks of economics, including wages, supply chains, worker safety and how work gets done.

This volume offers a variety of essays that explore lasting changes in Christian worship practices in the United States. My opening essay analyzes the findings to date of an ongoing series of Lilly Endowment-funded studies by the Hartford Institute for Research in Religion to provide a “big data” approach to the question of how worship practices have changed in ways that appear likely to endure and the implications of these changes for religious communities moving forward.

In the second essay, Michael Huerter offers multiple academic lenses on what some believe is the most impactful of those changes, the rise of hybrid worship as a prevalent practice, and in particular how that informs the musical life of congregations.

The next four essays bring the voices of pastors serving in different contexts (though three in Georgia) to explore the lasting changes in worship they have observed or been involved in making and what those mean for the congregations in their contexts. Jonathan Trapp interviewed leaders from three diverse ELCA congregations in the Greater Atlanta area. Adriane Burgess reports on her life as pastor of an African-American United Methodist congregation 100 miles southwest of Atlanta in Columbus, Georgia, and the changes she found necessary not only in worship but in pastoral sensibility to continue to be a faithful shepherd among her people. I offer my observations about lasting worship changes in the three ELCA congregations I have served in South Georgia since 2020. Finally, we hear from Juan Huertas, called as Minister of Proclamation and the Practice of Justice at a large United Church of Christ congregation in Lincoln, Nebraska. His position was an intentional move by that congregation to innovate with online-only worship and to strengthen its congregation’s impact post-pandemic.

These diverse voices, diverse approaches, diverse experiences, and even diverse styles of writing reflect some of the diverse impacts of the pandemic on Christian worship life in the U.S. Indeed, in reading them, you will not be able to miss the diversity! Yet in curating this volume, I find myself struck with the common underlying concerns each of them raises for the leadership and care of congregations—expressed in worship—as we live into life in our country post-pandemic.