Identity and Witness: Liturgy and the Mission of the Church

(Excerpt) The text for this lecture is a provocative aphorism which I owe to Stanley Hauerwas. In a 1987 presentation at Trinity Seminary, he said: The church has missionary power in direct proportion to its liturgical integrity. I cite this because Liturgy and Mission are often perceived as unrelated, if not actually opposed, to each other.1 Manuals and exhortations on evangelism often do not relate the Church\u27s mission of evangelization and conversion to the administration of Holy Baptism. Programs and advice on outreach which focus on inviting persons to the Sunday gathering of the Church often do not assume that what t~kes place at the Sunday gathering is the Holy Eucharist. For many advocates of the Church\u27s mission, liturgy belongs to the task of nurture, and attention to nurture must be balanced by attention to nurture. Liturgy is thus viewed as an inward focus, and the fear is that too much attention to liturgy makes the Church narcissistic