The Rev Roddy Hamilton highlights the importance of the ‘language of faith’.

FOR centuries we have trained an exclusive group of leaders to guide us and carry us through the patterns of our worship.

Such training is at university level and links us with ancient traditions, serves as a guiding corrective, and creates order as leaders have usually been ordained (same root word) creating order in what we do because worship is vital to who we are and our relationship with God.

As we increasingly invite more people to lead our worship as clergy numbers reduce, however, might there be an opportunity to open up alternative gifts in the leadership of worship in order to deepen and reimagine our worship?

Since the enlightenment there has been quite a shift from originally experiencing many stories as metaphor to engaging with them as literal events. We have long used worship to explain biblical ideas, stories and texts. It gives us a power over them if we can explain them, but the bible is so full of metaphor we lose the many nuanced layers of sacred meaning by limiting our encounter to a literal explanation.

We urgently need to find the poetry of our faith for our worship to be a living encounter again: creating an experience that is more than an exercise in explanation or understanding. For example, the burning bush: I remember being at a bible study where the leader explained there was a particular bush, when the sun was setting and the wind was blowing in a particular direction, Moses could well have imagined the bush was burning. We explain away stories apologetically treating them as coming from the imagination of someone less educated than us. The story is meant to be a metaphor! It is an invitation to recognise holy places are everywhere and we are invited into them daily.

It feels often that the church is losing its language of faith: the poetry, the metaphors, the word pictures that our ancestors used to explain something they didn’t have the words for.

In leading worship, perhaps part of our training is to explore art and poetry and symbol far more, to engage with how these things work in the human psyche and invite us into the mysteries of GodSome will want to leave literal stories as proof texts of who God is, through such one-off events. Others wish to read them as metaphors that become invitations to an encounter with that same God in our everyday.

Those of us who encounter worship from the pews, might expect our worship leaders to explore poetry, encounter art, engage with the abstract to interpret our faith stories. Indeed, is it not vital to do so for anyone who wishes to lead a service where bread becomes body and wine, a new covenant, to have any sense of what is going on in such moments, or even use words like ‘incarnation’, ‘transfiguration’, ‘resurrection’? Can we honestly use such words without having engaged and explored a sense of the art, the abstract, the poetry which allows such words to expand within us beyond definition and into the realms of experience; an encounter with the sacred?

“We urgently need to find the poetry of our faith for our worship to be a living encounter again…

Having a deeper understanding of metaphor, and a richer experience of symbol and image in our worship might invite us to speak of worship more fully as an encounter with wonder, mystery, and God.

The Rev Roddy Hamilton is minister at Bearsden: New Kilpatrick.