Last month, I dug into my experience with a preaching class as someone with a performing background. You can read it here:
When I tell someone I’m in seminary as someone with a theatre degree, and they start trying to make that make sense in their heads, the first place they usually go is preaching.
“Well yeah, because there’s lots of public speaking!” They offer.
If you think of theatre as fancy-public-speaking, I can see why this would be the case…
I went on to explain some ways preaching is like theatre and is supported by theatre. In fact, my preaching class surprised me with its familiar theatricality and imaginative possibilities. But the truth is, most of the time, I try to dissuade people from jumping to preaching as the obvious moment of theatre in a church service. Yes, you’ve got a person up front speaking it aloud to a surrounding crowd. Even so, I contend that when a group of people gathers together to be formed by communal worship, theatre happens in other, more prevalent ways.
Liturgy
“The work of the people” at first feels like a mundane meaning for liturgy, which so often entails those time-textured prayers which spin and dance in our mouths. I remember being disappointed when I first heard it. But I find that definition resonates better once overlaid with the filter of theatre.
Theatre is almost as old as we are, and for most of history it has served not as entertainment, but as truth-telling. People gathered not to escape, but to return. It first looked like someone enacting their origin stories for a community. Then it looked like a Greek actor and chorus telling a story through call-and-response, with limited movement. Medieval theatre like the York Corpus Christi Plays took over the entirety of towns, together rehearsing the drama of Christ’s passion. Only recently have we considered performed storytelling to be media for idle consumption; it has a far longer history as being a reorienting narrative rendered in flesh for communal unification. Historically, theatre has been a form of liturgy.
However sparse or densely thicketed a church’s liturgy is, it stands as their shared choreography of worship. A determinative text shapes truth for the community and is rehearsed among them, whether with fog machines or incense. Like Greek actor and chorus, the priest or pastor leads the congregation through the drama of God. Liturgy reveals that we are but one piece in a larger body, one soul in a parish, one voice in a creed, one moment in a long tradition, one church on a planet, one phrase in the history of salvation. One actor in a hallowed, live-wire story.
Liturgy makes scripture into a script, taking it from the page and making the words our flesh. It severs the partition between life and worship by putting holy mysteries in the hands of the people. Linger long enough in church and you will memorize the songs of the angels; you will find yourself making lunch while unconsciously joining your voice with all the company of heaven who forever sing, “holy, holy, holy.”1
Liturgy is also still the work of the stage, still an animated dance of individuals saying, “I’ll do this, you do that, and the story gets told.” In a single moment of a play, the actor shouts, the audience leans forward, the stage manager murmurs a cue, the board operator presses a button, the stagehand darts backstage, and the lights shift. Meaning gets made and beauty happens—yet you cannot pinpoint a single aspect as the essential moment; it is the work of the people.
Sacrament
Perhaps the most profoundly theatrical things happening on a Sunday are the sacraments. Take the most widely acknowledged one, the Lord’s Supper. We have our script(ure), our actors (the priest as Christ, us as God’s own), our blocking (take, eat), and the quiet yet present touch of a director (the Spirit).
This sacred performance does for the church what ancient theatre did for its communities—it names truth, forms an identity, and teaches us how to go forward. One quote often attributed to Augustine invites us at the Eucharist to “Behold what you are, become what you receive.”2 In the bread and cup, we discover our common likeness as the body of Christ and are simultaneously knit further into his image, all at once broken, given, and made whole. Together we rehearse reality, thinning the veil between here and heaven, and practicing the roles which we play in the world.
Meanwhile at the front, our priest stands in persona Christi, literally portraying our gracious host. The words they speak (lines), their attire (costume), and their movements (blocking) reach back to an upper room and forward towards a marriage feast. Two thousand years of divine tenderness rest in their hands as they invite us to receive.
Viewing a church service through a theatrical lens may stir up resistance in you. Is this manipulative? Is this fake? Have I suggested that all of worship is merely production value? “Theatrical” and “performative” aren’t generally complimentary terms for describing a church experience.
If we peel back the curtain of church and discover theatre, we have not uncovered falsehood, because theatre is not false. Rather than removing us further from authenticity, theatre helps us dissolve the divide between sacred and secular. Shakespeare’s oft-quoted line that “all the world’s a stage” prods a deep truth.3 All that we do is storytelling, a rehearsal, a performance, a shared narrative. And there is a reason 43% of Scripture is narrative and another 33% poetry. We can look at the content of our stories and notice: our God creates from speech where other gods create from violence. Our God is a storyteller.
The theatre of church peels back the curtain of reality to reveal this cosmic story being performed all around us. Rather than disguising inauthenticity, performing the liturgy together reveals our place in a larger narrative. Rather than offering escape, it invites us to return. The sacraments are a rewilding of reality, drawing us from our bureaucratic scaffoldings back into the Story. David Mason puts it this way:
“Insisting on a distinction between religion and theatre is itself the thing that reduces religion to fantasy and theatre to pretending because the distinction overlooks the creative force that is endemic to humanhood.”4
If you go from here and find yourself in church noticing theatre, my hope is not that you will tense, worrying that you have uncovered pretense. Instead I hope you notice it, mark it as performance, and think, “What does it tell me about God that embodying a narrative is this deeply embedded in what it means to be human?”
Cover Image: An English Country Performance of Macbeth, various artists, 1790.
The Book of Common Prayer 1979, Holy Eucharist Rite II.
Augustine of Hippo, Easter Sermon 227.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It.
David V. Mason, The Performative Ground of Religion and Theatre.
Interesting that "performative" has pejorative connotations but "ceremony" does not . . . although maybe it does, since it seems Western culture is so enamored of the private individual and their own atomized existence that it is hard to find the kind of performed, ceremonial activities which your description of public worship would fit into. It's quite rare to see public-facing ceremony and ritual in modern American culture: the only times I can think of it happening, besides worship, are weddings, graduations, little kids' birthday parties, and the courtroom. There are, though, quite a lot of private rituals: people's skin care routines, coffee in the morning, etc., etc.
The Eucharist as drama is profound. I am Kenyan. The majority of our churches here are Charismatic and so I happen to be in one. I have grown up in one and for most part that's all I knew about churches. It was until I entered into the world of theology that my eyes were open and I beheld liturgy for the first time. It was surreal.
Now when I think about our churches, we dropped liturgy for consumer based time of churches. So now what we have is not beautiful drama that we ourselves are called to participate in, it's just a terrible play really. Bad actors, terrible props as well.
There is something you said that is quite something. Many of our services are tailored to make the person preaching the highest point in our 'drama'. I am curious to know what you think about my space.