When visiting Namibia, I discovered a group of Lutheran Christians living in the desert. Their home typified round, African homes made of organic materials. They fit the dry, dusty desert. “It hasn’t rained there for 50 years,” the draught-stricken parishioners said.

The brick walls of a new, rectangular church stood next to the old edifice.
“What style will be the roof on the new church have? “ I queried looking at the steep-pitch roof on the old structure. “A roof like the old one,” was the answer.

I thought for a moment and asked, “ And from where were the missionaries who started your church?”

“Norway,” was the revealing response.

My story fits the question about style of liturgy for the Basic English Worship Service (BEWS). What kind of liturgy will the new worship have to fit the worshipers? Do we want an imposed, traditional, not-so-universal Catholic high mass or a form fitting new Christians or newly arrived worshipers? And how do people work as a COS team and without a pope?

A basic premise of COS is the participation of the parishioners. When a single member of BEWS asked a worship committee to write a liturgy alone for the group. Shouldn’t we better have asked the question of a person teaching ESL, from RTF and BEWS. One could ask what experience does an ESL tutor have to develop liturgy? Likewise, what experience has the Minister of Worship at COS with the ESL participants? How can one know the needs of these immigrants when she/he hasn’t taught an ESL class or even regularly visited a class of developing nation representatives?

Why are there people of other ethnicities on the BEWS Committee? So as not to transplant steep roofs in the desert, we want to learn from others. The Institute for Christian Worship at Calvin College provides the expectation.

We, the BEWS and Worship Committee representatives, and people with experience teaching ESL need to plan together with recent immigrants who know the challenges of immigrating as mature adults. The church is a body, not just the head, and not just an Eurocentric culture.

The form that Greg provides helps with the BEWS goal to be a transition to the traditional worship at COS. How can we accommodate each other’s cultures in a fitting form of worship and yet be worshiping God now in North America? The form Greg provides us will be a form worth using as a guide for BEWS, but the actual liturgy, I hope will be quite different from that used in prison ministry, for example. Each needs sensitivity to parishioners to fit the particular worshipers.

Thanks, Greg Scheer, for putting forth a form to consider as a guide to a form of worship that comes from Moses, Abel and Rosario, immigrants who works with us. Already they suggest fitting ideas, appropriate to newly arrived citizens of the states and the family of God.

Helen Bonzelaar
Co-chair of Basic English Worship Service Committee