Old Rituals, New Congregations

It is Good Friday of Holy Week as the faithful gather on the steps of the great Gothic church on Wilshire Boulevard. Several pick up a heavy wooden cross and begin a solemn procession through the neighborhood, reenacting the Stations of the Cross where Jesus stumbled on the way to his crucifixion.

At midnight on Easter eve at another Los Angeles church, a darkened sanctuary is suddenly and dramatically illuminated by a 15-foot-high pillar of fire symbolizing the resurrection of Jesus. A mighty pipe organ fills the nave with the stirring strains of Handel’s “Messiah.”

If you thought these moments of high liturgical drama and sacred observance unfold only in Roman Catholic or Episcopal parishes where formal religious ceremonies are a hallmark, you’d be wrong. They are taking place at two Los Angeles churches with deep roots in the Protestant Reformation: Immanuel Presbyterian Church at 3300 Wilshire Blvd., and the First Congregational Church at 6th Street and Commonwealth Avenue.

Once, “to be a Protestant was to be not like a Catholic,” said the Rev. Ignacio Causteria, senior pastor at Pacific Palisades Community United Methodist Church and a convert from Catholicism. Today, by contrast, once distinctive differences in worship styles are blurring.

“People have to have ritual and symbol in their lives and are looking for things,” said the Rev. Steven E. Berry, senior pastor at First Congregational Church.

As a result, Protestant churches, including some evangelical congregations, are increasingly embracing ancient traditions and rituals long thought to be the purview of Roman Catholic, Episcopal and Eastern Orthodox churches.

From the beginning of the Lenten season of prayer, repentance and fasting through Easter eve, Protestants are marking their foreheads with ashes, observing the Maundy Thursday ritual of foot-washing as a symbol of Jesus’ servant ministry, and lighting candles on Easter eve to proclaim the Resurrection. Some are observing the decidedly Roman Catholic Stations of the Cross by carrying large crosses in public processions through neighborhoods. Silent retreats are also becoming more common.

The reasons are several, but Protestant pastors say that chief among them is a search by congregants for meaning and permanence in a changing and fast-paced world. For these seekers, free-form contemporary worship styles devoid of symbol and ritual can leave them adrift and unconnected.

“Some of the people in the [Protestant] churches today are sensing they are missing some of the holiness, quietness and awesomeness of God in the contemporary styles,” said Gary McIntosh, professor of Christian ministry and leadership at Biola University’s Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, which is fundamentalist in its orientation.

There are no figures on how many Protestant churches are borrowing from Catholic and Episcopal worship styles. McIntosh says that he believes only 5% of evangelical Protestant churches are turning to more traditional forms. But Greg Ogden, director of the doctor of ministry program at Fuller Theological Seminary, believes the figure is higher, and sees an accelerating trend.

“One thing is clear,” said Scott Bartchy, director of the Center for the Study of Religion at UCLA. “These liturgical things are regarded more and more as common property and aren’t confined to a particular tradition.”

At the Rev. Robert Schuller’s Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, a church affiliated with the nation’s oldest Protestant denomination, young people began a variation on the Catholic Stations of the Cross five years ago. Instead of stopping at 14 stations, they stop at seven, but youth pastor Ronald G. Spence says the Catholic connection is undeniable.

“I actually stole the idea after I saw Pope John Paul II carrying the cross with some bishops,” Spence said. “What we’re trying to reclaim is [that] the Catholics are a much [liturgically] higher church than our denomination. They really have it right in the sense when they have a religious observance, they’re not afraid to put some symbolism onto and behind it. That’s one thing we lost at the Reformation.”

They don’t call it Stations of the Cross at Crystal Cathedral. It’s Crosswalk. Whatever it is called, Spence says it has been a hit: About 50 or 60 young people usually turn out for the Crosswalk.

“The only reason our kids used to think it was ‘good Friday’ is because they got out of school,” he said. But, he added, they are touched by a “hands-on, tactile religious experience” of carrying a large wooden cross through the neighborhood. “They’re far more excited about living out their faith,” he said.

Immanuel Presbyterian in the Mid-Wilshire district began observing Stations of the Cross four years ago for a different reason. It was responding to the growing number of congregants from Mexico and other traditionally Catholic countries in Central America.

Meanwhile, First Congregational, which long ago took a cue from Catholic and Episcopal Easter vigils proclaiming the “light of Christ,” will kindle its “holy flame” for the 56th year. But for the first time, last year it also began observing the Catholic and Anglican custom of foot-washing during Holy Week.

In Nashville--said to be the “buckle of the Bible Belt”--the First Presbyterian Church for the first time this year observed Ash Wednesday. The Rev. Reuben Brooks says that Ash Wednesday is but one of several customs his evangelical congregation is borrowing from Catholics.

After the reading of Scripture, for example, the reader says, “The word of the Lord,” and the congregation responds, as do Catholics, “Thanks be to God.” At the beginning of the service there is a variation on the Catholic greeting, when the minister says, “The Lord bless you,” and the congregation responds, “And also bless you.”

“They’re just minor things, but they’re powerful things,” Brooks said in an interview. “There’s just a longing to be more expressive of our faith.”

It is a point not lost on the Rev. Frank Alton, senior pastor at Immanuel Presbyterian Church. “I think it has something to do with the increased interest in spirituality and ritual,” he said. Its appeal to spiritual seekers, he says, is apparent “once people get over associating ritual with organized religion and realize this is something that goes back generations, centuries, millenniums, and has some integrity to it and isn’t just organized religion or empty.”