Author: Canon Dr. Josh R. Ritter
In November 2024, I wrote a post called What is a Micro-Formation? In that piece, I defined micro-formation as, “Any small reflective observation or intentional teaching on an aspect of Christian formation that connects directly to someone’s daily life and Christian practice.” I then suggested:
More powerful than programs, retreats, or events, we significantly undervalue the simple, intentional gestures of communication we offer to ourselves and to others. In fact, we often fail to realize that the small micro-formations we sow can have some of the biggest impacts in people’s lives.
In sum, micro-formations are the seeds Jesus told us about, and we might here recall his teachings on the powerful practice of seed casting to plant for future harvests. So, Jesus used micro-formations, and he practiced the art of seed casting. Why don’t we?
To continue reading about micro-formations, see my previous post.
Creating micro-formations of liturgical time
French Greek Orthodox theologian, Olivier-Maurice Clément, reminds us that we do not need more and better arguments about religious beliefs. We do not need stronger apologetics. We do not need more programs of self-improvement layered over with a veneer of spirituality. We do not need more entertaining services or more comfortable messages or adjustments to liturgy or worship style.
Instead, what is needed is a reminder of our liturgical life in God and the movement of God’s Spirit in the world.
So what’s the micro-formation? An invitation. Into liturgical time. It’s an invitation to step out of our cultural time and into God’s time where the Spirit is alive and moving.
Religious life is life. Liturgical life is life. It is a counter-narrative to dominant culture.
Most of the time we practice incarnating our cultural reality. As Paul says, we are con-formed to culture (Rom 12:2), but Christian worship is an invitation to inhabit a different reality and to incarnate a Eucharistic Reality within Liturgical Time. This is how we are transformed.
We talk a lot about storysharing in our churches. We say it’s a good thing. We bring it into sermons and lessons and pastoral care. We bring it into youth retreats and wellness retreats, and we talk about the Big Story of God. Yet, what we often miss is that the Big Story of God is our liturgical life, our shared re-enactment of the liturgical narrative.
Our common liturgy shared together is the embodiment of God’s salvation story for all of humanity. It is not a privatized form of spiritual individualism but a practice of bringing the world back into re-alignment with the heartbeat of God within the kingdom of God, on earth as it is in heaven.
Wow. Is that how we approach liturgy?
People often ask me, “What is formation?” The answer for Episcopalians is the Book of Common Prayer. Our liturgy is our formation. Our formation flows out of the Prayer Book, and the Prayer Book offers us a formation system.
Every day, four times a day (Morning, Noon, Evening, Compline), the Prayer Book invites us into the counter-narrative of God’s grace. Every day we are invited into a life of prayer within the inter-connected, inter-related Body of Christ as resistance to dominant culture and its values of privatization, productivity, efficiency, and profit at all costs.
Every day the Prayer Book beckons us into aliveness.
Every week it calls us to worship as a community.
It invites us to come and respond to – to “come and see” – God’s mercy and grace with joy and adoration as we arise out of our slumber and into a Eucharistic Reality. We awaken together to a new reality and rise from the deadening mindlessness of a society that conditions us to go to sleep, to be docile, to be good little boys and girls who do not cause trouble and just keep consuming.
Formation is the art of consistency over time, and the Prayer Book offers us precisely this opportunity to shape our lives into an art, a style of God.
We are a Prayer Book people because we are a people of patterns.
We follow the pattern of a Beatitude-shaped life into the Way of Jesus. We follow the pattern of a Prayer Book-shaped life into the story and time of God. We follow the God-shaped pattern of love, justice, mercy, and fidelity.
These are our patterns, and they happen in time. Formation is about time. It is not about linear time. It is about God’s time. When Jesus begins his ministry in the gospel of Mark, he proclaims first the time of God (Mk 1:15). He says the time of God (kairos) is here, now. It is breaking in to linear time, and we must turn our hearts (metanoia) into God’s time. He says this is the good news. The good news for Jesus, then, is time.
Perhaps this is because his time in the desert was so formational for him. He came to realize that we must depend entirely on God, surrender entirely to God, and let ourselves inter-abide completely within God. He tells us that we live on every word that comes from the mouth of God and that we, too, are every word that comes from the mouth of God. We are being formed and shaped in the flow of God’s time.
Our time on this earth, the hours of these days, is to be used to pursue this reality of God’s time, and liturgical life is the practice of God’s time.
God’s time is counter to…
The kingdom of God (or Sabbath) is counter to that which takes our time, energy, attention, and availability away from practicing coming alive into the Reality of God. God’s time, then, is a form of resistance. It is resistance because it is counter to the dominant narrative of fear, anxiety, power, control, success, wealth, and mindless consumerism. It is a resistance to all the cultural gods in our lives that try to occupy all our attention, time, conviction, and devotion. All the distractions and addictions in our lives.
Every day we are invited into the daily prayer, a direct connection with God.
Every week we are invited into a concentrated time of the spiritual presence of God in community with others.
These are our practices of resistance to cultural time and cultural formation and our surrender into God’s time and spiritual formation, but are we practicing this resistance?
Many of us “show up” for these moments of prayer and worship in the flow of time in our lives, and many of us receive Eucharist. But how do we say the words? What do they mean to us? Do we turn our hearts toward God? Do we turn also to face the sacredness of our neighbors? Where are our souls in our worship? In the enactment of our liturgy? In the words of response that we speak? Are our souls absent from this time of God? Do our words have meaning and passion within them? Or do they remain hollow shells, devoid of our soul?
Are we hungry for the new Eucharistic Reality that is our good news of aliveness within the movement of God’s Spirit?
Or are we trapped within our small, habitualized (mindlessly ritualized), cultural stories of docility and domination?
Liturgy is not ritual because ritual indicates a series of acts with a definite beginning and ending. Rituals are powerful and important, but liturgy is not ritual.
Liturgy is an invitation into time, an alternate time, and this alternate time is always flowing. It does not start and stop because we show up in a church space for one moment in our week.
The Big Story of God, the counter-narrative, is always happening.
Each time we decide to enter into liturgical time and the time of God, we are momentarily participating within this alternate time, an alternate reality that is more real than our “normal,” cultural reality.
There is no beginning and no ending to liturgical time. It is endless. It is a movement, a flow of God’s Spirit across the waters of our deep souls. Are we paying attention? Are we present? Are we arriving into God’s time with open hearts and eager souls?
As formation leaders, let’s remind our folks of the power of liturgical life. Let’s offer a micro-invitation into Liturgical Time and a new Eucharistic Reality.
In these ways, you are co-creating narratives of meaning, narratives of purpose, rhythms of life, communal identities, social cohesion, and…perhaps most importantly…trust…in each other and in God.
Never underestimate the power of the micro-formation!
Formation 